The world is still, after several long years, desperately trying to climb out of the financial abyss brought about during the latest global financial meltdown. Painful “austerity” measures, largely impacting working class people who already suffered the most during the crisis, are proffered by those responsible as the short-term economic fix to what ails nations around the world.

After roughly 150 years, and the countless day-to-day tribulations of billions of people, capitalism is being questioned like never before. Not surprisingly, the Bay Area’s counterculture spirit transforms economic models as well. New, locally minded businesses whose lifeblood includes notions antithetical to the dominant paradigm, including shared prosperity, enabling and/or giving to others, and creating community, are thriving.

Do they offer a more satisfying, rewarding, and ultimately more viable path for long-term success for society at large? On Wednesday, June 29, please join Kitchen Table Talks as we discuss the vision, mechanics, and spirit behind these “Alternative Business Models.”

Joining us in conversation will be:

Cathy Goldsmith, member of the Cheese Board. Cathy graduated from the University of Michigan with a degree in education and has cooked at various restaurants in the East Bay, Philadelphia, and London.  Her interest in food, politics, and social justice have found a home at the Cheese Board (a 100 percent worker owned co-op since 1971), where she’s been for the past 16 years.

Anthony Myint, restaurateur, chef, and author. After eating his way across 31 countries at age 25, Anthony landed in San Francisco and proceeded to co-create Mission Street Food, Mission Burger, Mission Chinese Food, and Commonwealth Restaurant–with its “benevolent business model.” Anthony was named among the most influential people in food in 2010 by Chow.com and among the “Top 40 under 40” by Food & Wine magazine.

Jessica Prentice, Co-Founder, Three Stone Hearth. Chef, educator, innovator, and mother, Jessica has been a spark in the Bay Area for the past 15 years. Formerly chef of the Headlands Center for the Arts and Director of Education Programs for the Ferry Plaza Farmers Market, Jessica coined the word “locavore” and co-created the Local Foods Wheel. Her first book, Full Moon Feast was released by Chelsea Green Publishing in 2006.

Caleb Zigas, Executor Director, La Cocina. After interning with ProMujer in El Alto Bolivia where he learned about microfinance in its infancy, Caleb brought those lessons to bear at La Cocina when it opened its doors in 2005 and has been shaping its incubator program ever since.  A former Yoshiyama Young Entrepreneur and named one of five “Community Organizers making a difference” by Inc. magazine, Caleb’s combination of food industry experience and commitment to social justice helps strongly define La Cocina.

The Panel discussion will be preceded by an introduction to the Living Wage by Karl Kramer, Campaign Co-Director of the San Francisco Living Wage Coalition.

When: Wednesday, June 29 from 6:45-8:00 pm

Where: Viracocha, 998 Valencia Street @ 21st Street, San Francisco

Kitchen Table Talks is a joint venture of CivilEats and 18 Reasons, a non-profit that promotes conversation between its San Francisco Mission neighborhood and the people who feed them. Space is limited, so please RSVP. A $10 suggested donation is requested at the door, but no one will be turned away for lack of funds. Sustainable food and refreshments will be provided, courtesy of Bi-Rite Market and Shoe Shine Wine.

Among the adherents of the food security movement in the United States, many idolize Cuba’s experience in building a vibrant urban farming sector. This idealization is due to the lack of information available on the Cuban system, as caused by the travel embargo and media blackout there. Compounding this situation is the vast difference between the Cuban and American political and economic systems.

Cuba’s accomplishments are undeniably astounding, inspiring and a testament to the country’s flexibility and pragmatism: 350,000 new well paying jobs (out of a total workforce of 5 million) created in urban agriculture nationally; 4 million tons of fruits and vegetables produced annually in Havana, up ten-fold in a decade; and a city of 2.2 million people regionally self-sufficient in produce. These accomplishments have been supported by an extensive network of input suppliers, technical assistance providers, researchers, teachers and government agencies.

Yet, Cuban urban agriculture, no matter how inspiring, is largely irrelevant to Americans. The state is pervasive throughout Cuba and controls virtually all aspects of the official economy. The government can mobilize quickly and massively around its priorities through an array of powerful policy tools at its disposal. After 50 years of socialist rule, Cuban institutions, as well as the mentality and expectations of the Cuban public, differ vastly from those in the U.S. By way of example, the ruling motto of Cuban urban agriculture states, “We must decentralize only up to a point where control is not lost, and centralize only up to a point where initiative is not killed” embodies the vast differences between their planned economy and our free market system.

