Join the SPIN Corps!: Teach the Business of Growing Food

Wally Satzewich is a veteran urban farmer and the developer of SPIN-Farming. After farming conventionally for nearly 20 years he realized that by downsizing his operation to less than an acre he could generate the same income as a large-scale farmer, but with less stress and overhead, and with more certainty of success from year-to-year. Along with his wife and business partner Gail Vandersteen, he operates Wally’s Urban Market Garden, a multi-locational sub-acre urban and periurban farm dispersed over multiple residential backyard plots leased from homeowners in and around Saskatoon, Saskatchewan Canada. The sites range in size from 500 sq. ft. to 3,000 sq. ft., and the growing area totals a half acre. The produce is sold at The Saskatoon Farmers Market and to restaurants. Wally served as agricultural advisor to Somerton Tanks Farm, an urban demonstration farm in Philadelphia, PA that achieved agricultural and financial breakthroughs that many thought impossible, generating ＄68,000 in gross sales from a half-acre in 2006, its 4th year of operation. He is co-author of the SPIN-Farming online learning series that is helping to foster a growing corps of backyard and neighborhood lot first generation farmers around the world. Roxanne Christensen is co-author of the SPIN-Farming online learning series with Wally Satzewich, a veteran urban farmer in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan Canada, who developed SPIN after farming conventionally for nearly 20 years. Roxanne collaborated with Wally on the creation of Somerton Tanks Farm, a half-acre urban demonstration farm operated in partnership with the Philadelphia Water Department in Philadelphia, PA. Somerton Tanks Farm, which was the first US. test bed for the SPIN-Farming system, achieved agricultural and financial breakthroughs that many thought impossible, generating ＄68,000 in gross sales in its 4th year of operation. The big opportunity she sees for SPIN-Farming is that it provides a farming system that can be learned and practiced across all economic classes and geographical boundaries, and that it will foster engaged, rather than escapist, agriculture whereby farmers set up their businesses in cities and towns and rebuild local food systems that are human in scale and joyful in spirit.