Back to the land: the next gen

Urban agriculture is healthy, environmentally friendly and it’s gaining ground

Sonja Myllymaki made a major career change this summer, from letter carrier to full-time farmer. And she didn’t leave the city to do it.

She didn’t have land of her own, but she found a way around that, too. She found vacant lots, she rented allotments and contracted space in friends’ backyards.

Myllymaki is pioneering SPIN gardening–Small Plot Intensive agriculture–a business model started in Saskatoon a few years ago. Bringing small-scale commercial gardening into the city is the latest development in the local food movement that is rapidly gaining momentum and sending shoots out in all directions.

The “eat local” campaign championed by restaurant chefs a few years ago has ballooned into a polyglot of urban farmers, average families looking for healthy food, environmentalists, social activists, provincial economists and urban planners with a new definition of a sustainable city.

Edmonton Journal