A lot in Fairfax, Virginia, sat empty for 25 years, long enough that neighbors barely noticed it anymore. Oren Falkowitz, founder of Area 2 Farms, sees places like that as potential farms. He joins urban planner Jeffery Tompkins to talk about bringing food production back into neighborhoods using vacant lots, overlooked buildings, and other spaces conventional development often passes over. Their Urban Farms Toolkit tackles one of the biggest obstacles: zoning rules written for a very different kind of agriculture. For vacant parcels that may never attract conventional development, a farm can give the land a role in the neighborhood again.
Hi everybody! Welcome to another episode of the Bottom Up Revolution. Today I am joined by two guests. Oren Falkowitz. He's a farmer and CEO of Area Two Farms, a USDA-certified organic urban farming company based in Arlington, Virginia, the mission at Area Two Farms is to grow farms within 10 miles of every American.
I'm also joined by Jeffrey Tompkins. He is the founder and principal of Proformas, an urban planning and placemaking practice that works with neighborhoods, small developers, and municipalities on incremental parcel-level city building. He writes the Substack "Thinking Big by Thinking Small" and is a columnist for the Indianapolis Star. Oren and Jeffrey recently collaborated on the Urban Farms Toolkit.
It's a guide for turning underutilized urban land into productive community-owned agriculture. Jeffery is from Northwest Indiana. I'm looking forward to bringing this conversation today.
I think you can sort of file this under the category of what now when you're looking at the landscape of the American city, when you're looking at underutilized lots, or when you're looking at these spaces between buildings, and thinking about how can we utilize everything that we have to turn our cities towards a more resilient future. I think this idea of bringing back urban farming, bringing back agriculture into the city is really interesting and holds a lot of potential. I'm looking forward to learning more as I talk with Oren and Jeffrey. I'm excited to bring this conversation to our Bottom Up Revolution listeners. Oren and Jeffrey, welcome to the Bottom Up Revolution podcast.
Thanks for having us.
Yeah, good to be here.
Oren, I'll start with you. Jeffery, I'll be asking you the same question, but I'd love to start by capturing a bit of your background. Where's home for you? Maybe you can share a bit of your professional journey and how did you come to this place of caring about cities and the built environment? Then in later questions, we'll dig in more, dig into the topic of agriculture and land use, but I'd love just to kind of set the stage a little bit and give our audience a chance to hear more of your story.
Yeah, absolutely. Well, I'm originally from South Florida, and I grew up there. Like many people that I've met over the last 44 years of my life, there were places that me and my family went and dealt directly with farmers. We went to an orange grove and got our fresh orange juice from there.
But before I got into farming, I left Florida and I started my career working for the government. So I worked as a spy at the National Security Agency for about 10 years. When I left government service, I was the founder and CEO of two prior companies, one in Boston. I lived in Silicon Valley before moving back to Washington, D.C., to start the farm business.
But I've always been interested in cities. I live in cities. Cities are really important. But one of the kind of key turning points for me in investing my time, was really living in California at the time it's not so much a California thing, but at the time, really the zeitgeist was about people focusing on how to change the world, how to interconnect people that were far apart from one another. At the same time, that there were things that were outside of my front door that needed fixing, and so what I wanted to do when I was ready for my next thing was to be able to build something that really impacted the people around me, and that's a short version of how we got to the farm.
I might push for not quite the long version, but maybe the medium version. How did that connect for you to farming? So, as you're kind of rethinking, what do you want to do next with your career? You're thinking back on these experiences in Florida. What were you seeing and hearing that really crystallized, like the direction you want it to go around urban agriculture.
It is one of these things that touches you everywhere you go. I said, I grew up in a place that people don't think of as agricultural, but we had deep connections with farms that no longer exist. When I lived in Boston, there were people building interesting technologies for agriculture. When I lived in California, it's the largest agricultural producer in the world.
There were stories of how there used to be apricot and peach orchards, all over the place that had been bulldozed to create more Class A office space at a time when people were focusing a lot on their health, focusing a lot on their food, and I also spent time in my personal life, growing things. My dad, when he was alive, he grew orchids, he grew roses outside, bred them. It is one of these things that has always touched my life. Food is an important thing that connects people.
The purpose of technology, and of being in service of folks, is to do it for people. It just came together through a series of confluences.
