A garden block proposal

It looks like one of the main take-aways from the CNU 18 conference is something being labeled agrarian urbanism. Fast Company is calling it the "new new urbanism" and Treehugger has described the notion as the next phase in the evolution of this 30-year old movement. Andres Duany, in particular, has been pushing pretty hard in this direction for the last couple of years. Briefly, the idea is that walkable neighborhoods could be intentionally structured so that food production is integrated into the physical form and the lifestyle of the inhabitants. In other words, it is a synthesis between urban and rural.

Of course, this new new urbanism is really no newer than the old new urbanism was (but that's fine). One of the primary motivations behind Ebenezer Howard's Garden City was to connect working class households with a viable food supply to relieve some of their financial stress. He landed on the number twelve dwelling units per acre as the magic density for self-sufficiency with affordability, and he worked out a form of common land ownership to help it along. Christopher Alexander thought that something more like a tenth of an acre was necessary to supply vegetables to a family of four. He had plenty of practical, timeless advice for arranging an urban living space accordingly. More recently, some architects have been using the word rurbalization to describe this sort of synthesis. Having recently passed through the grad school circuit myself, I can attest to a strong interest in food systems among new graduates.

I think these are good trends. Local food systems should inform urban design and vice versa, but I'm not sure the new developments being modeled have been able to find this synthesis without swallowing one side with the other - specifically, subsuming the urbanism into the bucolic landscape. This seems to be the case with Southlands in British Columbia and Serenbe in the exurbs of Atlanta. Kaid Benfield has this to say about these "farming is the new golf" developments,

"In theory, these "new towns" are great - self-contained entities providing walkability, efficiency, and all the services of a community within the development.  So, their proponents (nearly all of whom profit from them, one way or another) claim, it is a good thing to build them almost anywhere.  In practice, though, the nearby once-remote locations soon become filled with sprawl, in no small part because of the initial development, and the theoretical self-contained transportation efficiency never comes.  They become commuter suburbs, just with a more appealing internal design than that of their neighbors."

So can this vision work? Or is building agrarian urbanism like serving a glass of hot cold water? I'd like to play with this a little and consider what it would look like if we followed Duany's vision but flipped it on its head. Instead of embedding hamlets within a rural landscape, the garden block embeds pockets of agriculture within the urban landscape. It is not a stand-alone community but just another gene sequence to be spliced into the DNA of existing inner suburbs and cities.

Start with the standard grid. It can be found all over North America, but the following sketch is based on the 340' by 340' block in the Fan neighborhood of Richmond. Cobble together property ownership for the whole block into something like a community land trust. Households would own their home individually but share ownership of the land with the other 38, in this case, units on the block. Certain commitments to planting and maintaining the garden, either personally or through payment, would be built into an HOA contract.

The exterior of the block functions as in any other urban area. The public streets are activated by the fronts of the buildings and streetscape features, and the full range of transportation access to the rest of the city is available. The interior, on the other hand, is devoted to the more constrained social scale of the block community, and the structures serve as a wall protecting this garden area. Enclosure is necessary to provide a degree of privacy, to protect produce from theft and vandalism, and to keep animals from wandering.

By the numbers, this block allows a density of 15 DUA while keeping 28% of all land for growing produce. This is not food self-sufficiency, but I'm personally not too worried about these kinds of absolutes.

Here are some of the pieces:

Mix of Housing Types. One might expect retirees and young families alike to be attracted to growing their own food, but there is a broad range in housing needs between these two groups. Allowing a range of housing types could facilitate lifecycle diversity, as well as allowing those from different income levels to share the same space. The larger homes include their own growing plot delineated by a short fence.

Shared Resources. The shady northern side of the condo buildings is a place for the utilitarian functions. Gardening requires many resources that can be shared by the whole block. A tool shed is accessed from the side by the glass elevator. A water cistern collects and stores runoff from the buildings above. Chicken coops are lined up against the building. Although chickens need sunlight, some shade could benefit them as well. Maybe they could be on wheels. The composting bins are directly in front of the block's dumpster, so households can deposit their organic waste while taking out the trash.

