Design
One Thing Missing from the Urban Farm Movement: Farmers
With few skilled farmers, many urban gardens become victims of neglect.
They're growing like weeds, but often growing only weeds. Urban gardens and farms are appearing in backyards, schools and empty lots in cities all over the country. But people with the actual know-how and willingness to tend them – in other words, farmers – are far less abundant.
For Dan Allen, this is a critical problem. He's an urban gardener in Los Angeles, and runs a company called Farmscape that helps tend small-scale farms in the city. While there's clearly interest in the idea of making urban areas into not just consumers but also producers of food, Allen sees that interest as fleeting.