This summer, Reburbia, a suburban design competition, was held by Inhabitat and Dwell Magazine. The competition set out to gather creative and imaginative ideas on how to go about re-visioning the American suburban sprawl that will almost certainly become our suburban wasteland without intervention. Several of the ideas were great, but one in particular caught my eye.

Forrest Fulton designed Big Box Agriculture: A Productive Suburb. In his design he advocates for transforming abandoned big box stores into suburban farms and markets, and I think it is a tremendous idea. Within three miles of my house right now (and I live close to downtown Salt Lake City) there stands an empty big box store that used to be a CompUSA. Yeah. Remember buying that flash drive there last Black Friday as they were going out of business? Well the building is still there. Currently there is a Halloween business pumping plastic jack-o-lanterns and pregnant Brittany Spears costumes into the soon to be saturated October holiday madness. But they will be gone again in another month. The location is perfect. Less than a mile to the East is a long stretch of solid neighborhood. A little further to the West and you will find the same. Right next to the Costco and Sam’s Club there could be a blacktop farm and market.

Fulton’s idea would use the old CompUSA building as a greenhouse and restaurant by replacing most of the roof with glass and the rest with more crops. One could easily imagine a small market to find fresh produce or where one could wash and wrap the harvest one’s self. By keeping the blacktop parking lot and using containers for the farming the urban/suburban farm could maintain flexibility and easy customer access. In a place like salt lake the greenhouse space would prove invaluable as well. Winter roles around and all the plants that need to come inside have a place to stay.

The two problems that I just can’t shake are crime and parking. Ironic that you can’t just plow up all the parking lots in the world to plant crops even though most of these parking lots were farmland not so long ago. I don’t know about the location of most big box stores, but the old CompUSA isn’t in what you would call a walkable neighborhood. And I don’t think Costco is going to like people using their parking lot/derby arena for parking their John Deere. Could an operation like this maintain a shuttle with off-site parking? Is it ridiculous to consider an underground parking garage? Yeah, probably.

The second problem would appear to be crime. I guess you could always put up a ten foot cyclone fence around the whole farm, but that tends to take some of the community feeling out of the friendly local market. I don’t know, maybe there aren’t that many thugs who need to make a tomato-plant-peace-offering to their old lady for shooting out the television. Then again, my church had its freshly planted perennials yanked out just a few months ago.

One last thought to ponder would be the profitability of an operation like this. Urban and suburban property is still pretty pricy in most cities. Can dense, container farming pay the bills? I know I would like to see someone in SLC give it a try in the old building where CompUSA gave up the ghost.

Rico Locals has opened up on 800 S. and 500 E., SLC.  The founding vendors include empanadas, cheese, beef, a goat dairy, eggs, lamb, and Rico Brand mexican stuffs.  Not too shabby.  And I have to say that I really hope this sort of Urban farming and cooperative trend takes off.  I sometimes wake in a cold sweat thinking about small, artisan farms being gobbled up by large, industrialized tenant farming outfits.  I just don’t think that anyone can care better for the sustainability of farm lands than a small generational farm supported by local customers and a local market.

I can understand the thinking in globalizing agriculture, most of the time.  But we have simply spent too long shirking the cost onto nature and the poor migrant worker.  Could we do any worse by giving artisan farming a chance?  Would it hurt us to know what is in our food and where it comes from?  Would it be a bad thing to know the farmer by name even?  Is it possibly worth the extra dollar per bushel of whatnot in order to pay less on health costs in the future?  Is it smart to build cities in deserts too large to sustain themselves without getting the majority of their imports from hundreds of miles around?  Or should we just live somewhere else?

Salt Lake City is already where it is.  Probably not even water limitations will stop its growth.  The economy here in the high-plains desert is actually still strong.  The least we can do is start supporting the few individuals who are making a real effort to grow and eat local, and help the rest of us do the same.  One less trip to Cafe Rio or Chili’s and I could easily afford to buy my products from small, local suppliers and farmers.  Maybe then I wouldn’t be starting to lose my trim college waistline sitting her typing at my desk all day.

