Announcing Farmscape's new book!

In Beans from My Father, Farmscape argues with itself on almost every page. In this lively autobiography, Farmscape explores its background as both a social and environmental cause, and also a business. What does it mean to be a mission-based, conscientous organization, and yet also feel compelled to break-even on the balance sheet?

After college, the founders of Farmscape worked for three years to develop a business that would feed a city on sustainable, local, and maximally fresh ingredients. They took the business model to the sprawling metropolis of Los Angeles in search of its "authentic" self. They wanted to see if a theory would work for real...

At Farmscape we're proud to grow food in what an academic might call the “interstitial spaces” of the city. The nooks, and the crannies, the parkways, the vacant lots, the parks, and side yards between buildings, but most especially the residential landscapes. Places that more often tend to be under the dominion of turf grass, weeds, ivy, and trees.

What’s exciting about farming in the Space Between? We take land that agriculture has forsaken, surrendered to urban development. But we turn it into intensive urban gardens, and then we can harvest a quality of produce fresher than any distant farm field ever could. Meanwhile, we don't have to leave the city to do our work.

We are excited to announce that Farmscape has hired Moiri Fleming to be our urban farm architect. Before joining Farmscape, Moiri worked for four years with Van Atta Associates, an award-winning landscape architecture firm based in Santa Barbara.

Last month, Moiri collaborated with us to show Los Angeles that it was possible to elegantly incorporate food production within the new LA City Hall landscape, and her design won praise from LAist. Since then, she has worked with a half-dozen Farmscape members to provide elegant farm-forward designs.

If you or someone you know might be interested in Farmscape’s design services, please call us at 323-454-2888 or send us an email at info@farmscapegardens.com.

You're sitting on LAX --> LGA... Wait! What's that down there speckled across the yards of LA? That's Farmscape, spreading like a good idea. 

Pictured above, you can see our network of thriving urban farms here in the City of Angels. We're now in our third year of operation, this summer will be our sixth (biannual) season. To date we've established over 200 urban farms and we manage more than 100 of them on a weekly basis.

This is part 2 of an eleven part series: “I wish there was a Farmscape,” eleven portraits of the latent longing in our world for productive urban agriculture (now available by subscription.) Part I is here.

It’s 10AM on a weekday in Los Angeles. Hold your hand to your ear. What’s that sound? Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzizzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz! It’s a ghostbuster out on call, somewhere nearby. One of your neighbors has a ghost problem. Alas, it’s probably not Bill Murray, though Carl Spackler’s groundskeeping is a model to all of us in the business. But you’re certain it’s a ghostbuster because they’re hauling around a proton pack.

In fact, your neighbor’s ghostbuster is chasing after the spectre of the American Dream with what one LA blog has christened “Lucifer’s Trumpet,” a leaf-blower to go with their 2-stroke mower and edger. Starting early, they race from lot to lot offering commodity landscape maintenance at rock-bottom prices. They keep LA beautiful, and all-in-all it’s noble work done by hard-working noble people, though their tools and methods pollute our air and expose us and them to an elevated risk of asthma, non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, and other respiratory illnesses.