Urban Farmer Forgoes Lawn for Livestock and Veggies

It was such sen­ti­ments that spurred Novella Carpenter to raise chick­ens in her back­yard about 15 years ago. Then came bees and goats, and then the pigs, veg­eta­bles and fruit trees. If you’re imag­in­ing a bucolic farm scene, think again. Carpenter’s Ghost Town Farm is located near down­town Oakland—closer to the BART* tracks and free­ways than to a barn. For years, much of her ”farm­lette” squat­ted on a vacant lot next to her house. And the pigs—they were fed scraps found dumpster-diving.

Carpenter is part of a rapidly grow­ing move­ment of urban farm­ers for­go­ing lawns for food. In 2011, along with co-writer and fel­low urban farmer Willow Rosenthal, she pub­lished The Essential Urban Farmer (Penguin, 2011). The book is a guide to help other urban home­stead­ers bring the farm to their backyards.

Taking It to the City

Farming was not new to Carpenter when she got her first chick­ens in the late 1990s. In the 1970s her par­ents left the Bay Area behind and moved the fam­ily to rural Idaho to live with the land. What’s new about Carpenter and the urban farmer is that she’s not leav­ing the city. She plants wher­ever she can and raises small num­bers of ani­mals in back­yard spaces usu­ally reserved for swing sets.

This twenty-first-century pio­neer woman takes a refresh­ingly laissez-faire approach to the grow-it-yourself move­ment. Carpenter admits to not know­ing how much of her own food she grows. “I know that if push came to shove, I could live off what I pro­duce, except for grains; I don’t have the room to grow grains. But I’m not dog­matic about grow­ing my own food. I don’t live in a city to iso­late myself in a self-sustained world. I love to go to the pub for fish and chips or get Chinese,” she says.

Planting the First Seed

Ready to take a stab at home­steading? Start with foods you like and that are easy to grow, advises Carpenter. “A lot of first-time gar­den­ers start with things that sound healthy but that they don’t eat, like kale,” she says. “Then they grow it but don’t like it.” A salad mix makes for the per­fect yard crop. “A mix with mesclun and other greens, sown very closely together, makes a beau­ti­ful car­pet and it will really blow your mind how good it tastes.”

If you’re ready to liven things up on the ranch, chick­ens are easy and reward­ing. These “pets with ben­e­fits” are beau­ti­ful, kids love them, and all you need to do is feed them, says Carpenter. “Almost every­one eats eggs, and you get this fun thing called chicken television.”

Click any image above to see a larger version.

So you’re ready to buy your first chick­ens, or maybe bees, but what about the Jonses? Get neigh­bors involved as much as pos­si­ble, sug­gests Carpenter. “Often peo­ple won’t get it until they see it, and really not until they taste it.” So make sure you include them in the fruits of your labor. “Once you taste home­made honey or greens that are min­utes old from your yard, you appre­ci­ate the dif­fer­ence,” she says.

If neigh­bors are com­plain­ing about the look of your urban farm, aes­thetic upgrades are entirely pos­si­ble. “Keeping chick­ens doesn’t have to be this low-class thing. I mean, Martha Stewart keeps chick­ens.” You can spend thou­sands of dol­lars on archi­tec­turally beau­ti­ful chicken coops if you want to, accord­ing to Carpenter.

Want to see urban farms in action? Check these out: http://labriefamilyfarm.wordpress.com/

http://www.brooklyngrangefarm.com/

http://www.greensgrow.org/farm/index.php

*BART: Bay Area Rapid Transit.

Anna Soref is the for­mer edi­tor in chief of Natural Foods Merchandiser mag­a­zine, a lead­ing B-to-B pub­li­ca­tion serv­ing the nat­ural prod­ucts indus­try. She has been a con­tribut­ing writer for numer­ous trade and con­sumer nat­ural health pub­li­ca­tions, includ­ing Yoga Journal, Whole Living, The Herb Quarterly, Functional Foods and Nutraceuticals, and Vegetarian Times. Anna is a fre­quent speaker at events, such as the Natural Products Association’s MarketPlace, HBA Global Expo, SupplySide West, and Natural Products Expo West and East.