How many gardens out there end up being weed factories full of overripe and splitting produce, sipping on wasted water and allowing moisture to evaporate away into the ether?  In other words, are most of us into gardening more in spirit than in actuality?  And if so, do the spiritual benefits of readjusting our Chi with a spade in our hand really worth the waste of time, energy, soil nutrients and water?

Let’s look at some plus and minuses.

Plus: Even when I forget to check my peas in the back yard, the quail never do.  Minus: but then they eat all my grapes, and this really pisses me off.

Plus: I had homegrown radishes for lunch today.  Minus: the saved me like fifteen cents, maybe.

Plus: Gardening gets my wife outside and more often than not, in good spirits.  Minus:  this gets me outside with noisy, rented equipment like tillers.  (And this year it took me a while just to find a freaking post-driver.  Seriously, sometimes living in the city sucks.)

Plus: I have less yard than I used to.  Minus:  I still have a yard.  (Oh wait.  I guess this isn’t my garden’s fault.)  Plus:  I use less water on my garden than on my yard, and I can usually get my wife to weed the garden while I have to mow the lawn.  I do have some dwarf peach and nectarine tress that actually make fruit that gets mostly eaten by us.

So, I guess over all I would still prefer garden to lawn.  But, much of our attempts to garden end in fruitlessness and waste.  And I suspect that my wife and I might be better than many urban gardeners out there.  I think the solution lies in community development and neighborhood gardening efforts.  If our neighbors all tore out their strips as well, and we organized dates throughout each month in the spring and summer to tend the neigborhood strip garden, not only would the results be probably ten-fold, but the rewards would extend well beyond having salad grown on your own block.

This sort of neighborhood garden could provide sustainable community along with local produce which is good for our bodies and our planet.  Maybe then the quail would leave my wine-making grapes alone.

Many may disagree about whether the earth is in the midst of a food crisis or overall shortage.  If we all played nice, mabye everyone could have enough (fat chance).  We do know that in the U.S. we are losing farms, farmers and farm land.  But, there is much less disagreement that we suffer globally from a food distribution crisis.  Certainly portions of the earth surface lack sufficient food stuffs to feed the people that live there.  And seeing how lack of vital resources like food can cause mayhem and destruction of life that ultimately reaches even us lazy Americans on our couches, we should probably care that others lack food.  Enter hemp, stage right.

There are a lot of crazy stats out there and I will try to only through the most pertinent ones at you for the moment.  Hemp can be eaten as an oil, a cake or meal, as a nut (a hulled seed) and as a whole seed.  But it is the seed that has the most nutritional value.  The seed is often 25% to 35% oil and this oil is where the EFA’s come into play.  Hemp seed oil is such a good source of these non trans-fatty acids that it is comparable to fish.  And apparently, hemp nut is the only food on earth that has every EFA.  This is important because it is estimated that 90% of Americans don’t get enough EFA’s in their diet.

The second key element of nutrient for hemp is protein.  Hemp’s protein percentage of 25% to 35% approaches soy witch registers usually around 35%.  Hemp also has a great balance of amino acids and is closer to the more “complete” sources of protein such as meat and dairy than any other nut or grain.   But the key is that hemp’s proteins are 65% something called “edestin.”  This protein is much more easy to digest than the protein found in soy.  Thus less intestinal cramping and night time sessions of the squirts after an evening of veggie burger debauchery.  Praise the Lord.

But wait!  That’s not all.  Hemp contains 35% of our necessary dietary fiber, higher than all commercial grains.  And when you combine hemp’s source of fiber, protein, amino acids, and essential fatty acids it is feasible that man could live off of hemp alone.  Crazy.  Man does not live off of bread alone, unless that bread is made from hemp.  So, it seems clear that hemp could not only play a huge role in increasing health at home, but it could be essential in areas that lack the necessary nutrition to survive.

By far my favorite comrades in green at this year’s festival where the newly formed Salt Lake Urban Guerilla Gardeners (SLUGG).  How can you complain with stickin’ it to the man with “seed bombs.”  It’s better than sticking cut flowers in gun barrels (first you are planting stuff instead of killing it, and secondly you don’t have to look into a gun barrel).  I can’t wait for my walk around the neighborhood tomorrow and my small contribution to bombing SLC with future flowers in bloom.  Give ‘em herb, guerillas.  Give em herb.