The fundamental differences between the Cuban and American systems as they relate to the success of urban agriculture are vast and, for the most part, are insurmountable.

Land ownership key

Case in point, the success of urban agriculture in Cuba has been grounded in the distribution of public land for food production. For example, a law passed in 2008 allowed any citizen or entity to request idle lands up to 33 acres to be passed out in usufruct for 20-40 years. This law resulted in 16,000 persons requesting land in the past two years. Since all land in Cuba – with the exception of private homes – is the property of the State, the government has resources at its disposal to support its policies far beyond that of any American jurisdiction.

On the other hand, in the U.S., land use laws and private property land tenure represent a very real challenge to the expansion of urban farming. While some cities have made their minimal idle lands available for urban farming, when they do so, garden land tenure is not assured. For example, in New York City, hundreds of community gardens were threatened with destruction and dozens were ultimately plowed under when city government prioritized housing developments.

Land use planners here typically view urban agriculture as an interim land use at best, until a development opportunity with higher economic utility, such as housing, retail or manufacturing, becomes feasible. Few communities have protected urban agriculture as a permanent use in their planning documents, although this phenomenon is beginning to change. Neighbor complaints about noises, smells, visual clutter and dust created by urban farming are made frequently and deter farm permanence.

Salary controls nurture Cuban farming

In Cuba, virtually everyone works for the State. The State sets salaries; economic incentives are controlled by the government. To incent fruit and vegetable production, the government has allowed urban agricultural enterprises to distribute part of their profits back to the workers. These quasi-free enterprise farming operations have led to some unique salary structures wherein farm workers can earn two or three times the salary of the local physicians. These incentives have thus allowed urban farms to retain high quality human resources and maximize production.

U.S. policymakers have few tools at their disposal to shape the earnings of urban agricultural producers, beyond the nigh-impossible extension of commodity subsidies. Urban farms have to compete with the rest of the labor market for qualified workers, with immigration policy also playing a large factor in agricultural labor supply.

Profit, capital and the marketplace

The economic conditions under which Cuban urban farms operate are extraordinarily different than the conditions of similar enterprises in the U.S. For example, since they do not purchase or rent the land, they have no mortgage or rental costs to pay. Inputs and technical assistance are subsidized by the government. (A visit from a technician to assess a pest problem costs one cooperative member the equivalent of two bits.) They enjoy little competition from other sources for their fruits and vegetables, which they may sell at farmers’ markets or at on-site farm stands. While capital may be difficult to access from the government, there is no private banking sector and no interest charges to bear.  As a result, the urban farms in Havana are profitable enough to redistribute a significant portion of their earnings (85 percent in one case) back to the workers. In a country where the basic wage is $10 per month and a monthly incentive of $50 per month is quite substantial, these farms clearly do not need to be making enormous profits to make a difference in the lives of their workers.

Running a profitable urban farming business in the U.S. entails a much more complex set of calculations than in Cuba. In the U.S., small farms struggle to break even, under the weight of high monthly payments for land, inputs and machinery. On the wholesale level, they face difficult access to markets for selling their products and typically receive prices near or below their cost of production. Small farms selling directly to consumers frequently face stiff competition from other farmers or other retail outlets, which are typically better capitalized. The more socially-minded farming enterprises subsidize their operations with grants for educational programs or through agri-tourism schemes. To be profitable, urban farmers must find a market niche at which they excel, such as providing ultra-fresh micro-greens to high-end restaurants or through cause-related marketing.

Necessity, the mother of invention

Cuba’s shift to urban and organic agriculture was driven by necessity. As the Soviet bloc fell in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Cuba lost the primary market for its products and its source of subsidized agricultural inputs and petroleum. The crisis that ensued was referred to by the Orwellian term, “the special period,” and they were hungry and dark times for Cuba. To its credit, the Cuban government found partial solutions to this emergency by pushing the country toward organic and urban agriculture. As one highly placed Cuban official said about the decision to support urban farming and farmers’ markets, “We moved food production and the markets as close to the people as possible because there was no oil for transportation to get the people out to the food.” This policy decision came at an ideological cost. It entailed a partial opening of urban food production to the free market, which resulted in increased social inequality through income distortions. It also was a 180-degree turn from the capital and input-intensive, Soviet-influenced production methods valued in Cuba at the time.