Childrens' Area -  The playground and "kindergarten" is in full view of the whole grounds. Children have their own 24' by 31' plot to grow whatever they choose. A row of fruit trees creates a sound barrier for the adjacent rowhouses. Being within the enclosed communal area allows parents a certain assurance of safety.

Green Roof. I know these things are expensive for now, but in this case it's integral to the whole concept. Connected directly to the rest of the grounds by an outdoor elevator, it expands the growing area measurably.  Less tangibly, the views to north into the block help create a sense of internal  cohesion, and the southern views to the rest of the city a sense of external connection. 

Greenhouse and Car Sharing. A greenhouse is one of the most efficient uses of solar energy, and it's  necessary in most climates for extending the growing season. A single 4100 sq. ft. greenhouse should be sufficient to meet the needs for the whole block. There is off-street parking available at a rate of roughly one space per three units. The relative paucity of spaces may be compensated for by car-sharing. For areas with greater transit accessibility, this lot could be substituted with two homes.

Corner Store. The corner store is the public interface of the block and a neighborhood shopping hub. Possibly, excess produce and supplies from the garden could be sold here. The upper floors could be leased out to offices or any other reasonably compatible use.

The setting of a food revolution

After getting recommendations from three friends independently I felt obliged to check out Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution (It's still on hulu until June 5th). Definitely well worth the 4+ hours. You've got the drama of clashing personalities and the group hug scenes perfected by a decade of reality TV, but this show simply has the traction to carry real change beyond the scope of the show itself. I've decided it's not actually reality TV at all, but a documentary of a grassroots movement in progress.

Could this be a revolution that is televised after all? (that is, if you can look passed the irony of sponsorship from Healthy Choices pre-packaged dinners). The prize selection committee at TED seemed to think so, and Jamie Oliver's acceptance speech is a good introduction to what he's up to.

Pullman Square in Huntington, West Virginia. Flickr Credit: Sarah.WV

What I'm interested in is the deeply place-based strategy he has taken. He recognizes that eating well is not only an individual choice, but it's also profoundly influenced by the structure of the community you find yourself in. Do the markets stock healthy food at reasonable prices? Can you get to them? Do schools serve genuine food? Is there an overall culture of self-reliant food preparation? Seeing the problem this way naturally lends itself to picking one place, Huntington, West Virginia, getting every local institution on board, building enthusiasm and the synergy of community action, and finally creating a model city.

This movement needed a physical space to launch from. It needed Jamie's Kitchen (now Huntington's Kitchen) to be, not only a useful space for gathering, but an architectural expression of the whole idea. It is noteworthy that he chose the very center of the city, right off the beautiful Pullman Square on 3rd Avenue, for the location.

When I drove across the country the summer before last, I made a point to ask everyone I met this question: "where is the very center of your town?"

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In some towns, people would be puzzled by the whole concept. There was nothing to latch on to. Maybe the Walmart, but probably not. In other towns, the response would be immediate, and it was always some place they were proud of. It was a public living room for the whole community. I stopped briefly in Huntington but unfortunately never had a chance to talk to anyone.  I have a feeling they may have said Pullman Square if I had.

Jamie also knows that public space is the lifeblood of any grassroots movement. He closed down the street out in front of the kitchen and set up forty tables for one big cooking lesson. He organized a flash mob in the central gathering area of Marshall University to drum up interest from students. Once again, the center counts. The airwaves and cables could get his message into every private living room and every driver's seat, but the true source of energy happened when crowds united in one place. The fact that this occurred outside on public streets meant the whole city was the arena.

Right, I know the show is really about food. But it's also about place. These are the questions that I'm naturally asking while I watched. How can we physically structure our communities so that someone like Jamie can come in and have a fighting chance at starting a revolution?

