- Image courtesy of MyFarm
With the exciting financial times, Duck and I have been thinking about ways to both secure our own sense of safety and invest in our community. Since I’ve been feeling the food production thing, we decided to check out My Farm, which I found awhile ago poking around the web. My Farm is a great organization in San Francisco that builds a network of urban gardens and provides a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) box for members and other subscribers. My Farm installs a vegetable garden, and then maintains it weekly in exchange for harvesting and distributing your fruits and veggies to members. Or, you can choose to have a personal garden and pay for maintenance.I read a San Francisco Chronicle article about My Farm flush with lots of comments from folks about the bougie (or dispicable, depending on the commenter) aspect of paying someone to create a farm for you. I had conflict with this format also, recognizing the deep and complex intricacies of access to produce; it seemed an irresponsible use of resources and privilege to pay someone to create an urban garden when so many folks don’t even have access to a grocery in their neighborhood. One of the reasons we began looking into this was to consider responsible and accountable ways to distribute wealth and resources, investing in community instead of institutions as well as preparing a sustainable and responsible space in our home. I looked at a couple of different garden/farm resources, including Victory Gardens and City Slickers, and I am currently interning with People’s Grocery. All three are limited to specific and criticially deserving communties in San Francisco and West Oakland, so we didn’t fit the bill. I found My Farm, and was a little hesitant about the use of privilege and resources, but wanted to learn more.
Today we met with Trevor from My Farm to do an assessment of our garden. It was quite a funny interaction, as Duck and I had a different idea of how it worked. We thought it was more like a farm installation like a landscape business, except for food, with an option to participate in the CSA instead of the network of small SF farms. After we met with Trevor, we realized it was exactly what we were looking for—we just didn’t know it. My Farm creates a link of urban gardens in San Francisco and distributes the produce locally, allowing for it to be cost-effective for their organization and the participants. This allows local and organic food to be the mainstay of our consumption, and it supports local farming in a new and innovative way. Since the possibility of living on my own farm is not in the picture right now, this is a perfect chance to participate and support this vital community in San Francisco. Though it is not without our privilege that we are able to participate, I do feel much more grounded in our decision to support a small local organization, my San Francisco community, and ourselves in the decision to have an urban farm.
