SUSTAINABLE BUSINESS: Reclaiming Garden Victory

On a surprisingly fog-free afternoon in San Francisco Jeremy Oldfield, co-owner of Freelance Farmers, shuffles hand tools and overturned seedlings in the back of his partner’s SUV. “We took a turn too fast,” he says, scooping a few fistfuls of rich brown soil out onto the pavement. Oldfield already wears a smudge of dirt across his brow and has thin brown crescents under his fingernails. Add to that his overgrown blond hair and a copper beard, and he looks very much like your stereotypical farmer. But Oldfield’s not any old grower. He’s a new breed of urban farmer, an edible landscaper.

Most Americans are, by now, readily familiar with food movements, the bursts of energy that surround a specific message about the way our food is grown or consumed. Through the years, these movements have taken different forms: During the food shortages of World War I and II, the U.S. government encouraged its citizens to plant “victory gardens,” or kitchen gardens, to increase domestic food production and improve morale by including average Americans in the war effort. Later, in the 1960s and 70s, many frustrated urbanites started to abandon their confining cityscapes for rural stands, becoming known as “back to the landers” or “homesteaders.” More recently, the organic and local food movements have seen Americans attempt to gain more control over the source of their food products and the conditions under which they were created. Of course, environmental concerns, regarding both the impact of the growing process and the carbon footprint of long-distance food shipping, have also played significant roles in these movements.

Most recently, the edible landscaping movement has sought to build upon and deepen these traditions by combining organic growing techniques with hyper-local production – farms so close to the consumer that they’re literally located in their backyards. In this sense, the edible landscaping movement seeks to create a network of microfarms across U.S. urban and suburban areas. Where there are currently barren concrete expanses, edible landscaping proponents seek to plant rows of cabbage, chard and cauliflower; in suburbs where acres of lawns and ornamental plantings offer little more than eye candy, tomato vines and broccoli stalks can provide welcome sustenance. Even the White House lawn has not been spared by edible landscapers; Roger Doiron of Kitchen Gardens International is currently petitioning for part of the president’s lawn to be converted to a food garden.

Like most food movements, edible landscaping finds its foot soldiers in the young and socially conscious. Oldfield and his partner, Emily Stevenson, founded Freelance Farmers to help further spread edible landscaping practices and educate consumers about organic food growing techniques, and they’re not alone in this endeavor. Edible landscaping companies are popping up in cities around the U.S., including Seattle, Los Angeles, and Portland, Ore., in addition to San Francisco, where there are a handful of companies  as well as Freelance Farmers. Trevor Paque, also of San Francisco, has founded MyFarm, an edible landscaping company that’s already received positive press in The New York Times and the San Francisco Chronicle. Yet, while both MyFarm and Freelance Farmers seek to create a series of mircofarms from small, privately-owned urban plots (including yards and roof decks), their founders come from very different backgrounds and have approached the challenges of turning a business into a social movement in decidedly different ways.

Paque founded MyFarms after closing his mortgage brokerage office downtown and volunteering with a community-supported kitchen for three months. Growing up in Sacramento, he was always attracted to gardening. “I grew up on about three quarters of an acre and we grew vegetables and fruit trees, and had ducks, geese and chickens. When I’d see my grandpa I’d go out and work in his garden and go to sleep in the garden and wake up and – Sacramento’s a hot place – just feel the sun beating down on my face. I’d open my eyes and reach around, start smelling the tomatoes and feeling for my breakfast. I guess I’ve always liked being in the garden.”

Paque likes to think of his company as a decentralized farm to which people lend their yards. Clients can choose from pre-established installation packages or opt for a custom garden design, but they must agree that Paque and his team will handle the plot’s maintenance. In this respect, his business model is similar to that of a CSA (community supported agriculture). Clients are largely hands off (though they can help if they’re so inclined) and each week they receive a basket of produce collected from Paque’s network of microfarms across the city. “That’s the whole point of what we do,” says Paque, explaining why clients let him maintain plots. “We’re not a landscaping company as much as we’re a farm. People are giving up their backyards for us to grow vegetables in.”

