urban farming

Even as the idea of buying local finds eager audiences at the area’s many farmers markets, few might imagine that “local” means anything closer than a swath of farmland somewhere in Carnation, Mount Vernon or Monroe. That’s where produce comes from, right?

But in Seattle’s North Beach neighborhood, the radishes already are appearing for Noelani Alexander, who spent a recent morning planning an irrigation system for her 1,200-square-foot plot behind a home on Northwest 91st Street.

By summer’s end, on the five Seattle plots that comprise the urban farm operation she calls City Grown, she expects to see carrots, leeks, lettuce, spinach, squash and cucumbers and more — all destined for local sale, mostly online.

While many more people are growing their food, either to go green or save money, the notion of growing for profit — a Depression-era activity briefly revived in the 1960s — is another, more challenging matter.

“It’s kind of new for America to be going back to urban farming on a commercial scale,” said Josh Parkinson, of similarly minded Magic Bean Farm in West Seattle. “This is about as local as you can get.”

The practice has been rapidly resurrected over the past few years in cities such as San Francisco, Austin, Texas, and Boulder, Colo., seeded by economic need, the sustainability movement and national groups such as SPIN-Farming (Small Plot Intensive Farming), which works with farms in the United States and Canada.

In recession-ravaged Detroit, for example, efforts are under way to convert 40 acres of the Michigan State Fairgrounds into what organizers say would be the world’s largest commercial urban farm.

“Productive space”

Alexander, a 32-year-old former farm employee who had gone into landscaping, figured she eventually would leave her Wallingford home for a rural spread where she could return to food production, “but things weren’t going that way,” she said. Now, “getting food into the city is more important to me.”

While some of City Grown’s produce is grown at her Wallingford home, the bulk of the operation’s nearly 4,000 square feet of growing space — about one-tenth of an acre — is divided among four other residential properties in North Beach, Ballard, Wallingford and the Central District.

Those homeowners will receive weekly produce, and besides, “they get their yard developed. Most are lawns they weren’t using — and now it’s productive space.”

Commercial urban farming “makes the most of underused urban natural resources, and provides fresh food to people right where they can see it growing from seed to harvest,” Nicole Jain Capizzi, former director of a for-profit urban farm in Milwaukee, wrote on the Seattle-based website UrbanFarmHub.org.

But Capizzi, who since has moved to the Seattle area, noted challenges — untested business models, unpredictable weather and the difficulty of cultivating non-arable land. Throw in pests and the cost of real estate, and one wonders: Are urban farms really possible?

Seattle already has Seattle Market Gardens, a year-old program in which consumers can purchase carrots, peas and other produce grown by immigrant farmers throughout the city’s South End. Proceeds from the program, sponsored by nonprofit P-Patch Trust and Seattle’s Department of Neighborhoods, go mostly to the farmers.

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