Libraries as food desert oases

NPR reports on a clever strategy being rolled out in Baltimore to provide fresh food to underserved neighborhoods. It's being dubbed the Virtual Supermarket. Two library branches have been selected in urban locations where the nearest grocery store is basically inaccessible to anyone without a vehicle. The city public health department helps residents place food orders online using the library computers, and the bag of groceries is delivered the next day from a local grocer.

This program is up and running with the help of a $60,000 federal stimulus grant. According to the NPR story, there are currently a couple of dozen subscribers. This number may grow as people wade into the technology.

There's so much to appreciate about this innovative approach to food access. Delivery costs are held down, because the the orders are aggregated for each day and condensed into a single drop-off point. Libraries get to broaden their horizons a bit, a trend Wendy Waters discussed a little while ago. Some more assistance with computers can only help knock the digital divide down a notch. And, of course, more people get to enjoy the nutritional food at fair prices most of us take for granted.

The department plans to expand Virtual Supermarket to other sites with additional programming, such as cooking demonstrations. Apparently, other cities are watching all of this very closely. Philadelphia has long been known for being on the forefront of food access solutions, but it looks like Baltimore is finding it's own niche.

The following map is from Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future. It's their first swat at measuring food deserts in the city.

Necessity is the mother of vegetation in Havana

If you want to know how society might function in event of a serious economic downturn, Cuba is not a bad case study. When the Soviet Union imploded and no longer had the wherewithal to prop up an economy across the world, Cuba was thrust out on their own with very few options for trade with the outside. These dire circumstances have compelled local communities and individuals to devise creative and efficient ways to meet their own needs.

The movement of urban gardens in Havana seems like a natural outgrowth from this. It answers the question of how to help provide food for four million people without abundant oil supplies and transportation infrastructure.

A 2008 BBC segment sings the praises of Havana's urban gardening movement:



Although the basic need to eat certainly inspired these projects, the farmers are quick to point out all of the auxiliary benefits as well: the beautification of the city, a rallying activity for the community, and jobs for locals. The gardens range from green spaces squeezed tightly between walls on an urban lot to suburban small farms in close proximity to homes.

A walkable grocery thought experiment

Randal O'Toole has proposed a thought experiment that he uses to "debunk the smart growth myth" of the ideal walkable neighborhood grocery store.

"For smart growth to work, then population densities must be high enough for businesses to have enough customers within walking distance to keep them going. Smart growth won't work if businesses in pedestrian-friendly neighborhoods must attract hordes of auto drivers from other areas in order to survive. A modern large supermarket needs to draw patrons from a community of about 40,000 people. This is known as the trade population for this kind of store.

Joel Garreau says that, as a rule of thumb, 'the farthest distance an American will willingly walk before getting into a car' is 600 feet. However, 'if you do everything you can to make casual use of the automobile inconvenient at the same time that you make walking pleasant and attractive, you maybe, just maybe, can up the distance an American will willingly walk to 1,500 feet'...

The population density required to place 40,000 people within 1,500 feet of a grocery store is almost 124,000 people per square mile. That's about two-and-one-half times the density of Manhattan."

Therefore, smart growth won't work. QED.

O'Toole has asked a worthwhile question but plugged in the wrong numbers to answer it. Out of curiosity, I'd like to take a closer look at this hypothetical scenario to see how feasible the walkable grocery may really be.
Customer Base. O’Toole uses the concept of trade population, but this is begging the question. His trade population number is generated assuming an automobile-oriented environment, which is exactly what the proposed scenario is an alternative to. The more objective measure is the actual pool of customers a large grocery draws from. To get a feel for this I counted all of the food sources that serve the Charlottesville-Albemarle area. I came up with 14 large "modern grocery stores," between 30,000 and 60,000 sq. feet. This does not include:

• medium-sized full-service grocers
• about a half dozen health food stores
• specialty ethnic food stores
• big box stores like Target that sell food
• dozens of small convenience stores

I'm only counting the kinds of places O'Toole considers an unreasonable sacrifice to do without.