Jeffrey, I'd love to volley the same question to you. Can you share a bit about your background and how you came to care about cities and land use and all of those fun topics?
Yeah, of course. So I think that I got introduced to the idea of urbanism from the failures of my built environment growing up. So I'm from Hammond, Indiana, and. It's categorized as a Rust Belt city, so I'm between the South Side of Chicago and Gary, Indiana, and most people categorize those places as maybe failures of systemic urban issues, And so Hammond is sandwiched between these two kind of larger places, feeling these feelings of disinvestment.
Of course, I grew up in a post-industrial area, so Hammond and Gary in the 1950s, 60s had almost double, triple the population they do now. So by the time I'm growing up in the 90s, I'm seeing a lot of lot of disinvestment. I'm seeing a lot of brownfields that just aren't being repurposed, and a lot of people flee those cities, so I wondered as a child, and I didn't really get back to this until much later in my life, why those cycles of disinvestment were so pronounced? Those tools of incrementalism that we talk about now and city building that just weren't there at the time.
So when I went to school and studied policy, and then later architecture, and then later planning. I really wanted to understand the lenses at which we can understand place, in order to ascertain the approaches at which we could fix them. So I worked for a while in the private sector as a real estate development analyst, if you will. We worked a lot on anchor institution strategies, campus institution plans, big district kind of plans.
We were coast to coast on that, and I worked in architecture as a design director on a more global scale. So I worked very large scale projects across the world, and saw that a lot of these things that I was building were privy to the same type of failure that I was exposed to growing up, when U. S. Steel decided to build in Gary, Indiana, in 1906, and they built a company town, they probably didn't forecast that one day after World War II that we wouldn't need as much steel as we did before.
So, what happened to Gary is not only it's not idiosyncratic to Gary, Indiana. It's not idiosyncratic to Youngstown, Ohio, or Cleveland, or Buffalo, or these other places where top-down industrialization and market forces have capitulated the average person to disinvestment cycles. So, thinking about all that, really, I started Proformas, my practice, a few years back to understand that from the block level, what are the tools that we can use as city builders to repair those scars, but also make those incremental investments that add up to a larger mosaic of patterns that will be successful for proper city building.
Was really struck on your website by this emphasis on emergent urbanism. I was going to ask if you could share a little bit about your firm. What kinds of projects do you work on? Maybe you could unpack this concept of emergent urbanism for our audience a bit.
Yeah. So Proformas. We're an urban planning and design consultancy. I like to call us like the Swiss Army knife of urban planning.
So we work at all scales from the block, the lot to the city, the district, anything larger than that, and everything in between. So we're working on citywide zoning codes, but we're also working on a lot level of understanding those patterns of development that are going to collate into larger patterns that will be successful economically and for quality of life purposes. The thing about emergent urbanism, and I try to explain this a lot, and we'll talk about it a little bit later, but I really, I think of urban planners as planters, and so I'm throwing a T in there. But good city building is a lot like gardening, We've thought for decades in the United States and worldwide now these top down mechanisms that we have for city building, we think of the city as a machine, and particularly after the zoning that came about after Euclid v.
Ambler, the Supreme Court case, we zone it for this use and we separate it from that use, and the city should just work great. We use these scientific instruments to think about the city when that's just not how cities were built for millennia. I like to say this a lot when I do lectures: is we had city planning for millennia before city planning was a profession. People were self organizing.
So thinking about emergent urbanism, when right now we have birds migrating, and so when I look up from my window in Indianapolis, Indiana. We have a lot of geese flying in V's, and they're going to the southern pastures of perhaps Florida or South America. How do they know to fly in a V? How do bees know the emergent behavior to build honeycombs?
How do ants know to follow these lines of chemical scent in order to build a nest for their queen? It's these patterns that emerge from biological processes in our brains that maybe we're not even privy to understanding. But our city building is the same way. Again, we built cities for millennia before city planning was a profession, and arguably, it didn't really get.
We didn't mess up our cities until it was a profession. So, if you think about. Gardening metaphor again-that story of gardening. If you get the soil right, if you get the pH condition right, if you get the sun right, you get the amount of water right, you can grow a plant.
