City Growers

Since December 2010, CLF and CLF Ventures have partnered with City Growers—a Boston-based agricultural enterprise—to conduct analyses of both job creation potential within the agriculture sector in Greater Boston and the environmental benefits of such businesses.

City Growers, founded in 2010, is a new private enterprise that partners with local nonprofits, private landowners, and community organizations to establish small intensive urban farms and seeks to advance efforts to create economic development through agricultural uses of land to grow high quality produce for local markets. City Growers has a plan to grow its local agricultural business from its current startup crop production and distribution status, but as with many innovators with novel business models, faces numerous barriers to building an economically sustainable model.

CLF Ventures conducted an analysis of the potential impacts of creating approximately fifty acres of urban farmland in Boston. Our original analysis, based on substantial research and data collection, demonstrates significant economic, environmental, and health benefits associated with the expansion of urban agriculture in the Boston area. Based on our analysis, if commercial urban farming businesses are able to put fifty acres of non-contiguous currently underutilized land into agricultural production, it will provide the following:

• It will create between two and five direct, on-farm jobs per acre, or between 130 and 220 jobs across the fifty acres. Additional jobs will be created to provide services to the emerging urban agricultural sector, including equipment sales, composting and soil inputs, and food processing.
• In addition to this local economic development, our analysis suggests that fifty acres of urban farms have the potential to sequester approximately 112 tons of carbon dioxide (a greenhouse gas) in well-maintained soil per year while contributing to additional greenhouse gas mitigation by creating demand for compost made from food waste.
• By diverting thirty-five percent of Boston food waste from landfills, the stated goal of the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection (DEP), an additional 43,000 tons of carbon dioxide would be avoided annually.
• Lastly, we project that fifty acres of food production will generate approximately 1.5 million pounds of fresh produce for sale into local markets, providing local communities with a nearby source of healthy food. While our analysis is based on a fifty acre scenario, these results are presumably scalable to a much greater share of an estimated 800 plus acres of vacant land in Boston proper, as well as additional land in surrounding cities and towns.

There is tremendous and growing excitement around the issue of local food production and agriculture. In the face of so many seemingly intractable environmental and economic challenges, it appears that agriculture, and particularly the promise of urban agriculture, is almost intuitively appealing as a metaphor for and a real means to reclaim and rebuild a more appropriately scaled connection with each other and our environment. Food is something we all know, and through food, we somehow understand more easily our fragile and intimate dependence on clean water, healthy soils, sun, stable climate, and community. The power of food as a vehicle for teaching people about these connections has become very real, just as it inspires hope that we can all contribute to building more resilient communities through, in part, strengthening our local and regional food system.

Contact:
Jennifer Rushlow, CLF Staff Attorney
Jo Anne Shatkin, VP & CEO, CLF Ventures