Taking the combined service area's population to be 134,086 from current ACS data (Charlottesville and Albemarle County), this breaks down to about one large grocery store per 9500 people. APA has determined the average customer base for a supermarket in the U.S. to be 8,412 , but I’ll just stick with my more conservative 9500.

Modal Split. O'Toole, as usual, characterizes the smart growth position as something far more extreme than anyone would actually propose: a 100% walking grocery store, as if bicycles, transit, and automobiles do not exist at all. The term walkable means able to be walked to, not only walked to. Every smart growth proponent I know would actually hope to see a multimodal balance to allow an array of transportation options. For the sake of this scenario, let's suppose our store has 50% walkers (with some cyclists included in here), 25% transit users, and 25% drivers.

Walking Distance. If you ignore Garreau's snarkiness, the 1,500 foot number is an alright estimate for typical behavior in a pedestrian-friendly environment. Walking 600 feet will seem intolerable if it's between the Best Buy and the Bed, Bath, and Beyond through a parking lot and grass berm, but Charlottesville's downtown pedestrian mall is 2,100 feet long and people will regularly walk its length for an errand because it is so enjoyable. A more objective way to go about this would be to fix the travel time. Apparently, the average drive to the grocery store currently takes about 20 minutes, including the walk from the parking lot. At a leisurely pace, the average walker could traverse about 3,000 feet in 20 minutes. I'll stick with the 1,500 foot number, noting that this will cut the travel time in half even for the furthest walkers.

Needed Density. Considering all of these conditions, a back-of-the-envelope calculation shows that this grocer could be supported with a population density of 18,885 people per square mile surrounding it. This is about half the density of Brooklyn. If this still seems unreasonably high, it should be noted that this is only the density for one quarter of a square mile area. In theory, it could be surrounded by a greenbelt of parkland and have no effect on the calculation.

Charlottesville's new Market Street Market serves a walkable neighborhood

The more important question that I have not addressed is whether easy access to a “large modern grocery store” really adds much to quality of life. Granted that more choices are usually better than fewer, but is a whole wall of ketchup options that much more preferable than one or two choices. Psychologists for a while have been pointing to the phenomenon of too many choices, leading to customer confusion and even anxiety, so much so that major retailers have begun simplifying their selections and stepping up quality control. New corporations like Trader Joes are mastering this market.

There’s no reason why a medium-scaled grocer could not carry almost anything the average household would want on a much smaller footprint. And rather than singling out a one-size-fits-all shopping location, whether you're preparing Thanksgiving dinner or picking up milk, it's easy to imagine a full spectrum of grocery stores organized between convenience and selection. Walk to the neighborhood store twice a week; take a longer trip to Costco every two months.

Reburbia Contest Finalists

Inhabitat and Dwell magazines, publications that lean pretty heavily in the direction of modernist architecture, are holding a competition for ideas on retrofitting suburbia into a more sustainable form. They're calling it Reburbia. This is a good discussion to have, because the suburbs currently dominate the built environment in America whether we like it or not. Even if every citizen were convinced tomorrow that a distinctly urban and distinctly rural landscape is preferable, it would be impossible to simply remove all infrastructure and start over. The era of blank slate planning is long gone. Let's hear some ideas.

Twenty Reburbia finalists have been selected, ranging from the purely fantastical or ironic to some that are quite practical and suitable for incremental implementation. My two favorites are Urban Sprawl Repair Kit by Galina Tahchieva:

and Big Box Agriculture by Forrest Fulton:

The Repair Kit is a series of nicely done drawings representing New Urbanist techniques for densifying different kinds of suburban sites. Big Box Agriculture moves in the opposite direction. Parking lots are converted into farms, and the structures become greenhouses with attached grocery stores. Actually, most of the other entries include some agricultural component. Regenerative Suburban Median by Brian Alessi puts the farms in the center of wide streets, for a bonus traffic calming effect. For some reason all of the others suggest removing agriculture from land, either putting it all indoors or suspending it in the air.

