Food and the City: Urban Agriculture and the New Food Revolution by Jennifer Cockrall-King

Author:Jennifer Cockrall-King [Cockrall-King, Jennifer]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Prometheus Books
Published: 2012-02-14T05:00:00+00:00

The Roots of SPIN

The “food not lawns” movement, and the 2006 eco-sensation book by the same name, already chipped away at the idea that residential yards had to be a fertilized, overwatered, unproductive lawn, bordered with wood chips and evergreens. But this movement was part political act—in many municipalities, there were laws against food growing in front yards, though most cities have repealed these laws in the face of changing social norms and common sense—and part pulling a few veggies from your front yard.

SPIN farming, on the other hand, was designed not as an ideology but as a franchise-like system, an entrepreneurial business model aimed at making money for the owner-operator.12 And it cleverly gets around the two biggest barriers that first-generation farmers face: land and capital.

The system was designed by Canadian farmer Wally Satzewich as a new solution to a growing crisis in the farming community in the 1990s. It was a new approach to making a go of it as an independent family farmer. In the past few years, it has caught on like wildfire. There are now over six hundred SPIN farmers operating around the world, from Canada and the United States to Ireland, the United Kingdom, and Australia.

Between 1993 and 1999, Wally Satzewich and Gail Vandersteen lived in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, but they owned a quarter-section (160 acres/65 hectares) of land forty minutes away. They grew organic market produce on just about ten acres (four hectares), and they'd sell this organic produce at farmers’ markets back in the city. The rest of the arable land on the farm was leased to neighboring farmers for additional cropland. Like most farming families, there was off-farm income that kept them afloat. Vandersteen had a good job in the city at the University of Saskatchewan.

I called Satzewich on a mid-January morning in 2011, when winds were sweeping snow across Saskatoon at sixteen miles per hour (twenty-seven kilometers per hour), and the outside temperature was a seasonal minus-four Fahrenheit (minus-twenty Celsius).13 We spent the first several minutes discussing weather, a Canadian Prairie preoccupation, because that year the snowfall had been heavy. Fifty inches (127 centimeters) had fallen, and the winter wasn't even half over yet. Even Canadians know that Saskatchewan's winter weather is not for the thin-skinned. Soon enough, however, we got around to SPIN farming.

As Satzewich tells it, organic certifiers used to come to the farm and continually harp at him about scaling up. “They'd say, ‘Listen Wally, you've got to break away from the farmers’ markets and start thinking about semitrailer-loads of organic potatoes being shipped to Vancouver.’ That was the kind of model they were trying to hammer home to me.”

There were other problems with the way Satzewich was farming. He was always worried about finding someone to lease the other hundred acres of cultivatable land year to year. Then there was frequent crop damage from marauding deer, unexpected late and early frosts, and a very short but intense growing season in the northern latitude. And the relatively small size of his operation didn't allow for as many efficiencies as a large farm can take advantage of.

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