This is from a few months back, I just forgot to post it.

I’ve just finished reading Eat Here by Brian Halweil, a manifesto on the benefits of locally grown and processed food. It’s an inspiring book and has gotten me excited about how food gets to the right tables. Our current system seems to trade labor costs for transportation costs: get cheap labor on a huge, highly mechanized farm in Mexico, then pay to move the harvest a few thousand miles. My favorite statistic from the book: with this system, you get about 10% of the calories from eating the food vs. calories required to move the food. In a way, we are just moving lots of water around the world.

On the other side of the spectrum are CSAs, local cooperatives, etc. It’s a good system but it’s very fragmented and doesn’t feel optimal to me. So I want to work on this problem of getting local food to local tables.

Do you think urban gardening, on many small plots across the city, could be scaled up to yield a substantial amount of local produce (enough for a profit), if the logistics were greased with a bit of technology? Peer-to-peer gardening? I’m thinking of a system that connects land owners who have extra yard/roof space—and no desire to garden—with nearby stewards who love to garden but have no land. Stewards ride/walk/run to gardens on sunny days after work, getting exercise and doing what they love in exchange for some produce. Land owners are paid in cash, produce, and/or the beauty of a garden where a pile of dirt once was. Old folks who used to garden, but don’t have the energy for it anymore, might love to see some tomatoes growing in their yard again.

This is truly local food: The bulk of the urban harvest goes out to farmer’s markets and restaurants, if that’s the easiest route to the table. This is probably the hardest problem: knowing when things are ripe, and gathering and selling them quickly. The problem is made harder if the gardens are biodynamic, because you can’t just say "go pick all cabbage plots." How would crop distribution across gardens allow you to minimize the number of gardens visited in a given week? Gardens with a few vegetables that ripen around the same time vs. 12 that ripen over different times might be easier to manage.

I think the stewards and landowners could coordinate some things online, but getting soil and seed, and doing the prep work each season and for each new garden would take a lot of time and up-front capital. Each garden would have to be pretty standardized—which is why I like the Square Foot Gardening approach: it has high yield, it doesn’t depend on existing soil quality (BYO soil), it requires fewer tools, and it’s modular and scalable across many different garden sizes.

Crop loss via theft, drought, and negligence would have to be absorbed somehow. Supermarkets get by with 5% shrinkage so this isn’t a huge concern when the garden network is big.

Other concerns: liability and accessibility for rooftops, raccoons and other collateral nuisances, having "steward capacity" for coverage while other stewards are on vacation, how to process excess yield—ideally, a local canning facility. OK, this is a huge project and one could spend a lifetime on it.

Your thoughts?