Urban Agtivist: Cultivating an Urban Agroecology

Entrepreneurs are seeking sustainability and equitability in San Francisco’s urban ag movement

By Sarah Rich

In a region where people are passionate about the advancement of urban farming, it’s only natural that our local food magazine would dedicate some ink in each issue to talking about this noble pursuit. This is the first installment in Edible SF’s new urban agriculture column, where we’ll explore everything from window-box tomato cultivation to pending city policies around farms on public land. If you have suggestions for a little-known local endeavor or a pressing issue you’d like to see covered here, please get in touch.

We begin in the realm of entrepreneurship, because if there’s one thing that excites Bay Area residents more than local food, it’s the motivated upstart hitting it big. While technology remains the recognizable medium for enterprising go-getters, there’s a noticeable groundswell right now at the juncture of business innovation and fertile dirt. Where the agriculturally inclined would once have retreated to the country in order to make a livelihood from the land, today’s green thumbs are engaged in urban life, committed to sustaining themselves economically by sustaining the city ecologically.

Seed Funding

One of the oft-cited obstacles for small farmers trying to make a living is that the green thumb instinct doesn’t always pair naturally with the number-crunch instinct. It’s hard to make time for accounting, budgeting and business-modeling when there are rows to sow. Eli Zigas founded Cultivate SF in order to help growers assess their financial viability and encourage profitable commercial farming in the city.

“We began Cultivate SF with the assumption that urban farming in San Francisco will never reach its full potential to reduce food’s ecological impact, offer ‘green thumb’ jobs, and provide access to healthy, fresh food in the city’s food deserts,” Zigas says, “unless urban farmers can make a living selling what they grow in the city.”

Cultivate SF conducts feasibility studies with any urban farmers who are willing to be transparent about how their funds are acquired and distributed. His first case study is Little City Gardens, owned by Brooke Budner and Caitlyn Galloway, whose urban micro-farm is an experiment in agripreneurship, squeezing two living wages from a small plot of leafy greens, which they sell to restaurants, caterers and individuals. Budner and Galloway have made use of the micro-funding site Kickstarter.com to raise capital for their venture, and while supporting themselves is no cakewalk, they are dedicated to the challenge. They view a successful urban farm business as an activist undertaking, pushing toward more equitable food systems, job creation, and sustainable local economies.

San Francisco has some unique advantages for start-up farmers, not only in terms of climate but also because of the willingness of many residents to pay a higher price for locally-produced food. On the other hand, a farmer must sell far more heads of lettuce to make rent in San Francisco than in less expensive cities. By advising farmers on their business models and advocating for them at a city policy level, Zigas hopes to see commercial urban farming become a viable way of life here. In the process, he’s building up a promising little start-up of his own consulting in a field that’s still setting down roots.

Picking Winners

In the Mission, where I live, there are plenty of sidewalk hazards waiting to sully the shoes of distracted pedestrians. In the month of May, in addition to the usual suspects, there were cherries dropping from the trees. Each time I narrowly avoided a pulpy, dark red glob, I felt a slight pang of regret that this delicious fruit—in season for such a woefully short time— had become nothing more than a threat to my footwear.

Fortunately in this city, we have people like Lauren Anderson, who spends her days intercepting the fateful fall from branch to cement, and redirecting this free food source to people who need it. Anderson’s organization, Produce to the People, offers harvesting services to local residents who have fruiting trees and bushes on their property and can’t use up the yield. Some of the gleanings get distributed as-is through free food programs like the Mission’s Free Farm Stand, while the overripe or bruised fruit gets turned into handmade jam (author-tested and heartily approved), which PttP sells around town.

While the principles of this small non-profit are admirable, providing free services is an admittedly difficult way to build a self-sustaining business. Anderson currently earns her living as a maintenance gardener and home care aide, but she aspires to turn PttP into her primary income source. “This does put us in the position [of having] to sell something, whether it be goods or services,” she says, “It gets very complicated to draw a line between what is for sale and what is for free, and free access to healthy food for underserved folks in our community is the heart of our mission and is not going to change.”

She expects foundation funding to be an ongoing support mechanism, but she also knows what so many urban farmers are learning as they try to make ends meet: diversification is key. By combining client services, value-added products and youth education programs, Produce to the People stands to generate revenue in pieces, without sacrificing the less lucrative core offerings.

Breeding Opportunity

While much of David Gavrich’s career has been spent managing the vast, invisible transport webs that take our solid waste and recycling out of sight and out of mind, he’s best known for a much newer endeavor, as San Francisco’s “Goat Guy” and founder of City Grazing. Down at the Port of San Francisco, Gavrich practices urban ag, animal-style, housing 80 goats who provide a truly natural weeding service on overgrown lots citywide.

Carla Brauer of City Grazing manages a herd of fourlegged weed eaters. Photo: Travis Smith

The herd’s dry, grassy stomping ground is bordered by graffiti-laden railcars and cone-shaped mountains of gravel, but they don’t seem to mind the unconventional terrain. The babies gallivant like awkward puppies while more sure-footed adults balance on a stand of boulders as though this is the Rocky Mountains and they are big-horned sheep.

Unlike Produce to the People and Little City Gardens, City Grazing is not a from-scratch operation and Gavrich is not bootstrapping his way to solvency. The lively offshoot of his main business, Waste Solutions Group, was born of necessity, and grew organically. Federal regulations require that railroad tracks be vegetation-free—a mandate most often met through the use of chemical herbicides. Gavrich had heard about goats being used for weed control on public land in Denver and he decided to give them a try in his railyard.

“It wasn’t originally thought of as a financial opportunity,” says Carla Brauer, City Grazing’s Goat Caretaker and Communications Director, “but as people learned that we had goats, calls started coming in asking if we’d rent them out for weed and brush control. The financial opportunity sort of found us!”

While the weed-eating goats haven’t rendered Waste Solutions Group superfluous as a revenue source, they’ve become an important symbol of the potential for urban farming as a viable business model. Soon, the local design interventionist whiz kids from REBAR group will be building new living quarters for the herd, potentially setting up the right conditions for another generation, and certainly creating another reason to visit the Port. For now, the goats are like a mobile field trip, popping up around the city to educate kids and adults about animal husbandry and ecological stewardship of industrial land.

Sarah Rich is a writer and content strategist specializing in new media, design, food and sustainability. She is a former senior editor at Dwell, co-author of the book Worldchanging: A User’s Guide for the 21st Century, and most recently a co-founder of 48 Hour Magazine and the Foodprint Project.

Join your food community: subscribe to Edible San Francisco today!

Edible San Francisco