Cultivating Community: Community-Supported Agriculture
Through a unique community-supported agriculture program, neighbors in a Boulder, Colorado, subdivision grow fresh, organic food to feed many families.
March/April 2009
By Laurel Kallenbach
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Community Roots' suburban microfarm grows enough food to fuel a CSA, sell at the farmer's market and to donate.
Photography By Michael Shopenn
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Through a unique community-supported agriculture program, neighbors in a Boulder, Colorado, subdivision grow fresh, organic food to feed many families. The antithesis of pesticide-laden,
monocrop agribusiness, the produce—grown in suburban yards—requires little or no fossil fuels to get from farm to table.
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Walk along a cluster of streets in Boulder’s Martin Acres subdivision and you’ll find front yards filled with rows of zucchini, tomatoes, eggplants, broccoli, onions, lettuce and arugula. You won’t see a red barn or cows, but a working organic farm lies hidden among the ranch-style and tri-level 1950s and 1960s homes.
Thirteen tiny plots scattered throughout neighborhood yards total less than an acre, yet the cobbled-together microfarm feeds about 50 families. This suburban garden is the work of Community Roots, an organization created in 2006 by Kipp Nash, a part-time bus driver. With help from his neighbors and other volunteers, Nash is providing locally grown organic food—and addressing environmental and social issues.
“This program is a beacon of hope that anyone in our neighborhood can access,” Nash says. “People everywhere are aching to connect to their food sources and to each other, but so often next-door neighbors don’t know each others’ names. Community Roots brings it all together.”
Homeowners offer their yards—plots ranging from 600 to 3,500 square feet—and water for irrigation; Community Roots members plant, water, weed and harvest. Every contributor receives a share from the community gardens.
Meet, greet and eat
Nash, a former apprentice at an organic farm, came up with the multiplot urban farm concept in 2005 and took out an ad in the neighborhood newsletter asking for space to garden. “The whole project snowballed when we planted in our next-door neighbors’ front yard,” he says. “Then everyone got curious.”
Nash’s system relies on a few basic principles: Plant vegetables that don’t require much space such as leafy greens, radishes, beets, carrots and potatoes. Then maximize the harvest by growing two or three crops per bed each season. These ideas have been so successful that the group now sells produce at the Boulder County Farmer’s Market.
In 2007, after the gardens were established, Nash created a Community Roots CSA (community-supported agriculture) program in which families or individuals pay in advance for a share of the weekly harvest. Twenty-five families have bought into the CSA.
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