Because we are privy to these emergent tendencies from a biological level. Our places are very much the same way. If you get the conditions right, you can grow places, and it doesn't have to necessarily be a top-down mechanism. But it's getting those things dialed in, so then you can emerge those good quality of life uses and properties that we're all trying to plan for. Really, we should plant for.
Yeah, when I hear the word, when I hear the phrase emergent urbanism, I think another part of it too is this idea of pace and this idea of scale, Like you're moving at a less urgent pace, and you're not building quite as at a super large scale because you understand that people in the environment are going to respond to what you plant, and you might have to make some changes along the way, Like you think of gardening, the gardeners I know are always listening to their plants. They're always watching and listening and tweaking and making changes and adding and taking away. I think the same principle applies to our places. This idea that it's one and done.
We got it. We figured it out on paper or on a piece, and in a software. Now we just need to hit play, and it's just going to perform exactly right. It's a very, like you said, scientific and mechanical approach to the city.
I've always said cities are ecosystems, And ecosystems can't really be controlled. You can provide the right conditions, but you can't necessarily control the outputs. I think that should fascinate us, With doing these little experient experiments to see what happens, but that's not the mindset of modern city planning. But we'll save that for another episode.
Oren, I would love for you to tell the story behind Area Two Farms. So we're gonna let's talk about food here, and eventually we'll talk about how you guys met and the toolkit that you all collaborated on, but I'd love to hear the origin story. So, what's the big idea behind Area Two Farms? Can you share a bit about the concept and then a bit about how it's structured?
So, I know it's structured, if I recall correctly, sort of like as a franchise model. I'd love to hear about some of the results that you're seeing so far. So, it's a lot packed in there. Take that in whatever direction you'd like. But to start, I'd love to know the story behind when this really came together for you, and you decided to put Area Two Farms out there as a company.
Yeah, absolutely. Well, today we live in a world where if you go to the grocery store, whether it's a Publix where I grew up, or a Kroger, probably closer to where Jeffrey shops at, or Whole Foods, or Safeway, or Amazon, whatever it is. The food that you're getting is probably traveled about 1,500 miles, to get to you. One of the kind of interesting consequences that people don't think about it is there's a pressure that's coming from the retailers, which is they want things to last on the shelves longer, and so that makes its way all the way back to farmers to grow certain varieties or breed their crops or to make sure that they're ready for transportation, not to make sure that you're getting the best of that.
So going all the way back, what you find today is that our food system is really more of a multimodal transportation network than it is really about delivering high quality produce, to people. So the idea behind Area Two Farms is very simple. It's rather than moving the food, the idea is to move the farm and not the food, and that is to plant and to grow a farm within 10 miles of every American. Some of that, comes from when I go around not only my own cities, but travel around the country.
There's so many spaces, and Jeffrey has a lot of really good data that we've collaborated on that people can't figure out what to do with, or it's underutilized, or it needs to be transformed, or it needs to be revitalized. If you go back to the original thing that I was saying, that in a lot of these communities we all live in, a lot of these cities that we all live in. There used to be a farm there, and very simply, we just want to return that farm in Fairfax, Virginia, where we're building another farm. The site has been vacant for about 25 years.
It was a farm about 100 years ago, and in between those two things, a lot of progress, or so-called progress happened. It was a gas station. It was Howard Johnson's. It was something else, but at the same time, the community members lost a good source of how to get local food that's better for them.
The greatest value you have in food is knowing where it comes from. You can see that through this summer's disease and pathogen outbreaks like cyclospora. If you can't answer the question, where did you get your greens from? It's probably not something you want to be able to put into your body.
By moving the farm, we really do that. We think we have a great new type of infrastructure, a third space for cities, and they're widely appreciated by the communities that we've grown in and continue to grow in.
Okay, so tell me about Reach. How many farms do you have going?
Yeah, so we started in Arlington, Virginia, and we're opening a new farm in Fairfax, Virginia. We'll be opening up outside of Atlanta, Charlotte, Nashville, Dallas, Austin, Houston, South Florida, Tampa, Orlando, Columbus. So our goal is to keep opening farms. We do that by working with a local farmer in a franchise-like model, as you mentioned.
We really feel that the most important part of a farm is knowing the farmer, and that farmer has to have really deep invested ownership and stake in it to get you the best, quality thing. But farming can be an uncertain and challenging, endeavor. So, being part of a network, being part of a system that reduces some of the uncertainty is really critical for farmer success. Today, the largest farms or food brands-they're all franchises.
