Inner City Farmer

Inner City Farm is an urban sustainability project located in the heart of Austin, Texas. The project is intended to promote the effort of one family, in this case my young son and I, to transform our small city lot into a working farm so that we might one day be completely self-sufficient. By adopting the practices of permaculture, natural building, and organic gardening, we aspire to wean ourselves from all external sources of food, energy, and water.

The farm’s name is intended to express our solidarity with the poor, downtrodden, and meek, for we ourselves are poor and downtrodden. However, we are not meek. We are making a stand against an economic system that makes the rich richer, the poor poorer, and has done untold damage to the natural environment both here in the United States and abroad.

Not only has this way of life proved to be emotionally and spiritually unsatisfying, but hopelessly fragile as well. Over the course of the last decade Americans have started to feel the shock that comes from being dependent on a food supply that is itself dependent upon the world’s rapidly dwindling supply of oil. As the price of oil has skyrocketed, so too has the price of such staples as corn and milk, and it will only be getting worse as the world’s population swells to a projected nine billion by 2050.

This potential crisis promises to be especially dramatic in cities where over 80 percent of those nine billion people are expected to live in 2050. How will we feed them? Where will the energy come from to power their homes? What will we do with the waste they produce? We won’t solve any of these problems by continuing to embrace an outdated paradigm that has our cities hooked up to an increasingly tenuous life support system when they could easily be taking care of themselves. Instead of pulling in food, energy, and water from hundreds, if not thousands, of miles away and in turn pumping out staggering amounts of human waste and harmful emissions, our cities have the potential to be completely self-sufficient entities by removing themselves from the global economy in favor of the local and adopting closed-loop systems where everything gets used and nothing gets wasted.

To demonstrate how this might work, my son and I are attempting to do it on a much smaller scale, just a fifth of an acre, but the underlying principles are the same. Do we expect to attain complete self-sufficiency? No, this project is more about the journey than the destination. I do hope, however, that there will be at least one Friday morning in the near future where we won’t have to roll our garbage can out to the curb because we will have produced no trash. I also hope that by writing about our experience we might inspire a few others to dip their toes into the pool of urban self-sufficiency, to start a garden, raise some chickens, or harvest the rain that falls on their land. Every little bit eventually adds up to a lot.