If you are from Vancouver, BC, your reaction might be, "There's no farm in the Kitsilano neighborhood!"
Yes There Is!
Kitsilano Farms is an amalgamation of backyard gardens around the Kitsilano neighbourhood. The people who own these gardens have provided the space to grow produce that is taken to market or share with the community through their Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) program.
Craig Heigway calls himself the Chief Pitchfork Operator (CPO) of Kitsilano Farms. Craig says:
As a boy, my summer weekends were spent behind the wheel of an old Massey Ferguson tractor, hauling the equipment that turns hay into bales. Luckily, I was under the age of 12, so not big enough to heft the bales onto the wagon --that was left to my older brother, Drew. There is a big gap in time between the farm of my childhood and Kitsilano Farms. Time that I rarely experienced farm life, but often longed for an opportunity to get back to the land. Now I have the opportunity to put my hands in the soil, plant the seeds, weed the gardens, tend to the crop; that is, be a farmer again.And the best thing of all, I get to meet the people and see the smiles on their faces when I present them with the beautiful vegetables that I grew. That's why I started Kitsilano Farms.
Click Here to learn more about Kitsilano Farms.
Comments (1)
What is helping to spur the backyard farming trend is a franchise-ready commercial vegetable growing system called SPIN-Farming. Developed by Canadian farmer Wally Satzewich, SPIN makes it possible to earn $50,000+ from a half-acre. SPIN's growing techniques are not, in themselves, breakthrough. What is novel is the way a SPIN farm business is run. SPIN provides everything you'd expect from a good franchise: a business plan, marketing advice, and a detailed day-to-day workflow. In standardizing the system and creating a reproducible process it really isn't any different from McDonalds. By offering a non-technical, easy-to-understand and inexpensive-to-implement farming system, it allows many more people to farm commercially, wherever they live, as long as there are nearby markets to support them. By using backyards and front lawns and neighborhood lots as their land base, SPIN farmers are recasting farming as a small business in a city or suburb, and it is now starting to be practiced throughout the U.S.,Canada, UK, Australia, Ireland and the Netherland. You can see some of these entrepreneurial farmers in action at www.spinfarming.com
Posted by Roxanne Christensen | September 7, 2008 9:58 AM
Posted on September 7, 2008 09:58