Making money urban farming

Unfortunately, that means chems, GMOs, tilling etc. Related Content. Urban farming is booming, but what does it really yield?

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City Slicker Farms in West Oakland does more than just grow food for the local residents. Bonnie Powell photo Over on Earth Island Journal, Sena Christian has an excellent, rigorously reported article about the tough economics of urban farming. Acknowledging the limits of urban ag, Christian seeks making money urban farming tease out its potential: particularly its economic upside. Limits are an important place to fsrming on this topic. For all the hype urban farms have gotten of late, no one who works in the field expects cities to become anything close to self-sufficient with regard to food.

What is Urban Farming?

Gone are the days of urban farming as a quirky hobby rather than a viable channel for food production. With more reports sounding alarms about looming food scarcity issues, the urban agriculture sector is also increasingly melding with the boom in agriculture tech, breeding companies offering everything from unorthodox growing setups to soil sensors, hydroponics and all manner of crop data analytics. Alongside the boom in urban ag startups is the growing number of grassroots nonprofit community groups looking to turn vacant lots into local food production hot spots, often marrying issues of nutrition with economic development. Just look at Urban Tilth , City Slicker Farms or the Green Bronx Machine , which all grow affordable, high-quality food on underused land — and manage to create job or help alleviate food deserts in the process. Figuring out how to regulate urban farms — even putting into place checks for food safety and other basic processes — is one issue. With one United Nations report even noting that one-fifth of the world’s food is grown in urban areas — everywhere from informal backyard plots to high-tech vertical farms — one overarching concern is avoiding ills such as cost-cutting, dependence on toxic fertilizers and ecosystem degradation that have plagued the industrial food system.

Full Disclosure

Select crops that have higher yield per unit area. Now we need to take it a little further: What is the monetary value per unit? But, honestly, given the food production and distribution system we have, we’ve not needed anything like this until we began to realize that this system that is in place is producing very low quality food that quite possibly may be doing more damage than good. An area of just one square metre can provide 20 kg of food a year. Some urban farming enterprises are successfully negotiating the profit landscape. For example, what is popular and valuable in New York City might not be the same in Nairobi. If you lose some of those customers, then your income could be compromised very quickly. Another driver is the price of food: People in developing nations pay a far higher percentage of their total income for food than Americans do, and poor transportation and refrigeration infrastructure make perishable goods, like fruits and vegetables, especially dear. You have wide repertoire of plants to work with from herbs, onions, garlic, to strawberries and even fruit trees. Making money urban farming Hoff Aug. For this reason, always look towards diversifying your revenue streams and build strong relationships with your customers. A profitable mushroom will depend on knowing which mushroom strain to cultivate and how to maximize your production. In comparison, radishes are ready in days, and in the same space as one cabbage, you could harvest eight bunches. Who knew?