Thinking comprehensively, it seems that both the urbanizing and the ruralizing approaches will be necessary depending on the site. The urbanizing option will probably work best for inner suburbs and some nodes along transit lines, but obviously there would not be enough demand to do this everywhere. Conversion to agriculture would work better in the more isolated exurbs, especially in metropolitan areas suffering from economic decline. I disagree with some of these finalists that commercial sites would be ideal for farming, because they are usually located along transportation corridors. I think that we're more likely to see residential lawns being used for small-scale farming and the density happening along the important corridors.

One thing that's missing entirely from the list of finalists is industry. I know it doesn't feel very green to envision the manufacturing and warehousing districts of the future, but if the United States has any intention of curtailing imports from far away lands (and the energy it takes to get them here) we'll have to make at least some of our stuff closer to home. Even the more thorough environmentalists I know are not willing to go without a minimal amount of material goods and modern conveniences. I'm all for local carrots, but where are the carrot peelers coming from?

Two different lawn strategies

From flickr user PhilTizzani

The town of Perris, California, which sits right in the middle of California's "inland empire," has decided to paint lawns of foreclosed houses green, as part of a larger effort to keep up appearances in quickly hemorrhaging neighborhoods. The paint is biodegradable, and it will last for six months. Each lawn will cost $550 to paint.

On the other side of the county, Michelle Obama has broken ground on a vegetable garden on the White House lawn. The garden will help provide food for White House meals, as well as a local soup kitchen. The garden will occupy a quarter of an acre of the White House lawn, which is slightly larger than the average lawn size in America.

From the Washington Post,

"The 1,100-square-foot garden, the first of its kind since Eleanor Roosevelt planted a victory garden during World War II, will grow dozens of vegetables, berries and herbs. The collection of crops, a wish list from White House kitchen staff, will include lettuces, squash, fennel, rhubarb, cucumbers and sweet and hot peppers."

Joel Salatin, Jane Jacobs

From: flickr user Wendy Cohen

I went to hear farmer and prominent local foods advocate Joel Salatin speak this evening. A strong libertarian and proponent of traditional farming practices, Salatin naturally did not have many kind things to say about the industrial food system. In his words, modern agribusiness has been made opaque, "put just over the hill, where we don't have to see it." It's zoned out of our lives. This leads to a disconnect between producer and consumer, and compromises the inherent business accountability of a community - an accountability that must somehow be made up for with a complex regulatory system.

According to Salatin, small-scale traditional farms can be "beautiful, aromatic, and romantic," somewhere that kindergartners would want to go on a field trip. Unlike a massive "Tyson's poultry processing plant," this is one form of agribusiness that does not have to be relegated to a far away location. It's existence can even enhance the living environment, even if some small-scale processing functions are allowed to happen on-grounds. This is at least one form of industry that we might not mind having in our backyards.

It struck me that this self-professed Jeffersonian agrarian was sounding so much like the quintessential urbanist, Jane Jacobs. In Death and Life of Great American Cities, she wrote,

"A restaurant or snack place, a grocery, a cabinetmaker, a printer's shop, for instance, can fit well into such a street. But exactly the same kind of use - say, a big cafeteria, a supermarket, a large woodworking factory or a printing plant - and wreak visual havoc (and sometimes auditory havoc), because it is on a different scale."

Both Jacobs and Salatin love the diversity of small-scale systems. Salatin works with the biodiversity of his farm to fit the interlocking pieces together into a mutually-reinforcing whole. Jacobs loved the daily "ballet" that occurred in her Greenwich Village neighborhood, with all of the homes, shops, public street life, and workplaces fitting together into a coherent whole.

Even industry, the classic case for separate-use zoning, need not be categorically separated on all occasions.

