Why Urban Farming?

My husband likes to point out that its hard to call it a farm when we have just under 1/2 an Acre. It produces a quarter ton of food a year so he'll just have to live with the description. We started our farm for 4 reasons. 


The first reason we grow our own food is for the health benefits. The American food supply is limited and not well regulated. In order to claim eggs are cage free the farmer has to let the chicken out once in a while. This does not allow the chickens to eat bugs or grass which is necessary to produce truly healthier eggs. Similarly organic vegetables and fruits do not have strict requirements, and they are being lowered all the time. We determined the best method of avoiding unhealthy foods is to grow our own, and eat home cooked meals. 


The second reason is economic. By growing our food we can get high quality food at reasonable prices. We are planning to grow enough fruit and vegetables to truly supplement our grocery planning. Last year we took 2 potatoes, cut them up into seed potatoes and grew 40 lbs of potatoes.


If you aren't worried about your health, and your wallet is doing fine, you could still get behind reason number 3...TASTE! Vegetables we grow here are so much more flavorful than the poor imitations you can buy at the local grocery store. I remember telling my husband how much I hated tomatoes when we got together. As a joke he bought me a hanging tomato plant to take care of. When I ate the first one I fell in love. It was so sweet and tangy, not liquidy and bland like its store bought cousins.


Lastly and possibly most importantly urban farming helps the environment. Each item on our table takes large quantities of gasoline to get there.  Unsustainable practices are usually used to produce it.  This means that each meal we eat has become another loss for mother earth.  One unsustainable practice is using systemic pesticides on our crops.  Honey bees are dying out in North America. Europe has banned the (systemic) pesticides we currently use and their bee population has rebounded, however we are unwilling to do the same. Bees are responsible for pollinating most of the world’s vegetables, fruits and grains. Without them we will have to find alternative methods, taking nature even further out of our food production.  Having a bee hive won’t stop this, but it does let us take responsibility for a few bees, and do our part to turn this around. A single bee hive will improve the yield of every plant in a 6 mile radius by 60%. Our single hive won’t save the bees, but they will remain alive and help our neighborhood to grow what they can. 


Now we are not willing to totally eliminate non local food (I love citrus, pineapples and many other foods that simply don’t grow in Utah) but we are trying to act responsibly. We do this by growing what we can and buying locally to improve our carbon footprint while eating well, being healthy and saving money.