So think Tropicana oranges. It's not one orange grove that's growing them. Ocean Spray Cranberry-it's not like one guy picking the cranberries. Land O'Lakes Butter-it's not like two cows that are getting milk for all the butter.
Driscoll's berry, the largest berry producer in the world, it's hundreds and hundreds of farmers working together to provide high quality berries, and so that's really the core of it is to create a network of farmers who are invested. Some of those other brands that I mentioned, even though they kind of operate in this similar way, the thing that they've done is they've hidden the farmers away from the people, and our hope is to kind of reverse that and to place the farmers, the owners, front and center to drive a human relationship that's more critical than ever when it comes to getting food.
Can you tell me what your farms grow? What's the output?
Yeah, so we grow what we would consider to be like a differentiated staple, so it's regular things that people are eating every week. So every week we are growing lettuces. So think like spinach, arugula, kale, herbs, rosemary, thyme, basil, parsley, mint, microgreens, root vegetables, carrots, potatoes, sweet potatoes, radishes, onions, leeks, and then some specialty items. Specialty items being things maybe you're unfamiliar with, but are really cool to try.
They can be regional or ethnic specialties. They can just be things that are beautiful, tea blends, things of that nature. So we create this basket every week. We sell to our community members locally, not through stores, directly to them through community-supported agriculture model, they get a little basket of all five of these things every week, and people really love it. They really enjoy being a part of a community, enjoy being members of something great, participating in the farm, knowing who the farmers are, and feeding their families, driving conversations, relationships, around food.
What are some of the stories you're hearing so far about impact and success?
About the way people eat, or
Or just the reception of these farms and communities, and just the consumer response. I
There's a lot of them. I'll give you the three quick ones. One, we do a lot of tours and have a lot of students, K through 12, and even college and graduate students, come by to kind of see what we're doing. There's a young kid named Ian.
He's probably about 11 years old. Came by the farm. Was very inspired by it. He's been building model Lego replicas of our farms and giving them to us.
Right. So, I think something is really interesting when someone comes for a tour and they're really inspired to go do that. That's an example. We have women who are concerned or are battling forms of cancer, And they're getting high levels of nutrients from our products, and they're being directed by their doctors, and so it's a big part of their life, and we see other people who are living alone or whose kids have gone off to college, and they're saying, "Hey, we love being a part of this because it gives us as empty nesters a new way to kind of engage in our kind of post-child life around food and so forth. So it's just like hundreds of little examples you hear from people that are really exciting and very loyal, community members.
So when a customer comes to one of your farms, can you describe what they would see? Is this like an outdoor farm, indoor like a farmers market? How would you describe it?
I'd say it's all three of those things kind of wrapped in one. The first thing is, and where we wanted to really work with Jeffrey is that we really want to take any space that's available and transform it. Spaces that people look at and they think, "What am I going to do with it? It doesn't pencil for the REIT in New York City.
It doesn't really work for a developer. It's kind of funky looking, and we can transform it. We make the places. In real estate, sometimes people are thinking about the cost or the rent.
This is, for location, location, location. This location is so great; it'll drive so much business. In our case, we kind of think the opposite. We say, "Hey, look at this space that nobody else thinks anything of, and we can do the most amazing thing with it.
So, a large part of our production is done growing indoors. Allows us to grow year-round. We're not subject to inclement weather, whether it's rain or snow or extreme heat, but we use all the parts of the space outside with growing beds, up top, and so forth.
We want every inch of our spaces to be a growing, environment that engages people, looks beautiful, and then gives them the food that nourishes them. So, in addition to growing it, the farms they have a farm stand. People come, they engage, they buy with it. So it's a mix of farm production, farm retail.
It's all happening in one place. The last thing I would say is there's a third space component to it, which is people come here and gather. They do things all the time. Schools come for tours.
People come for holidays. People come and volunteer. People ride their bikes over, and they stop. So it's a place that people come not only to get their food, but to be a part of.
Yeah, to feel like they're more connected to the community. Definitely, I was just thinking about what we were talking, what we were riffing off of with this idea of planting versus planning. So I just I love how it's not even a pun, but it's just very full circle. You and Oren connected over Twitter.
