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Though my father was a subscriber to Organic Farming magazine in the Sixties, the practice was till pretty exotic until just a few years ago when most chain grocery stores began carrying organic produce. Now organic farms have become so popular that housing developers are beginning to incorporate them in their planning. Localized food growing – where it’s practical – offers a lot of advantages to long distance shipping. And the organic approach is much more sustainable in terms of preserving good soil and preventing damaging runoff into streams, rivers, lakes and oceans.

The following from an article in the New York Times:

Increasingly, subdivisions, usually master-planned developments at which buyers buy home sites or raw land, have been treating farms as an amenity. “There are currently at least 200 projects that include agriculture as a key community component,” said Ed McMahon, a senior fellow with the Urban Land Institute.

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Here in South Burlington, David Scheuer, a developer, runs a firm called Retrovest that specializes in pedestrian-friendly subdivisions. He is adapting the Prairie Crossing model with a 220-acre project called South Village, where he eventually hopes to sell 334 homes at prices of $200,000 to nearly $700,000.

A 16-acre segment of the property, which was not previously used for farming, is now producing lettuce, garlic and other crops, which are harvested for sale to homeowners and others from the area who have joined a local community-supported agriculture group. “Agriculture can be the caboose on the train,” Mr. Scheuer said, “and housing can be the engine.” Once he is selling 20 homes a year, he said, he hopes to pay the salary of a full-time farmer.