City urged to offer land for farms
“Mini-farms could start sprouting on vacant lots throughout Cincinnati.
Vice Mayor David Crowley wants the city administration to publish a list of all the city-owned, otherwise unusable plots of land and offer them cheap to people willing to plant on them and keep them blight-free.
“With the price of food going up and everything else, we thought it might be appropriate,” he said. “This is one of the small steps we can take” to help reduce the city’s collective carbon footprint.
There are thousands of such parcels for which the city has no other current purpose, he said. Many of them have no development potential because they’re small and/or oddly shaped. He asked that City Manager Milton Dohoney’s office report back to council in a month with a way to do the Cincinnati Farm Program.
“Many city residents would appreciate having the use of a parcel of land for vegetable gardens, flower gardens, rain gardens or neighborhood beautification,” Crowley writes in his motion to establish the program. “Some city residents would be interested in earning a living through sustainable urban agriculture, producing food on land that is currently idle and selling it to residents through local farmer’s markets.”
The idea came from the Climate Protection Action Plan (the Green Cincinnati plan) pushed by Crowley and Mayor Mark Mallory and endorsed in June by council.
But the concept of urban gardening or community-supported agriculture is growing nationally, too. Portland, Ore., for example, charges $50 for 400-square-foot plots of land.
“I know it’s not a new idea,” Crowley said. “But why just let these spots go to waste?”“