I'd love just to hear from your perspective, what resonated with you about this concept, and then I want to talk about how you all collaborated on this zoning toolkit. But maybe you can share the initial story about how you all connected and what resonated with you about this model?
I think Oren reached out. I think he DM'd me and I was like, "Oh, sure, We talked on the phone, and I heard his story for a little bit, and I was like, "I've always wanted to work with James Bond. So, just check
That off your list. Work with former spy. Done. Now I can check that off.
I've had a former spy on Bottom of Revolution. Where's my badge?
Yeah, they're going to give me security clearance now. But I heard a story of here's a guy who looked at a dead building and said, "Let's build a farm, and that's just awesome. That's just incredible because that's something that I've done my whole life is look at the potential of what something can be, and you're solving for something, and you're providing something. Which is, we talk about growing as a metaphor, but you're literally growing place, and you're thinking about parcels in terms of purpose, and it's something that just is not.
We have a lot of that intentionality missing from city building today, And so when I consult municipalities, when I talk to my friends in the development community, they're like, "Well, how do we make this happen? I was like, "What is already what? What are you solving for? So when Area Farms, and Oren talks to me about moving the farm, not the food, he's solving for something direct.
There is such a glut of this underutilized land throughout our cities. 15% of all land in American cities-if you take the top 25 cities by population in the United States-15% of all that land is vacant. So when I hear something like that, I'm seeing somebody that's being intentional and thinking through how to provide to solve for something, I'm 100% on board. It just made total sense for me, and he grew the plant. Let me just stop there.
All right, so I want to ask a clarifying question around the use of the word land, because when I think of like a vacant spot, I think of what I see around my town, which is like literally plots of land with nothing on them. But or in the way you're describing the farms, it sounds like that you all are mainly growing inside. So are you mainly repurposing real estate that already exists, or are you building the real estate from scratch on vacant land?
It doesn't matter to us. I think what Jeffery was saying is that we look at spaces sometimes. In the case of Fairfax, Virginia, it's literally an empty lot that's been sitting there as an eyesore for 25 years. It's been so empty and underappreciated that the local community that when I tell them about.
They think, oh yeah, I've driven by that place for almost two decades, and I didn't even realize something could go there, So we will erect, structures on empty spaces. Sometimes those spaces, and why I got really interested in Jeffrey's work is because he was doing some things around alleys and kind of like we just look for geometrical spaces that could be used to grow things, and if there's an existing building on it, great. If there's not, great. The only thing that matters is the proximity to people and the ability to transform into something that's a good for the for the public.
I'd love to hear from both of you on this, but what stands out to you the most from the conversations you have with communities about this concept, Jeffrey? Let me start with you. What stands out to you the most when you when you all are bringing this idea? Or I don't exactly know how your model works, but when you're in conversation one way or another with the municipality or just with community members, what is resonating the most.
So when we approach any type of zoning reform, thinking about various land uses in cities that might not be there already, just really thinking about how this either aligns or does not align with current zoning practice or land use practice in that municipality. So I think the biggest thing is to understand that some people have natural fears of various land uses and typologies, and there's a reason for that fear, So, when people hear urban agriculture, a lot of times what comes up in their head is, "Oh, they're going to grow pot. you can understand that, but like there's that natural fear of place because you're not sure what that means, And so, the way that technology has improved, and the way that we and Oren and his proprietary method has created a way that you can grow in these smaller spaces. This is a more novel concept for a lot of municipalities.
So, what I find in these conversations, it's not just urban agriculture in these conversations. Sometimes it's like missing middle housing or missing middle retail, or repurposing alleys to have some kind of different land uses, like accessory dwelling units or accessory commercial units. It's not just urban farms, but it's understanding where the fear is coming from around these various land uses, and how to approach that topic from a place of, hey, I'm hearing you, I'm seeing you, and you're reacting to something that maybe this is not, and so that's kind of bridging the gap and seeing the places as a planner and as someone who consults municipalities, seeing the places in the code where that fear can be allayed, and say, hey, look, this is just like this. If you make these one or two different tweaks in your thinking in terms of the way that the code reads, you can actually have these emergent land uses that aren't the boogeyman.
They're actually really cool stuff. You just gotta kind of reframe how you're viewing them. Oren, I'd love to hear.
