Jeremy asks: Urban farming: the new dot com?

Roxanne Christensen, co-author of the SPIN-Farming online learning series, says a wave of innovators is developing profitable models for sustainable alternatives to industrial agriculture. These new entrepreneurs are developing breakthrough technologies, approaches and business models that, she says, "can help create a post-industrial food system that is less resource intensive, more locally-based, and easier to monitor and control". . .

SPIN's [S-mall P-lot IN-tensive] growing techniques are not, in themselves, a breakthrough. What's novel is the way a SPIN farm business is run. SPIN provides everything you'd expect from a good franchise: a business plan, marketing advice, and a detailed day-to-day workflow. In standardizing the system and creating a reproducible process, it doesn't sound all that different from McDonalds. . .

Areas represented at Agriculture 2.0 will include controlled climate growing systems, building integrated agriculture, urban agriculture, closed loop irrigation and waste processing systems, mobile food processing, aquaculture, and appropriately-scaled marketing and distribution systems.

According to Janine Yorio of NewSeed Advisors, the conference will take a sector which has been viewed as marginal, dispel that notion, and expose its potential to the mainstream financial community.

While such systems are not a credible alternative to real agriculture - industrial or not - they may in fact spin out some profitable small businesses. A chain of such businesses operated by franchisees could make up a company large enough to get the attention of financiers and investors.

There are a host of reasons why urban farming is more complicated, once you start, than opening a hamburger restaurant. Among these: Skewed planning laws, competition for land from developers, insecure water supplies, pollution management, and the sheer number of diffferent actors involved even in a simple food system. But the "just start a business" approach will inject a new dynamic into the range of experiments multiplying all over the world.

One way to look at such experiments is as primitive first steps toward a future of synthesized foods, a future where food really is produced in factories rather than grown on the land. A progression from these type of controlled environment, season-independent intensive forced growth systems (they should talk to the pot growers who have already developed the "grow house" system), to cultured foods based on microorganisms grown in vats, to true synthesis from inert materials ending in the techno-vegetarian dream may be our future. We may all have Star Trek type replicators at some point rather than kitchens. A Drexler in every pot.