A case for small cities

From: Flickr user Smaku

An essay in the Boston Review by Catherine Tumber presents hopeful take on the future of small cities, particularly former industrial centers in the northeast and midwest - places like Syracuse, New York, or Youngstown, Ohio. Rural small towns have always enjoyed a cherished place in American's hearts, and the big city represents cosmopolitan culture, the creative economy, and global interconnectivity. But small cities, fitting neither of these models completely, have often fallen between the cracks.

She describes the troubling recent history of American small cities. While major cities were hit hard by urban renewal and the dispersal of development, these forces have been almost fatal blows to smaller cities.

"Large cities survived the changes and the resulting onslaught of suburban shopping malls—itself a reaction to extended supply–chains—in the late ’70s. In smaller cities, malls decimated what was left of retail districts already damaged by massive downtown highway systems that choked off commercial centers from surrounding urban neighborhoods. "

Furthermore, the shift away from an industrial and into an information economy has drained small cities of capital and job opportunities, while major cities were able to refashion themselves as hubs of global finance and technology. Cultural creatives were drawn to the global cities, but most smaller cities have never acquired the cache or critical mass to draw significant numbers of people in.

However, with a growing emphasis on green jobs and sustainable agriculture, Tumber sees a new niche for small cities. She showcases some of the advantages small cities may have over major metropolitan areas in our transitioning economy. Renewable energy and sustainable agriculture both benefit from decentralization, which allows transmission costs to be minimized and sufficient land to be available.

"An inversion is at work here: placing smaller cities at the center of analysis leads to an imaginative template that is decentralized, deconcentrated, relocalized. One of the Obama campaign’s strokes of genius was bypassing big–city power centers, where self–appointed national leaders claim to speak for minorities, and working directly with the decentralized grid of smaller–city community organizations across the land. As policymakers rethink the American agricultural economy and invest in renewable energy, they, too, should be looking at smaller cities."

Front yard gardening

I just listened to an interview with an architect/gardener Fritz Haeg, and this man has a pretty inspiring vision. Like many other folks, he has grown very dissatisfied with the cultural phenomenon known as the front yard and everything it stands for - wasted space, a monoculture of Kentucky bluegrass all over the country, pure ornament with no function, and a lack of transition between the public street and private house. Yet instead of griping about things (like I do, for instance), he has embarked on a campaign, from Salinas, Kansas to Baltimore, Maryland, to reclaim these private spaces for use as productive gardens.

As an artist, his main focus is to help shift the notion of a beautiful yard. Front yards are visible to the entire streetscape, and their landscaping as long been a way for homeowners to make a personal expression about their values. Although private property, there is a sense in which the front yard functions publicly as well, which comes to mind as soon as you consider how angry people can get when their neighbors never get around to mowing. If the front yard can become a useful space, and one that reinforces the connection we all have with the land and food, it can help enliven and educate an entire neighborhood.

While I'm on the subject, it's worth bringing up a wonderful project happening in Charlottesville down the road from us. The Quality Community Council of Charlottesville planted an "urban farm" adjacent to the Friendship Court apartments on Monticello. It provides a service on a number of levels by providing nutritious food to low-income families, setting up a local organic food source, creating a beautiful shared space, giving a common purpose to the community, and providing some physical activity for kids. I wouldn't be surprised if we see more of these popping up around the country.

A last day at the markets

Today was a beautiful day to wander through the two farmers' markets and one artisans' market in downtown Missoula.


The farmers' market has to be one of the oldest urban establishments. As soon as there was enough surplus agriculture to allow some people to devote time to other pursuits, there had to be a way to trade for food in a location accessible to the whole community. For the last few decades we in the West have engaged in a concerted effort to destroy this ancient practice, in favor of the super-efficient and standardized supermarket, which plugs nicely into the industrial food sector of our global economy. Fortunately, since around 1970, a growing number of cities have made efforts to conserve the farmers' market and the more intimate food system it is based upon.