American interest in urban agriculture has been influenced by the state of the economy. Backyard vegetable production and seed sales for 2009 spiked significantly over 2008 levels, and urban farming in Detroit has grown rapidly as a means to deal with acres of vacant land. But, by and large, increased policymaker and public interest in urban agriculture is traced to concerns about food literacy, urban sustainability, community building, obesity prevention and – to a lesser degree – economic development and job training. These goals are important, but they are not driven by a state of emergency as Cuba suffered.

The success of Cuba’s urban agriculture program is a true inspiration to the people working to green cities here in the U.S. Yet, what is best learned from Cuba’s experience is not the specifics of how to produce more food in urban communities, but the value of alternative economic, political and social structures that can help us accomplish our goals.

We are in the midst of a revolution in urban agriculture. In a growing number of cities, suburbs, and small towns, community groups and entrepreneurs have discovered innovative ways to harvest and grow food, using networks of relatively small plots of public and private land and shared resources, and in the process, forging novel relationships among producers and consumers.

While these innovations are based on historical precedents, from the radical Diggers movement of 17th century Britain, to sharecropping arrangements, the victory garden movements during the World Wars, and recent community supported agriculture systems, they are unique in that they apply social networking tools, mapping technologies, unusual land tenure arrangements, or novel business models to forage and farm cities and suburbs.

In addition, while they are grassroots, and based on aggregated small-scale production, collection, and distribution, they are replicable components of a civic agriculture network that has the potential to scale up, producing an increasing amount of food in cities and suburbs, putting urban land to productive use, recovering food that would otherwise be wasted, and helping to re-localize urban food systems.

The programs and businesses are distinctive because they are tailored to the unique people and places in which they are created. However, they generally fall into one of the following broad categories:

(1) Gleaning Social Networks – urban foragers who harvest fruits, nuts, and other edibles growing on public spaces and, sometimes, on private land, often to contribute this bounty to the needy;

(2) Peer-to-Peer Agriculture – networks of urban landowners who lend their properties, perhaps as little as a rear or side yard, to those with the inclination to produce food, in some cases to share the bounty and in other cases simply for altruistic reasons;

(3) Aggregated Urban Micro-Farms – urban farmers who aggregate multiple small parcels of privately owned land into quantities that are cost-effective to farm. The food production is either provided for a fee or for a share of the produce, which is in some cases distributed through a CSA model;

Gleaning Social Networks

Gleaning, or collecting the excess crops on farmers’ fields to donate the food to the needy, is an ancient practice referred to in the Old Testament. Throughout much of the world, people still forage for food growing in public spaces. In many cities, however, such practices are discouraged or prohibited, despite the fact that cities often have fruit and nut trees, shrubs producing edible berries, and other wild edibles.

In recent years, a number of gleaning social networks have emerged to educate the public about the availability of edible landscapes in their community, and to encourage the collection of fruits, nuts, and other food growing in public (and with permission) private spaces. Sponsoring groups have organized events to harvest fruit, produced online maps illustrating where publicly accessible fruits, nuts, and berries can be found, and have facilitated the distribution of excess produce gleaned from these sources. These programs not only facilitate the consumption of food already being produced in a community, but by making these resources visible and demonstrating the benefits of edible landscapes, hope to promote the planting of fruit and nut trees as a viable way to produce food in cities.

Examples:

Village Harvest, San Jose — a non-profit organization with approximately 700 volunteers who harvest backyard fruit and distribute it to community organizations through a program called Harvesting for the Hungry.

Fallen Fruit Collective, Los Angeles — artist collective and activist organization that organizes walks to gather fruit from trees extending over public property.

LifeCycles Fruit Tree Project, Victoria, B.C. — links residents who have, but do not completely harvest, fruit trees growing on their property with volunteers willing to pick the fruit, and individuals and organizations who need access to fresh produce.