Yeah, Oren, I want to hear your response to this. But isn't it funny how humans are kind of caught in this tension between wanting to experiment and explore and do something new, but they really love not changing. They love the certainty of and the familiarity of like, ah, this is my street, this is my neighborhood. I don't have to worry.
Some, I just think that's so interesting. The city is this kind of place where we capture that and we like wrestle with that tension. I think, yeah, doing it on that small scale is really the right scale to navigate those fears and navigate those anxieties and practice that experimenting and kind of wrestle with how do we experiment in a way that preserves like our sense of place, but not be so afraid of change that we lock our place in time, so to speak. Oren, what stands out to you the most when you're talking to communities about Area Two Farms?
I've never encountered a local leader that I meet with, and I meet with them all over the country all the time, who doesn't want to do more, for their communities, especially as it relates, to food. So you find, especially in leadership positions, incredible amounts of support. I think some of the issues that Jeffrey mentioned, people often ask me if we're going to grow marijuana, which is really funny to me. Yeah, sort of funny to me.
We do not, just to be clear. Not there's anything wrong with it, but we do not. People have concerns about like animals and smells and things like that. People have ideas and visions, mental models for what a farm would be.
But those conversations are straightforward to have. I'd say that the thing that's the most challenging and where we've done the most work with our urban farms toolkit is to really just speak the same language that all these people are speaking, and just give a small analogy. When I left the government, we used to do these things called civets or secure video teleconferences. When I left, I was walking around Boston.
I started my first company, and everyone saying, "Let's do a WebEx. Let's do a WebEx. I was asking people, "What is a WebEx? It wasn't a term that we use because we called them civitzes, and you find the same is true with these land use issues.
People have a lot of terms. There's a lot of terminologies, a lot of things, and being able to translate that, like we did in Urban Farms Toolkit, it just levels the playing field and allows good conversations to have about considerations. Now, I'm a really pure version of an entrepreneur. My entire mode of life is trust me, it's going to be cool, Like if you just trust me, like it will be cool.
I appreciate in a very small part of my brain that people want to have some assurances. They want to make sure that you're going to follow the local standards. You're going to do this. You're going to do that.
Because of the work that we put into the Urban Farms Toolkit, we're just able to have those conversations more clearly, to work more quickly, and to address the kinds of concerns that allow leaders to say, "Hey, we have our own set of priorities and goals, and we just want to bring them together, not to fight them and rub them together. So that allows us to be very successful, I think.
Okay, let's talk. About the toolkit, so Jeffrey, I'd love for you to give a first stab at describing it, telling your listeners what the problems you're trying to solve with this toolkit, and how you're hoping it helps communities who see the value in repurposing underutilized land and turning it into a farm.
Right. So the purpose of really any good planning document is always going to answer like the what, why, and how. So what we really wanted to do is establish and preface the need for urban agriculture, what it actually is, and what the forms it can take are. Right.
So really, we started off showing the history of how we've gotten here and how zoning is prevented and separated where people live from where food is produced, and a lot of our top-down mechanisms of industrialization and also just the economics of scale, right, have created this really industrialized level of farming that is so detached from our communities, and a lot of what Oren's discussed is, we used to have these little, orchards. Right, we can go pick an orange. Obviously, our forms of urbanization have made that not as abundant. So we have this connotation in our head of how local production of food would be noisy.
It'd be smelly. There's manure. There's these fans, and we're thinking of all these things, and that's not necessarily true when we're thinking about creating microscale and hyper local production of food locally for your greens and veggies and fruit, So one establishing why local fruit production is away from where people live, away from actual neighborhoods, and then kind of showing a path forward. We also touch on that technological disruption of controlled environmental agriculture.
Thinking about vertical farming, the proprietary technology that Oren brings to the table, these new technological advances that have allowed farming to occur indoors, to occur at scale, to occur affordably in a neighborhood scale, and so we had the zoning that came from kind of good reasons, We didn't want like manure smells by people. That makes sense, But as technology improved, we haven't really reformed the zoning to allow that food production for greens and fruit and all that good healthy greens that you need in neighborhoods. So, introducing those concepts and then showing municipalities essentially that playbook. So, Oren talked a little bit about how different municipalities have different titles for things, and some place like Seattle, it might be called urban agriculture.