I just finished reading Bill McKibben's Deep Economy, his plea for a more satisfying and durable localized economy. From the book,

"Every new farmers' market is a small step in this direction. It requires new connections between people who came together to found it, the farmers who come in from the country to meet their suburban and urban customers, the customers who emerge from the supermarket trance to meet their neighbors. The market begins to build a different reality, one that uses less oil and is therefor less vulnerable to the end of cheap energy. But, more importantly, the new reality responds to all the parts of who we are, including the parts that crave connection. One-tenth the energy; ten times the conversations - that's an equation worth contemplating."

Growing some food

With the first signs of a legitimate spring here, we began planting our little garden plot against the house.

It seems that three different major trends are coming together: historically high transportation costs, a renewed appreciation for local foods, and questions about the viability of the American suburban experiment. At the center of these trends, back-yard gardens have been in the news lately.

From the Wall Street Journal,

"Farmers don't necessarily live in the country anymore. They might just be your next-door neighbor, hoping to turn a dollar satisfying the blooming demand for organic, locally grown foods.

Unlike traditional home gardeners who devote a corner of the yard to a few rows of vegetables, a new crop of minifarmers is tearing up the whole yard and planting foods such as arugula and kohlrabi that restaurants might want to buy. The locally grown food movement has also created a new market for front-yard farmers.

"Agriculture is becoming more and more suburban," says Roxanne Christensen, publisher of Spin-Farming LLC, a Philadelphia company started in 2005 that sells guides and holds seminars teaching a small-scale farming technique that involves selecting high-profit vegetables like kale, carrots and tomatoes to grow, and then quickly replacing crops to reap the most from plots smaller than an acre. "Land is very expensive in the country, so people are saying, why not just start growing in the backyard?' "

And Micheal Pollan from his article "Why bother?" in the New York Times Magazine,

"But the act I want to talk about is growing some — even just a little — of your own food. Rip out your lawn, if you have one, and if you don’t — if you live in a high-rise, or have a yard shrouded in shade — look into getting a plot in a community garden. Measured against the Problem We Face, planting a garden sounds pretty benign, I know, but in fact it’s one of the most powerful things an individual can do — to reduce your carbon footprint, sure, but more important, to reduce your sense of dependence and dividedness: to change the cheap-energy mind. ...

You begin to see that growing even a little of your own food is, as Wendell Berry pointed out 30 years ago, one of those solutions that, instead of begetting a new set of problems — the way “solutions” like ethanol or nuclear power inevitably do — actually beget other solutions, and not only of the kind that save carbon. Still more valuable are the habits of mind that growing a little of your own food can yield. You quickly learn that you need not be dependent on specialists to provide for yourself — that your body is still good for something and may actually be enlisted in its own support. If the experts are right, if both oil and time are running out, these are skills and habits of mind we’re all very soon going to need. We may also need the food. Could gardens provide it? Well, during World War II, victory gardens supplied as much as 40 percent of the produce Americans ate."

The underground egg trade

Last week, a friend of ours set up a brief appointment with us, "meet me at the back of the church right after service." When the time came we obliged and followed her out to her car, where she produced a small bag. We promptly handed her a few bills in exchange for the bag and she drove off. What was the purpose of this shadowy exchange? Chicken eggs.

With capable apologists like Michael Pollan and Barbara Kingsolver, many Americans are discovering the advantages of locally produced foods. Perhaps this is simply a reincarnation of the back-to-the-land ethos from the 60's, but in other ways it seems to be both more far-reaching and more grounded in the practical reality of the modern economy. The New York Times ran an article about how some educated urbanites have moved into the countryside in order to begin small farms. And they are actually finding viable careers. I thought this particular experience was telling,

"Ms. Wimbish grew up in Tulsa, Okla., a child of the suburbs, and it wasn’t until she moved to New York that she discovered farmers’ markets and the politics of food. She worked the last two summers at Hearty Roots and became hooked on the agrarian life. 'Moving to New York City,” she said, “was what first got me interested in food and farming.'"

