Bay Area Land Is So Expensive. How Do Urban Farms Survive?
“This whole area here, north San José, was all pear orchards,” said Moitozo. The canneries eventually all moved away, many to the San Joaquin Valley. “So my husband and his brother planted the orange trees.”
By Dana Cronin
KQED
Mar 16, 2023
Excerpt:
While Silicon Valley has largely converted from farmland to techland, there are still hundreds of urban farms all over the Bay Area. From small-scale vegetables to rooftop flowers, urban farmers are growing all different kinds of things.
What they all have in common is that it’s hard to make it work financially here.
“It’s incredibly difficult to be a commercially viable urban farm,” said Eli Zigas, food and agriculture policy director at the San Francisco Bay Area Planning and Urban Research Association (SPUR).
To understand how they survive, Zigas divides Bay Area urban farms into two general categories: commercial and noncommercial. Commercial farms are ones that make a living on what they grow.
“They are in it for the business of agriculture,” said Zigas. Perhaps they sell at a local farmers market or have an online shop.
Noncommercial farms, on the other hand, tend to focus more on education.
Get our monthly newsletter featuring listener questions not answered on the Bay Curious podcast.
“Those projects are things like community gardens, school gardens and teaching farms,” Zigas said. “In the Bay Area and most of the country, those are the most common forms of urban farming.”
Nonprofit farms are incredibly important to urban communities, said Zigas, because they help people connect with the land and learn about ecology, seasons and how to grow their own food. Even the U.S. Department of Agriculture has an advisory committee and various grant opportunities targeted specifically at urban farms.
While not all urban farms fall squarely into these two categories, Zigas said it’s a helpful framework for understanding how they survive here.
To understand it even better, we visited some farms.
