Your back-yard farmer

Or urban sharecropper

By Culinate staff

November 19, 2010

One of the many entrepreneurial spinoffs of the locavore revolution has been the professional back-yard farmer. For four years, for example, the two-woman team of Your Backyard Farmer has been farming private back yards around Portland, Oregon, offering families the chance to enjoy super-local, super-fresh, all-organic produce without doing any of the hard, dirty work.

Now the Wall Street Journal has discovered the trend, and is busy dismissing it as yet another project of smug elitists, dubbing it “urban sharecropping.”

Not only is this catchy title inaccurate (real sharecroppers don’t get paid by landowners), it also elides the creative swapping of the movement, in which folks who have green thumbs but no land pair up with folks who dislike gardening but have plenty of turf. Still, even the snarkiest article (with witty visuals but, weirdly, no weblinks) can spread the word. Sign up now, urban elitists!