Every new trend sparks entrepreneurial ingenuity.
Rising food prices, tainted food from China, and a growing realization among the public that transporting food thousands of miles contributes to global warming, are all leading to a renewed move to eat locally produced food. Backyard gardeners are growing in numbers and urban gardens are increasingly popular.
Although many people want to grow their own food, they don’t have time to weed, compost, and harvest. That’s where the entrepreneurs come in.
One of the first businesses of its kind, San-Francisco-based MyFarm helps people create a "secure, sustainable food system." MyFarm will install a small backyard organic garden and do all the chores, with services ranging from $600-$1000. After they create your garden, they show up every week to weed. They’ll even leave a box of vegetables at your door.
Customers can keep the whole crop or share it with members of MyFarm’s CSA (Community Supported Agriculture). The crops can also be shared with local chefs, who integrate the products into their menus.
A similar service based in Portland, Oregon, Your Backyard Farmer, began in 2006. It also offers individualized organic gardening services, intended to help customers start and maintain their own gardens. The company is involved in managing about 57 small organic gardens so far. Home gardening help is popping up around the country with services in Santa Cruz, California, Boston and Washington DC.
"The highest form of luxury is now growing it yourself or paying other people to grow it for you," says food columnist Corby Kummer, in a NY Times article. "This has become fashion."
Locally produced is fast becoming the nouveau successor to organic food. The New Oxford American Dictionary selected "locavore" as its word of the year in 2007. And a survey of chefs, many of whom work for large chains, found that locally grown produce is the second-hottest American food trend (after bite-size desserts).
Indeed, the new credo seems to be, I want a garden but I don’t want to do the work!
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Read the Times article.
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