Moving to New York City inspired farming?! How counterintuitive, yet it does bear a certain logic. I've blogged before about how urbanism and agrarianism can coexist in a sort of symbiotic relationship, while the blurring of those boundaries evident in the suburbs actually destroys both.

Rod Dreher has this to add about the urban role of sustaining local agriculture,

"Notice that this back to the land agrarian movement is only possible because people who live in the city are willing to buy what the small farmers produce. That's why it's important not to adopt a false duality, and this idea that if you don't drop your urban life and head for the hills, you're some sort of hypocrite. Not everybody is cut out for rural farming -- me, I'm the second coming of Jean de Florette -- but we who are living in the cities and the suburbs can and should help support these farmers by buying the fruit of their land and their labors."

The fruits of our labor

Missoula's own Ten Spoon winery held its annual grape harvest this weekend. Members of the community were welcomed onto the vineyard, fed very well, and put to work with a pair of scissors. The Ten Spoon winery is an example of a valuable asset to Missoula nestled in the high-property-value Rattlesnake valley.

Jen and I topped off the day by driving another mile up the road and biking into the Rattlesnake wilderness area. I've been told that the Rattlesnake is the closest federally protected wilderness area to a major metropolitan area. Mount Rose is pretty close to Reno, and Mount Sandia abuts the suburbs of Albuquerque, but we're at least in the running.

The farmer's market fixture

Missoula's thriving farmer's market has been our Saturday morning entertainment and food scavenging ever since I've lived here. I sometimes imagine a juxtaposition of the outdoor market and the standard supermarket. On one side is the hard florescent lights, the tinny Bee-gees song in the background, the constant assault of flashy marketing, the check-out line tabloids. On the other side is the sunlight, the local street musician, the vibrant colors of the arranged produce, and plenty of quick conversations with friends. That's not to mention the quality of the food itself.

Farmer's markets are growing in popularity around the country, with about an 18% increase in quantity in the last 10 years. And many folks are finding that the local market, contrary to established wisdom, is not necessarily the more expensive option. The economy-of-scale advantage of the supermarket is offset by the lack of the local farmer's "value-added" elements (processing, packaging, marketing, distributing). Jen and I probably do end up spending more at the farmers market, but it's cash so we don't really keep track of it. And I'm reminded of the benefits by the pork ribs currently stewing in the oven.

It's great to see the resurgence of this most ancient fixture of city life, that original connection between the urban world and the countryside that sustains it. Its organically formed system of commerce will hopefully never be fully replaced.

"I'm pro-chicken and I vote"

These were the t-shirts that supporters of urban chicken ownership wore to a public hearing in Missoula on Monday.

I'm not kidding. And I don't think they were kidding either.

Here's the dilemma. Currently no livestock are allowed in the Missoula city limits, according to a 1982 ordinance. However, recently it has become marginally popular for individual families to keep a few chickens in the yard. It's a low-cost way to ensure an ongoing supply of eggs and maybe a nice chicken parmesan dinner when it's all said and done. The trouble is that this trend has worried some into envisioning a town overrun with smelly, loud birds.

Every urban community has to decide where it stands in the spectrum between garden plots (good) and slaughterhouses (not so much), between individual liberty and the right for others to not hear clucking over the fence. Montana happens to lean on the self-sufficient side, so my money is on the chicken owners.

But some have also seen a deeper value to the chickens as well. Mr. Wendel Berry of Kentucky once laid out a list of practical ways to instill a lifestyle of conservation. On the top of the list was the suggestion to cultivate a garden, even if it's only a box on a window sill. Not everyone can be a professional farmer, but everyone can have at least some connection to the land. I wonder if chicken-ownership is to animal husbandry what a garden is to farming. Could your breakfast omelet mean something different, even taste differently, if you knew it came from Maggie in the backyard rather than a carton at Safeway? We talk about local food. Maggie is so local you can smell her.

By the way, the hearing came to no conclusions. They will pick it back up next week. Here's a pdf of the proposal to allow chickens under certain conditions.