SMALL PLOT INTENSIVE FARMING

"Innovation of the Week: Small Plot Intensive Farming", reproduced from NOURISHING THE PLANET ((http://blogs.worldwatch.org/nourishingtheplanet/innovation-of-the-week-small-plot-intensive-farming-growing-food-in-unlikely-places/?utm_source=The+Nourishing+the+Planet+Project&utm_campaign=5715698611-NtP_Draft_2_5_11_2012&utm_medium=email)

Earlier this year Olivier De Schutter, the UN Special Rapporteur on the right to food, submitted a report arguing that agroecological farming methods “outperform the use of chemical fertilizers in boosting food production,” particularly in developing countries where access to resources is limited. Practicing this low-input, diversified farming style on a small scale has been gaining popularity in the U.S. in recent decades due, in part, to rising fuel and land prices. Farming intensively on tiny acreages, particularly in urban areas, may offer a sustainable solution to many of the U.S. food system’s ills.

Farmers Wally Satzewich, Gail Vandersteen, and Roxanne Christensen have created SPIN Farming, a business that trains would-be farmers how to farm profitably on as little as 5,000 square feet, or roughly the size of two 4-bedroom homes. SPIN farming, or Small Plot INtensive Farming focuses on the business side of farming, from keeping overhead costs low to finding easy-to-access markets. Using SPIN’s model, farms are cropping up in unlikely spaces. Somerton Tanks Farm, for example, operates in the shadow of two five-million-gallon water tanks on land owned by the Philadelphia Water Department. And in Wilkes-Barre, PA, students at Wilkes University founded the first-ever campus-based SPIN farm by reclaiming an abandoned lot on the edge of the campus.

[This initiative is quite similar to the 'Projeto Mandala', developed in the state of Paraíba, northeastern Brazil]



- See vídeo, in Portuguese, by accessing: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GI3IgK-IAio&feature=youtube_gdata_player. Posted using BlogPress from my iPad