One of my favorite green entrepreneurial ideas is the personal gardening service. Let’s say you have a busy lifestyle, but you realize the pure goodness that is fresh produce which comes from your very own garden. The only problem is that neither you nor your significant other has the time required to cultivate and maintain your very own backyard garden. Enter Your Backyard Farmer, or one of the many other similar entrepreneurial ventures spotted across the globe.
Backyard Farmer
In particular, Your Backyard Farmer provides the following services:
- Knowledge and expertise in small scale urban farming.
- An organic method farm in your backyard, custom-built to your family size and eating desires. Vegetable Selection list in pdf format. Dowload and circle your choices.
- Soil amendments, plant transplants, seeds, fertilizers, water timer and hose.
- Weekly visit to insure farm is growing well–including pest inspection, weeding and planting.
- Weekly harvest basket at your backdoor.
What could be better than your very own garden as well as your very own gardener? How fantasitic would it be to get a bushel of fresh produce at your door each week that came from your backyard. Keep Your Backyard Farmer in mind if you live in the Portland and Milwaukie areas, or consider starting your own version in your town. If you hear of other companies like this, let us know!
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{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
That’s very cool, although I’d question if it’s cost effective when compared to shopping at farmer’s markets or other local sources. This will dovetail nicely with my next blog about Slow Foods, which I investigated recently.
Sunshines last blog post..Backyard Farmer
Ben - I have actually thought a lot about that very question. I’m not sure that it would be cost effective on an individual basis, since it would be difficult to consume all of the produce that comes from your garden. I found out that most of these backyard farmer type companies start at about $60 per week, which depending on how much produce you are getting, might actually be worth it. I would tend to agree with you though and I think at best you would break even.
However, what I have been thinking about is how to distrubute these costs so that it would be cost effective for one or two people to do something like this. Initially I thought that a group of neighbors could hire a backyard farmer, and share the costs as well as the produce.
This is really like the old tragedy of the commons problem, however, where a common resource without well-defined property rights is over-exploited because the costs are evenly distributed. Parenthetically, the enviornment is a tragedy of the commons problem too, where any one individual can polute like crazy, and only carry his or her pro-rata cost. This provides an incentive to over exploit the resource.
What I have been thinking about though, is whether or not delegating all USE of the the garden (the ‘common’) would eliminate the over-exploitation. If so, then I think something like this could really be great for shared urban farming, where multiple individuals own a large urban farm, but all operation is handled by a third-party, and none of the owners are allowed to interfere.
Hello I am one of the owners of Your Backyard Farmer founded in 2006. To answer your questions the cost is not what you quoted above. It is much less, I wish i could morally charge that price for our service : ) We make this program work by keeping the cost down so all can have access to good healthy food from there backyards.
The amount of produce that comes out of these small spaces can not be bought at the prices the local farmers markets or Organic grocers charge over a year long season. With the amount and diversity of vegetables harvested.
We do encourage and have mini CSA’s with in our farms, where neighbors are sharing in the cost and one of them have a large yard to support the amount of people we will be feeding. This not only brings community and neighbors together but also they are invested in in a good healthy food source for the families.
@Donna: Thanks so much for the followup comment. I’m glad to hear that this type of service is more economical than we had originally thought! I would be interested in hearing more about your shared farms and the scale they provide to neighbors.
@Rob - The tragedy of the commons only comes in when there is no one to enforce contracts. In the original “story” there is the common, upon which the neighborhood sheep graze. There is some optimal number of sheep that can graze without doing damage to the commons, but any more and there starts to be trouble. But, as you mention, because no single individual bears the cost, the existence of the commons creates an incentive for people to add additional sheep, thereby ruining the commons for everyone.
In the case of the backyard commons, it is fortunately easy to see who’s eating how much (Donna, correct me if I’m wrong) and so the tragedy can be avoided by the rest of the community asserting their rights. Additionally, in this case, it’s not really a commons issue because the only possibility of over-exploitation is over consumption, which while being crappy for those without produce, does not ruin the ability of the farm to produce.
So basically, all that to say, that it’s a really good idea and I’m interested to know some of the mechanics, particularly in regards to how you build up a community around the gardens. Additionally, I’d be interested to know if there are distributed solutions with people specializing in one type of crop but sharing in a co-op.
Hi, I found your blog on this new directory of WordPress Blogs. I dont know how your blog came up, must have been a typo, i duno. Anyways, I just clicked it and here I am. Your blog looks good. Have a nice day. James.