The Real Story Behind a Pioneering Urban Farmer

He never wanted to start an urban farm movement. He just wanted to make money.

This is the story of Wally Satzewich. He did not come from a farm family. Forty years ago he was driving a cab in Saskatoon SK. Self-sufficiency was as strong a cultural impulse as it is today, so he began growing food in his 1,000 square foot backyard and selling it at the Saskatoon Farmers Market. That sealed his fate. He realized he was a farmer.

Like most farmers back then, Wally thought that to become successful, he had to get bigger. He acquired 20 acres outside of Saskatoon, along the Saskatchewan River, invested in an expensive irrigation system and brought in outside work crews. But he continued to live in Saskatoon and grow in his small yard there.

His rural plot was considered an idyllic farming site on its riverfront location. The reality was different. His crops were perpetually challenged by wind and hail, insect infestation, rodents and deer. Fluctuating water levels inhibited irrigation during dry spells. After a few years he was well along the road to ruin. Still, the same advice kept coming — expand even more.

It just wasn’t adding up for him. He was growing high-value crops, like carrots, radish, spinach and salad mix in his small backyard, and he was growing low- value crops, like onions and potatoes, on his larger acreage in the country. This distinction between a high-value and low-value crop got him thinking about the other advantages to his backyard garden plot in the city.

He could grow high-value crops in the city because he was not losing them to large scale insect infestations and deer. His irrigation system in the city was the water faucet. He did not have to depend on fluctuating river levels or worry about water quality.

Using the city’s microclimate advantage, he found he could grow three or more crops a year on the same plot, pick and process them on-site and put them into his cooler to keep them top-quality for market, which was 5 minutes away. The small scale of his city crops allowed him to manage his entire operation with only the help of his wife. He did not have to pay outside labor.

When Wally looked at his financials is when his head really got turned around. What he saw was that, even though the growing space and overhead of his city-based operation were a fraction of that of his larger rural property, their bottom lines were similar. He could earn as much, or more, income from his backyard as his larger-scale farm, but with a lot more control over his operation, a lot less stress and overhead, and with a lot more certainty of success from year to year.

In 1998 Wally sold off his land in the country and became an urban farmer, eventually adding 30 additional yards and city lots to his operation, which he kept to under an acre in size. The only land he owned was his backyard, and he rented or bartered for the others.

Meanwhile, the forces needed to change the way to eat and farm that had been building for a quarter century coalesced and found expression in a new movement — urban farming. Wally became a poster child for it, for a while. While he was certainly aware of the many social and environmental benefits of how he farmed, his main interest was that it benefited the bottom line of the farmer.

Over the last 20 years Wally has sustained his five-figure business growing on multiple scattered plots in urban, peri-urban and rural areas, sometimes growing in all three at the same time, following what he calls the multi-locational model. He has kept his operation about an acre in size. While his SPIN-Farming system is especially suitable for urban areas, the context really doesn’t matter.

“A lot of people just don’t get it,” Wally says. “Many people are not seeing the potential of small plot intensive farming because they are not willing to make the break with home gardening thinking, or they are tied into the idea that they need a larger land base.”

So what does Wally call himself? “Hey, I’m just a farmer,“ he says.

SPIN stands for s-mall p-lot in-tensive.
SPIN Farming is a commercial production system designed specifically for growing spaces under an acre in size. It was developed in the mid-90’s by Canadian farmer Wally Satzewich. Those who practice it use gardens, community plots and vacant land to start and operate moneymaking farms that serve the needs of local communities.