Urban farming offers a better chance for a sustainable food system because its bar of entry is much lower than setting up a farm in the country. All it takes to begin is intensively growing food for yourself and others on a little piece of land. The beginning could be a yard, a weedlot, or some other marginal piece of land near the borders of the city. It doesn’t need to be a full-time operation; just a couple of hours a day and some work on weekends could result in a fairly decent yield if your systems are right. 

By not trying to take on too much at once with a move to the country, a beginning farmer can keep working a day job. There are far more opportunities in the city than the country when it comes to 9-5 employment. These urban jobs also often pay better, enabling a beginning farmer to better handle the very difficult cash flow of a farm.

The problem is that too often people who want to farm want the idyllic countryside experience. This is in part because, in our mind, that is what farming means. In order to get more urban farms, we rethink the farm itself, and, following people like Will Allen, come to a different vision of what a farm is. A farm can no longer be seen as some place out in the country with a big barn and pasture and large fields of crops. Instead, a farm should take many forms, whatever is appropriate to the place and grower. It could be an 80-acre pasture with cattle grazing in rotation, or it could be a two-acre lot where a woman who writes ad copy spends her evening growing vegetables for a local restaurant with her friends. Our food security depends on a multitude of approaches, as does our energy future, financial system, and so much else. We are entering an age of multiplicities. My only hope is that we will be able to embrace them before the monolithic solutions of the past implode.