We live in a typical house in a typical East Vancouver neighbourhood. The lot is 33 feet wide backing onto an alley. By strolling the alleys, I notice that many of our retired neighbours cultivate their backyards intensively, producing up to four crops of many kinds of vegetables in the course of a year.
We don’t garden ourselves, and now that our only child is nearly a teen, the backyard is not used much. I’m thinking of inviting one of my farming neighbours to come into our yard and cultivate it as he wishes. It would certainly look better and it would relieve me of the nuisance of whacking the grass, hacking the hedges, and otherwise keeping up the grounds, which I don’t enjoy.
The idea got me thinking bigger, however. On my strolls through my neighbourhood, I notice all the City-owned and unused boulevard space between sidewalks and streets. I did some calculations which revealed that each ten-by-ten block area in my neighbourhood contained roughly one-and-a-half hectares of City-owned space between sidewalks and streets. The average small peasant farm in the world, of which there are tens of millions, is about that size, one-and-a-half hectares. In the city of Vancouver as a whole, there is enough cultivatable and very accessible land between sidewalks and streets to suit 150 small farms of the kind and size that supply most of the world’s food, and quite a bit of its peasant family income.
My neighbour’s cultivated portion of his backyard is about one-two-hundredth of a hectare, or about one-third of one percent of an average peasant farm. Having observed him for about 15 years, I’m familiar with what he produces out of his small patch. It amounts to about 10 different types of common vegetables produced in four different crops, yielding, I roughly estimate, about three bushels of food in each crop, or 12 bushels of food over the course of a year.
With his expertise and guidance, and that of countless backyard retired gardeners like him who populate East Vancouver, there is no reason the boulevards could not be coaxed to yield similar production. A farm situated on the strips of land between sidewalks and streets in a 10 block by 10 block area of east Vancouver—an area bounded by, say, Commercial Drive and Renfrew Street, and 1 st Avenue and Broadway—could be made to yield 3,600 bushels of food per year in the form of tomatoes, potatoes, squash, beans, peas, cucumbers, zucchinis, green and white onions, garlic and all sorts of other foods, and also any number of herbs.
I then strolled around the nearby farmers’ market at Trout Lake Community Centre. Gathering some data on market prices that common kinds of vegetables fetch at these kinds of markets, I arrived at a very rough estimate of what an average bushel of food is worth, which is about $30. So it seems to me that food produced on the boulevards of one small part of East Vancouver could be made to yield produce worth about $100,000 annually at the local farmers’markets.
A tenant farmer given the street boulevard space in a four-block-by-five-block area could generate for himself $20,000 per year. Throughout the whole city of Vancouver, up to 750 such farmers could work the land between sidewalks and streets, producing well over half-a-million bushels of food. Our family of three consumes about half-a-bushel of such food a week, or 26 bushels a year. If we’re typical, then the boulevard farms of Vancouver could satisfy nearly 10% of the basic vegetable needs of the whole city.
The farmer’s markets are already well-established in Vancouver and could be expanded and multiplied to make room for lots more produce and sellers. The clientele who shop at them are already the types who would value the opportunity to buy very locally-grown produce. The City administration is already concerned about the source of our food. And local production as well as local buying reduces car trips and greenhouse gas emissions. Furthermore, intensive gardening absorbs carbon dioxide from the air, reducing the city’s overall greenhouse gas emissions.
Being able to tend a garden is one thing, but choosing what to plant, transporting the yield to market, pricing it, selling it, and managing all the other elements required of someone operating in a traditional market economy is asking too much of the kind of people who would be attracted to boulevard farming. What they would need is a farmers’ coop that would gather information from the market about what people want to buy, and that would buy produce from the farmers at some fair and agreed-upon price. The coop would look after trucking the produce to market, setting up the selling stalls, pricing the goods, marketing them, advertising them, and managing all the other intricate affairs of business. It would have to be a coop so that the farmers themselves own the company and direct it democratically, thereby avoiding exploitation of the farmers. Fair trade standards would, of course, be met.
The real bonus is the employment provided to people who are otherwise unemployable. The modern economy today provides jobs at its bottom rungs that demand high standards of personal hygiene, prompt attention to clocks, ability to follow precise orders and routines, and to work deep inside alienating indoor environments, such as food courts in shopping malls, or at the WalMart or other such places. People with manageable mental illnesses, various kinds of addictions, or who have economic impediments keeping them from regular access to showers and laundry facilities, or people who simply won’t or can’t fit into the narrow strictures of minimum-wage service sector jobs, may find farming suitable. By providing the opportunity to work outside at their own pace and direction doing the kind of mindless rote activity on the land that humans have been doing since they became humans, the boulevard farms of Vancouver provide a tailor-made solution. And it provides the traditionally unemployable a reasonable income that requires no state subsidy and little state involvement in their lives.
What is required is a pilot project to see if this all makes sense, and to refine the model so that it can be applied throughout the city. A ten-by-ten block area that creates in total a 1.5 hectare farm to be worked on by five tenant farmers looking after their own designated five-by-four block section is the first requirement. Naturally, householders in the area need to be reassured—but not necessarily all convinced, since it is City-owned property.
A model coop then needs to be created and initially financed to arrange matters with the first five farmers and provide them tools, seeds, organization, and help with turning the ground and preparing it for the first planting, and then to buy the produce from the farmers when the first crop is up and harvested, and truck it to the market and set up a stall to sell the produce. The coop, really just one person perhaps, with help from the farmers themselves, then can use the proceeds it earned at the market to cover its costs and buy the next harvest from the farmers.
If it generally works, the idea can be refined and expanded across the city, ultimately providing Vancouverites with a very local source for a significant portion of their food, good-paying and healthy jobs for those unemployable anywhere in the modern service economy, a reduction in car use by shoppers, a carbon sink for the local environment, and a good start at a survival plan for city residents should there be a major disruption to energy supplies.
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