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The Yardfarmer Response to Farming for a Small Planet

The world as a whole absolutely needs to make the shift to an organic,
agroecological way of farming, and this transition will indeed address the
issues presented in Farming for a Small Planet, including: inadequate
nutrition, climate change impacts, concentration of social power, profit
driven production, and the lack of a sustainable, closed loop system in our
current mode of industrial agriculture. An important area of the paper that
could potentially be expanded upon is the method by which to implement the
switch to widespread organic agriculture.

Industrial agriculture concentrates social power and exacerbates problems
of food insecurity and poverty, whereas small-scale organic farming on an
individual or community level can significantly distribute social power
across communities all over the world. An approach like this is one we like
to call =E2=80=9Cyardfarming=E2=80=9D (a concept we=E2=80=99ve spent the la=
st year advocating for
through www.Yardfarmers.us).

Yardfarming is the process of turning unsustainable, resource-intensive
lawns and otherwise underutilized green spaces into small food production
sites, or yardfarms. In this regard, individuals would be contributing to
their own sustenance with healthy, organic produce. When people grow their
own food, they know exactly what does and does not go into the process. If
they are educated in organic farming techniques, they will replace a
portion of their diet with home-grown, sustainable, and healthy food.
Yardfarming effectively changes the profit-driven motivation behind farming
to an individual and community level motivation focused on gaining access
to nutritious food. This is especially important in areas where access to
fresh produce is difficult to come by. This approach to agriculture could
combat the existence of food deserts across the world.

A yardfarming revolution (yardfarmers.us/why-yardfarm/our-vision/) could
drastically mitigate the effects of climate change. In America alone, there
are 40 million acres of turf grass (yardfarmers.us/why-yardfarm/) that
could be converted into smallholder farms. The process of growing food
right in one=E2=80=99s backyard removes many of the environmentally deleter=
ious
processes associated with our current industrial form of agriculture. Food
would no longer have to be shipped thousands of miles but merely dozens of
feet. The vast amounts of fossil fuel-intensive fertilizers that large
monocropped farms need to function would be reduced when the demand for
these crops declined as more families grew a portion of their own produce.
The most environmentally degrading aspect of the current system, animal
agriculture, could be reduced due to increased consumption of plant foods.
With fresh fruits and vegetables readily accessible on a yardfarm, per
capita meat consumption could potentially be
decreased. Yardfarmers could also grow some of their own meat as part of
their sustainable farms, thus reducing demand further.

In addition to removing harmful effects and processes associated with
industrial agriculture, yardfarming would also start to slowly rebuild
soils across the world. Healthy soils have huge potential for carbon
sequestration. With small-scale (but widespread) yardfarms practicing
organic farming concepts, soils would get healthier and be able to
sequester more carbon with each passing growing season.

Compost is an essential component of building healthier soils. When people
have their own yardfarms to tend to, there is greater incentive to start a
compost bin or even a composting initiative in their community. The
excessive amount of organic material that ends up in landfills, especially
in industrial countries, would instead be put back into the earth. This
effectively closes the current linear =E2=80=9Cfarm to table to trash to la=
ndfill=E2=80=9D
path, and instead puts food waste back into the soil to create a healthier
yardfarm for the next season.

Yardfarming spreads social power and gets individuals involved and invested
in their own health and food production. It decreases and in some cases can
reverse environmental degradation (for example not only by displacing
industrially-produced foods but by redirecting some labor from the consumer
economy (offering livelihoods in backyards rather than in cubicles).

Yardfarming creates a healing, closed-loop system between us and the
planet. It removes the motivation for profit and replaces it with a
motivation for health and nutrition. Yardfarming addresses all of the
problems created with an industrial agriculture system and provides an
effective approach to organic agriculture, especially in overdeveloped
countries like the United States. Our unsustainable, suburban sprawling,
environmentally degrading ways could instead be a nourishing landscape of
small-scale, organic yardfarms=E2=80=94which in turn can offer local food s=
ecurity
and resilience that we=E2=80=99ll certainly need in the warming century ahe=
ad.

Emily Helminen and Erik Assadourian

(Advocates of yardfarming, particularly through the mobilization of
America=E2=80=99s underemployed Millennials to move back into their parents=
=E2=80=99
underutilized suburban homes and convert their parents=E2=80=99 and nearby =
lawns
into yardfarms.)

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February 29, 2016