The Ultimate Guide to Urban Farming: Sustainable Living in your Home, Community, and Business

Beware this book, written by Nicole Faires, as it will pull you in and quickly create a conviction in you that you want to become an urban farmer. Surprisingly, for such a fun-filled book, there is a lot a lot of hard information between these pages that can support any person or group considering creating a project which involves cultivating land in a small-scale or larger way and even converting it from a local urban sustainablity focus to actual surplus and potential profit.

Prefaced with some beautiful quotes and charming photography, the book begins with a momentary history of the rise of supermarkets before turning its attention to Urban Farming Defined.

Divided into five chapters, by the first pages of chapter one it jumps right in. Describing the requisite levels of self-reliance and skills, it then explains permaculture ethics and the process of creating an agricultural hub. The book describes crisply what community is and isn't, and how to start one. Using a lot of pretty charts and beautiful user-friendly layout, it then delves into business structures, starting a farm co-op, and straight into break-down sheets for setting up a CSA.

The next part of the book introduces discussion of record-keeping, followed by a section that addresses acquiring land, rental or buying, making a farm plan and profitability planning. Different models of farming and a crop planting schedule are presented in this wonderful book, along with information on commercial greenhouses and on how to access funds.

Everything about this book is so hooky and cheerful, it's impossible not to feel encouraged to jump into something wild by the conclusion of these early chapters. Chapter 2 swings straight into designing your land, and explores permaculture in more depth, climate, water management, fencing, frames, trellises and greenhouses, as well as how to develop the final successful design.

Chapter 3 is an in-depth discussion of soil, soil health, where to get worms, save seeds, and how to reclaim and remediate soil. The second to last chapter discusses plants, immediately addressing cash crops in case you didn't think they were trying to hook you into becoming a farmer. This chapter also contains extensive plant tables and guides for the beginner.

The final chapter is titled Animals, and it is much more in-depth than one would expect from such a book for beginners. There's actually a helluva lot in this volume about raising chickens, what to expect and how to raise ducks and quails as well. It even includes a section on sheep, goats, succinctly explaining the challenges of raising them and how to process and market their milk as well as their meat.

I really enjoyed this surprising volume. I would recommend this book for its unintended revolutionary effect as readers will have a tough time not dreaming of farming by the middle chapters. It really was super interesting and every starting farmer would clearly do well to keep a copy of this book in their library, as there are a number of indispensable chapters. Recommended.

Faires, N. (2016). The Ultimate Guide to Urban Farming: Sustainable Living in your home, community, and business. Skyhorse Publishing.