In Charlotte, it might be called indoor urban cultivation or something. I'm making that up, but there's all these different translations of the same language. What we do then after prefacing the issue is saying, "Hey, look, here's the different definitions of these things. We're all on the same.
We're going to level the playing field, and we're sitting on the same thing. We're going to introduce the concept of what this urban farm could mean and show what that looks like. The Urban Farms Toolkit is illustrated. We try to make this simple to understand, visually pleasing, and graphically accessible.
I believe that a picture is worth more than 1000 words. I believe that it's because it can captivate, and you cannot put a price or a word amount on captivation or inspiration. So, when someone sees a definition of hydroponics, and it's got an actual illustration or diagram next to it, it starts to make sense and resonate with folks more than just a legal definition. I'm not like everybody.
I think zoning is sexy. I think urban planning concepts are really, really hot. Not everyone thinks about the legalese of urban planning and zoning and thinks that's sexy, And so we really wanted to make these terms and this terminology and that level playing field really easy to understand, and it look hot. From there, we really take a couple paths forward.
We're saying this is how municipalities can go forward with these terms. You can create a new zoning amendment, or you can use administrative review and augment your existing code. So we're providing various pathways for these municipalities so you don't have to reinvent the wheel. We're giving the language, we're giving the terms, we're giving the pathway, and we're giving you the inspiration to take this community and showcase why, the what, why, and how this could really impact and bring food back to your neighborhood.
I think that it makes it really easy. It's easy to package, and from what I understand, the municipalities that have seen it so far are really, really pleased.
Yeah, Oren, what would you add to that?
I wouldn't add much. I would just say I would continue to what Jeffrey was saying. Is that when we show it to folks, I think it creates this level setting, allows progress to happen. There is an ability for folks to understand the different levers that they can pull and which one's most appropriate for them.
As you said, in some cases we've had cities change their zoning. That's great. In other cases, they've just come through with a zoning administrator's approval or opinion, and that's great too. Ultimately, when you're trying to transform a space, clarity is the thing that kills the business side of it. When we're able to work hand in hand with local leaders and help them understand what we're trying to do, what the benefits can be, how the business operates, and they can provide clarity, it allows deals to happen, At some level, we're just trying to make sure that spaces can be turned into farms, and through their recognition of that, it just creates more opportunity for people to get what they want in their neighborhoods, and not the same live-work-play kind of dynamics, that just show up all over the place.
Yeah, that's interesting. That's an interesting comparison. I think that's what I find so interesting about urban agriculture. In a way, it's restoring a type of work back to the neighborhood that you can trace the line between this work and my survival.
If that makes sense, I'm thinking of things that you would have seen probably in a old school village. I don't know the bread baker, the candle maker, the horseshoe fixer guy, And you've got the fruit stand and the vegetable stand. You have those livelihood businesses, not livelihood. Maybe that's the wrong word, but just I think it's really neat when you can see that connection restored.
Oh right, that's where I go. I love. I used to live in New York City, and I just loved when I had to go to one shop for really good cheese and one shop for really good bread, and there were these little shops. You, there was a meat shop that I went and got turkey legs at for Thanksgiving one year, and it just was so charming to be in there with all these other New Yorkers trying to get their meat for the holidays, and they have their own charming way about how they put together your order.
I don't know. I don't know. Is there a word for what I'm trying to say? But like, I just love that, and I think there's something really literally grounding about seeing about having local food supply and having like the opportunity to have relationships, and I wonder, do you all find that you ever struggle to people to see the value of this?
Because I could see how someone's like that land. Ah, we should use it for housing, or we should use it for something where maybe they feel like it's going to solve a more urgent problem. Do you feel like you ever find yourself kind of needing to work a little bit harder to kind of say like we can do better than Safeway and Publix and Kroger like and helping them see the value of bringing the farm back into the community.
I'd say a couple things. So I think the word you're looking for is excellence, And the thing that you're experiencing when you go to a butcher, when you go to a cobbler, when you go to a local florist, is that these are businesses that define themselves in excellence, They don't define themselves in scale, in margin efficiency, but you get the best products from them, and that's why they're really attractive. In the largest cities, Los Angeles, Tokyo, Paris, New York, They're just filled with these things because people really value excellence, and people value excellence, all over the place. But sometimes it's hard, to bring those forward.