Keeping MyFarm’s niche well defined helps Paque to ensure he is realizing the company’s mission. “One of the reasons why I left the mortgage industry was because I felt totally disconnected in lots of ways. That’s what this is really about—connection. Connecting people to their food, to the people that grow their food, and connecting people to their neighbors.”

Where Paque experimented in the corporate world before founding MyFarm, Oldfield and Stevenson went straight into farming after graduating from college (though Stevenson worked briefly in publishing). They refined their growing techniques by crisscrossing the country, working on farms in California and Maine, with stints in New York and New Mexico in between. But it was at the Four Season Farm run by Eliot Coleman that Oldfield and Stevenson really began to define their farming aesthetic. Coleman, author of the 1989 organic farming bible The New Organic Grower, proved an excellent mentor for them, just as Scott Nearing, author of Living the Good Life and a prominent voice of the homesteading movement, was for Coleman. Nearing established his farm in Harborside, Maine, in 1952, prompting Coleman to move there in the 1960s. In this respect, Oldfield and Stevenson could be considered the third generation of a farming lineage in which each generation learns from, builds on and modernizes the work of the generation before.

Like Paque, Oldfield and Stevenson also stress connection with their clients as a motivating factor in establishing Freelance Farmers. However, they choose to focus on custom installations and the education of their customers, and are less interested in maintaining the gardens themselves. According to Oldfield, “As we teach people, the idea is that they will teach other people and maybe this could be the starter crystal for a new way to imagine the urban yard.” He and Stevenson revisit a garden twice monthly after its initial installation, training the new garden owner on maintenance practices such as soil fertility, thinning, pest control, weeding, composting and drip irrigation techniques. They also make a customized manual for each new gardener, an extra which Oldfield notes the customers really enjoy. “We’d rather keep expanding our clientele than just stick with fifteen clients and close our doors,” he adds.

Though Oldfield and Stevenson plan to grow Freelance Farmers, they don’t currently have aspirations of moving beyond what they themselves can do. For them, the personal interactions with their clients and the opportunities to educate a new group of growers are the cornerstones of the business. So when they think of expansion, they think of ways to reach different populations. “We’d like to explore working with schools to set up school lunch and salad bar gardens and to look at working with hospices and hospitals, involving patients or residents in gardening just like they historically might have been.”

For Paque, on the other hand, it’s important that MyFarm is able to expand its reach beyond San Francisco. “We want this to be something that can replace a good portion of the way that food is produced right now,” he says, adding that his main hesitation regarding expansion is maintaining the quality on the installations. He says he’s eager to see the MyFarm model replicated in other cities, but is unsure currently just how that replication should take place. “Open sourcing is one way for it to grow, where we just post our model online and make it available for anyone who wants to start it up in their town. But then, part of our concern with something like that is how we know that this idea of backyard farming won’t get a bad name because some people failed to do it right it somewhere. In San Francisco, we’re doing it successfully. In something like franchising or licensing, we’d have more control.”

This is the idea that unites both companies: They’re not just in the business of planting food gardens; they’re contributing to a movement larger than their companies or themselves. Yet it can often be a difficult thing to balance the financial responsibilities of making a company work with responsibilities to a greater cause.

For Oldfield, it’s something he admits to struggling with initially: “It’s been hard to merge a transcendent love of vegetable farming with charging people, but it has also meant that you can keep sharing that knowledge. Maybe that’s the Johnny Appleseed vision. Instead of planting trees, we’re trying to plant people who will want to plant.”

He admits to thinking about the movement first and his bottom line second, adding that, “The bottom line has to line up for it to even happen, but it has been. We’re fortunate enough to be meeting with certain circumstances where the bottom line works itself out.”

Thus far, MyFarm and Freelance Farmers are proving that business and social change can coexist and thrive. If these companies are any indication, there might be a new business model emerging, something Oldfield refers to in his quiet, pensive way as “casual entrepreneurialism.” He can’t articulate exactly what that means, but he knows it when he sees it: a guy with dirt under his fingernails and seedlings in his car.

Tracey Samuelson is a freelance writer currently based in Portland, Maine.