Fleet Farming – Bicycle Powered Urban Farming

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Fleet Farming – Bicycle Powered Urban Farming, from Oakland, CA is taking its show on the road – the railroad.

From Pittsburgh to Los Angeles, Justin Vandenbroeck will be taking the Millenial Train, stopping in a total of five cities to give a free 75-minute workshop about the Fleet Farming model — what it is, how it can work in each city, how we can turn lawns into local food, etc.

Here’s the dates for the workshops, each held during the lunch hour in a downtown location (near the train station).

August 1  Pittsburgh, PA

August 2  Chicago, IL

August 3  Kansas City, MO

August 5 Albuquerque, NM

August 6  Los Angeles, CA

Here’s the link to the Facebook page, where you can check on the details of each city’s event. https://www.facebook.com/fleetfarming/

For each workshop, Justin is working with local partners and inviting anyone to attend — urban ag-gers, bicyclists, planners, community development, property owners with big lawns, etc.   He will be documenting each workshop in a short format (2-page Fact sheet ?) and I believe will make the results available to everyone.

For more information on Fleet Farming or the workshops, contact:

Justin Vandenbroeck  (Director, Fleet Farming Oakland)

justin.vandenbroeck@ideasforus.org

954-658-4531

Fleet Farming as a model (from Justin’s outreach email):

Bicycle powered urban farming program that converts homeowners lawns into small productive urban farms. We sharecrop 5-10% of our harvests with the homeowner in exchange for land/water use and sell our remaining crops into the marketplace. Bi-weekly we mobilize volunteers on a bicycle powered urban farming experience known as the Swarm – biking from site to site!

Our program is operating in Orlando, Oakland and Kampala, Uganda; farming a total of 24 lawns! These efforts have gained some incredible attention around the world with videos collectively amounting to over 10 MILLION VIEWS and articles in the Huffington Post,Smithsonian Magazine, NPR All Things Considered, Modern Farmer and many other outlets.  

PS re MILLENIAL TRAINS PROJECT.  If you like trains as much as I do, check out the details of the Millennial Trains Project  — a fascinating format for incubating  community (25 young entrepreneurs with great ideas) in a cross-country trip on a private train (vintage rail cars).   As MTP’s website says:

We believe that journeys build leaders and that new frontiers exist. We use trains to explore opportunities and challenges across America. We come from all walks of life. We are friends. We are problem solvers. We travel because we love learning. Together, we have fun and do our best to create things that benefit, serve, and inspire others.

Fleet Farming is one of two food projects on this year’s “Change” train.  A second “Unity” train for another 25 participants runs from Los Angeles, San Francisco, Denver, Milwaukee, to Detroit (Aug. 10-18).  I don’t know if there are any food-and-farm people on the second train.