During a recent training session, a group of urban farmers in Mansfield, Ohio, huddled around a small raised bed of radishes, examining the crop’s growth after a cold spring week.
They aren't on your typical farm. Dozens of small beds of greens are lined up under tunnels in this “micro farm” on the Ohio State University Mansfield campus, which is built on top of a parking lot.
They’re being trained as part of a project at the school, which recently received a $2 million grant from the Foundation for Food and Agriculture Research to create a new model for urban agriculture. The project connects and supports dozens of small micro farms so they’re both economically and environmentally sustainable.
The long-term goal is to expand the project to hundreds of micro farms and to bring healthy foods to urban food deserts — neighborhoods where access to grocery stores or fresh foods is lacking — all while researching and tracking the project's impact on the community, on green space, and on the environment.
Project lead and associate professor of environmental history Kip Curtis says the micro farm system is different from a typical urban farm because it maximizes the number of crops produced in a small space — in this case, only one-third of an acre — and takes a whole food system approach to be more profitable.
That involves training, growing the same things in the same way, and marketing and selling all the produce before it’s harvested.