some suggestions on Urban Farming.

Re: Urban Farming

Postby Michael » Fri Feb 05, 2010 4:35 pm

this is a review of an article on Farmland Reports, please follow the link at the end to read the entire article peace and light michael

Imagen Fairfax County, Virginia, next to Tyson’s Corner—one of the nation’s biggest malls—is a small farm stand with a green sign reading, “Potomac Vegetable Farms.” Multi-million dollar houses sprout up in surrounding fields, but farm owner Hiu Newcomb, her daughter Hana and their partner Ellen Polishuk have found a way to turn the intensely suburban location into more of a boon than a burden.

A worker picks garlic scapes out of green buckets, as a neighboring Salvadoran family stops by the farm to purchase a live chicken. The garlic scapes are bundled with rubber bands to prepare for the week’s farmers markets in Washington, D.C., where the farm sells a cornucopia of freshly picked veggies (50 total), flowers, herbs and fruits: lettuce, Chinese cabbage, mixed mustards, Swiss chard, sugar snap peas, sweet onions, dandelion greens.

In the 1960s, when Newcomb and her husband Tony first started farming in the area, Tyson’s Corner was a little crossroads, with “cattle lolling under the peach trees.” The couple grew sweet corn on 1,000 acres of rented land. “That was our main crop,” Newcomb says. “We had a reputation for great sweet corn.”

No longer farming primarily on rented land, Potomac Vegetable Farms now has a production farm in Loudoun County, near Purcellville, in addition to their original farm and roadside stand on Leesburg Pike in Vienna. “When we started, we were 100 percent wholesale. Now we’re five percent wholesale,” Newcomb says. “Our preference is to direct market.”

Like Newcomb, many farmers around the country—especially those in urban-edge locations—are selling their goods directly to consumers who are eager to buy locally grown food. Some customers are driven by concerns about food safety; others find that farm fresh food tastes better and enjoy the experience of knowing the person who grew the food.Potomac Vegetable Hiu in HoophouseImage

“We didn’t know in the early 1960s that we were the vanguard of a movement,” Newcomb says. “There weren’t many vegetable farms around Fairfax County then.”

These days, the farm generates about a third of its income from farmers markets, a third from its roadside stand and a third from selling CSA shares (where customers purchase a portion of the season’s harvest). It also sells directly to a few restaurants and delis in the area. The farm’s CSA shares typically sell out in less than a day.

Some of the farm’s 460 CSA customers are even its employees and neighbors. To make sure the farm “always had good neighbors,” Newcomb built Blueberry Hill, a cohousing community built on the back corner of the Vienna farm where some of her workers, family members and CSA share-holders live. But overall, the farm “ended up having really friendly neighbors who would never give us trouble,” Newcomb says.

A good relationship with the community, and her customers, means Newcomb never has trouble finding labor. “Our labor [in the past] was always college kids. My children thought that was great,” she says. “But now we have more local people and part-time workers. Some are volunteers, some work for pay and some work for food. There’s always something for somebody to do.”

Despite the economic downturn, Newcomb says the farm’s sales are better than ever. “If someone complains that it’s three dollars for a bunch of chard, I say, ‘What else are you buying for three dollars that’s as good and healthy for you?’” Newcomb says. “What’s more important than what you put in your mouth and body?”
http://blog.farmland.org/2010/01/farming-on-the-uber-urban-edge/

Peace and Light, michael
Posted by Michael on January 9th, 2012

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