Courtesy of Wally S., Wally’s Urban Market Garden, Pleasantville SK
About ten years ago there was a plot I had been farming for about five years, and then it was gone. The owner sold her house that it was attached to, and she had no interest in accommodating me as part of the deal. If this were a traditional farming story, I’d be the tragic hero-farmer being kicked off his land.
That’s not my story. I could actually say “Good riddance.” It was a good plot. It was about a half hour’s drive north of my Saskatoon home base. It was 7,000 square feet, so 7 SPIN segments. I grew my longer season crops there – onions, potatoes, squash – and I could count on it contributing $7K – $12K to my bottom line each year. But over the years, its negatives started outweighing the positives. Traffic on the drive there got crazier, and I obtained other plots in the opposite direction, so logistics were more burdensome.
A friend at market offered me 6,000 sq. ft. he was not using which was only a couple of miles from another one of my plots. So I could manage both in one day. To make up the loss of the 1,000 sq. ft. I intensified production. So this story has a happy ending: I lost a peri-urban site that was becoming tough to manage, and got a new site that was easier to integrate into my operation.
That’s the advantage to being a multi-locational SPIN farmer. You have more options to access land (in the US there are 40 million acres of lawn), and you are less likely to get stuck in a rut.
Goodbye plot. You served me well, but I won’t be crying in my beer over this breakup.
SPIN FARMERS HAVE INNOVATIVE STRATEGIES FOR ACCESSING LAND. FIND OUT HOW TO CREATE AND MANAGE A FARM USING MULTIPLE PLOTS AND LOCATIONS HERE.