Welcoming Home the Farm Next Door:

Small Farms are Returning Tiny homes builder the harvest moon rises in the sky, the faint memory of a nation of local farms celebrating another season of abundance lingers in the air. But soon it may be more than just a vision of long ago. More often now, if we turn the corner, the farm is real. A new form of farm is becoming more and more visible. Under the umbrella term "micro eco-farm," they thrive from backyards to small acreage, and are prospering in our new century. World travel and the Internet have introduced new crops for them, allowing them to grow heirlooms and gourmet varieties not produced large-scale. And global interaction has also brought to them the methods discovered worldwide for organically producing very large amounts on very small plots of land, including backyards. Both ancient discoveries and 21st century research has helped the new micro eco-farm come to life. Historically, the Incans fed 15 million, always with a three to seven-year surplus. China once fed one billion on less than 10% of their land base. Russians lifted themselves from economic disaster in 1997 when its citizens 'farmed' 0.6 acre plots attached to the Russian village houses. 18 million of these plots totaled 15.3 million acres, becoming the most productive 'farms' in the country. French "potagers," or tiny home gardens or gardens allotted to villages, are everywhere. The French government estimates about a quarter of all fruits and vegetables eaten in France are home-grown. And long ago, royal French gardeners helped discover the French intensive method which out-produced conventional mechanical farming many times over. In America, today, this information is gleaned and re-molded into prosperous micro eco-farms. http://www.MicroEcoFarming.com reports some operate in backyards and even urban rooftops. Local Harvest, which tracks statistics on successful eco-farm members, reports that 45% of its member farms are less than 15 acres. Collectively, they help communities, regions and their own countries reach food independence while restoring topsoil and the local eco-system.