Peer-to-Peer Agriculture

Exchange and sharing networks are designed to more productively use the land that exists in people’s yards for food production. They range from websites that link those with available land who are willing to allow landless residents interested in gardening to grow food on their property to more complex social networks that facilitate land sharing and also food bartering. These schemes rely for their success on citizens willing to enter into non-financial relationships with others to either achieve mutual gain or the simple satisfaction of turning a fallow resource (such as their unused yard space) into a more productive space.

Examples:

Patch Match, London — web-based organization that links growers, landowners, and those who have gardening skills.

Grow Local, Victoria, Australia — web-based food producing network, linking together food producers within a particular community and enabling them to share and/or barter their food, plants, seeds, and potentially, tools and skills.

Aggregated Urban Micro-Farms

Cities have significant amounts of land suitable for growing food, divided into yards of varying size and shape. Some entrepreneurial gardeners have created businesses turning backyards into intensive vegetable patches, often for a simple fee for service. In other cases (currently clustered in Portland and San Francisco, but emerging in other cities) the business model involves aggregating a number of intensively planted micro-farms into a scale that produces sufficient food to operate a viable CSA subscription service. To the participating land owners, who provide the property to grow food and get a weekly box of produce in return, this system offers a greater variety of food than can be grown on one’s own particular parcel. Moreover, depending on their level of interest, skills, and time, households may also participate in some or much of the planting, tending, and harvesting.

Examples:

Your Backyard Farmer, Portland — Portland company that farms a collection of individual backyards and sells the produce to the homeowners and others through a CSA-type subscription model. Individual households contract with Your Backyard Farmer to prepare raised beds, seed them with vegetable varieties selected by the property owner, and tend the micro-farm throughout the growing season. Each week, the business then delivers harvested produce aggregated from all of the farmed backyards to the household.

My Farm, San Francisco — San Francisco-based company farming a cluster of backyards with a slightly different business model. For some households, My Farm acts like a specialized gardening service. Households pay $600 to $1,000 to create their garden, plus weekly maintenance costs of $20 to $35, and have exclusive use of the harvest. Others, particularly those with larger gardens (called “owner members”) pay a reduced weekly fee and instead give up a portion of the harvest to My Farm for resale in a CSA-type subscription. San Francisco residents without backyards are able to order weekly shares of the produce harvested from those owner members producing food for My Farm’s CSA.

Amyitis Gardens, San Francisco: Neighborhood-based farming system that provides restaurants in the Mission District with food grown in backyards throughout the community. Residents allowing their backyards to be farmed receive some of the produce, and in exchange for providing the excess to local restaurants, receive discounts for meals at those restaurants.

Assessment

Distributed farming offers the possibility of increasing food production in cities and suburbs through networks of small-scale efforts. While each project contributes a very small percentage of a city’s food supply, in the aggregate a significant amount of food can be produced if intensive farming techniques are used. Indeed, a distributed farming system may be the most suited to fitting food production into the existing urban landscape, which is a patchwork of vacant land, yards, and rooftops owned by individuals, businesses and government agencies.

Although, by some estimates, cities like Philadelphia and Chicago have tens of thousands of vacant parcels, many of which have the potential for food production in raised beds or movable container farming, these are scattered throughout large areas and are owned by many different individuals. If connected through community-based programs and businesses, a wide range of public and private sites, from schools and housing projects city parks, utility right of ways, and roof tops, can be put into food production.

Moreover, distributed urban farming ventures, while in some cases organized primarily for profit, are distinguished from conventional farming ventures in that they involve some form of community building and require a significant amount of social interaction with community members. In contrast to conventional agriculture practiced in rural areas, distributed urban farming involves navigating complex social, economic, political, and technical issues. All community participants in the process engage in problem solving, from identifying and mapping edible vegetation to offering gardening advice in exchange for a portion of the harvest. Whether an individual participating in a distributed farming enterprise is passively contributing space for a garden or actively foraging to distribute fruit to a senior center, he or she is grounded in place and part of a larger effort to meet the nutritional needs of his/her community. As a result of having to mobilize the community to acquire land, assemble volunteer labor, develop relationships among producers and consumers, and create relationships of trust among people using property in common, these activities help to build a resilient, civic urban agriculture community.

Photo: My Farm