We don't see on the second part, and people know that when it relates to food, particularly, which is that like the quality of the stuff you get is better, and so what they don't need to know is that they want it. What they need to know is that it exists. When people find out that there is a farm literally in their neighborhood, they will go to it. Those farms have existed before.
I said in my own experience, like we had a citrus grove. We went places, all the time. It's not some ye old shop of farm from 200 years ago with the candles maker. I can go to Colonial Williamsburg and see guys churning butter, but this is actually more of a return to things that are familiar within a single generation.
But the second part, I think, to your question is that no, those conflicts that you're highlighting aren't really applicable in our efforts because there is a need for getting a candle, a frozen pizza, some charcoal, some vegetables, and like some deli meat as well. That's what a grocery store serves, Like you can get kind of all those things in one place, but the spaces that we're talking about, they don't work for that either. Nobody's trying to build a Publix where we're trying to build a farm. Nobody's trying to build houses where we're trying to build a farm.
As Jeffrey mentioned, there are 10s of percent of land, but I don't know how many millions of square feet or acres you can quantify it. But there is just a glut of space that is just sort of sitting there that doesn't work for those other things, but it could work for other things like we're proposing. There are worthy debates about what some land should be used for, but there's so many spaces that aren't being used for anything that would be great for, in our case, a farm, and I'm sure other types of businesses as well.
Jeff, I'd love to hear any thoughts you have on my soliloquy to the old. What do they call it? I don't know, like the old market model. But also, I kind of want to tie this back to the theme of emergent urbanism because it's interesting what you all are what's happening with Area Two Farms, and you're bringing new technology, bringing an innovative approach to urban agriculture, but in some ways, it really is embodying this emergent approach. How do you think cities could become more just like open to this mindset, to this experimental, incremental planting attitude towards their places, and in doing so, like unlock more creativity and more solutions to some of the problems we're facing.
So, to answer your question, to get to more village mindset and creating that emergent land use, it's imbuing that flexibility in our zoning codes and reforming our land use to allow for those village-like land uses.
So to wrap things up here, this has been super inspiring, and I feel like I could easily ask you guys a bunch more questions, kill another hour. But all good things must come to a close at some point. So I'd love for you guys to tell me a little bit about your neighborhood. Ask all of my guests this question.
Tell me about your neighborhood. What do you love about it? For the sake of time, maybe you guys could share me one local business that you love to recommend people check out if they come to visit. Oren, I'll start with you.
Sure. Well, the thing that I love about where I live are the people, and I think communities are just made of people, and one of my favorite businesses is a place called Wonderland Books. It's a great local bookstore, and they just friendly staff, great selections, great to walk into. So difficult typical stuff.
Awesome, Jeffrey.
There's one spot here on the near east side of Indianapolis, I love. It's called Natural State. It's a brewery slash gastropub, but they started to create these little spots within that building. So they have a dog park, and then now they host a coffee shop on the weekends, and then they rent a bike shop.
So like this one building that started off as just a restaurant is now like five different third spaces in like one building. It's awesome. It's always activated, and they've really allowed that one building to become an incubator for these entry-level retailers. It's beautiful.
It's awesome. Great, great spot to get a beer.
Fantastic. Well, thank you all so much for taking time to come on the Bottom Up Revolution with me. It's been super inspiring and really fun to talk to you and to capture your story for our audience, and I'm just yeah, I'm really grateful.
Thank you so much. Great to talk with you.
Thank you so much. It's been great.
Obviously, anyone who comes to visit needs to go see an Area Two farm. It's really exciting to hear about where you guys are expanding to. I'm glad to hear a couple are coming to Texas. I'll have to take my kids out for a field trip.
You've set the bar really high with this like custom Lego sets, and I want to get my three-year-old on it, and to be like, okay, I need an original watercolor or something. But we'll put links in the show notes so folks can learn more about what you guys are working on and find the toolkit. To our listeners, thank you so much for joining me for another episode. I'll be back soon with another conversation. In the meantime, keep doing what you can to build a strong town.
This episode was produced by Strong Towns, a nonprofit movement for building financially resilient communities. If what you heard today matters to you, deepen your connection by becoming a Strong Towns member at strongtowns.org/membership.