Environment

The difference between farming and gardening

by mtippett | July 28, 2008 at 03:27 pm

411 views | 2 Recommendations | 2 comments

An interesting post from the Urban Farmer, one of the Vancouver Sun's blogs. As a novice gardener I'm pretty easily impressed with my own mild victories in the backyard. But as Nick Read points out, growing is only half the battle when it comes to producing food for others.

You have to make sure it has no suggestion of insect life on it. You have to shield it from the slightest bruise or blemish. You have to make sure it appears to all intents and purposes exactly as a customer's mind's eye expects it to appear: perfectly round or oval or pear-shaped and iridescently red, green, yellow or purple.
It is, in short, a helluva job, and one customers rarely consider when they cavalierly pick up an avocado to squeeze or a melon to knock. They simply expect it to be perfect. Anything less won't do.

Until, that is, you grow your own food. Then your expectations shift. You no longer demand perfection. The mere fact that something grew is perfection enough. It is on every level a fundamental change in taste.

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jayp

at 16:15 on July 29th, 2008

Have you found a use in the vegetable garden for that snow shovel?

Roxanne Christensen (not verified)

at 06:15 on July 30th, 2008

There is a growing corps of entrepreneural farmers throughout Canada and the U.S. who are growing commercially in their backyards. They are practicing SPIN-Farming. SPIN makes it possible to earn $50,000+US from a half acre. SPIN farmers utilize relay cropping to increase yield and achieve good economic returns by growing only the most profitable food crops tailored to local markets. SPIN's growing techniques are not, in themselves, breakthrough. What is novel is the way a SPIN farm business is run. SPIN provides everything you'd expect from a good franchise: a business plan, marketing advice, and a detailed day-to-day workflow. In standardizing the system and creating a reproducible process it really isn't any different from McDonalds. By offering a non-technical, easy-to-understand and inexpensive-to-implement farming system, SPIN allows many more people to farm, wherever they live, as long as there are nearby markets to support them.