Urban farming concept could grow in Lakewood
Quint and Jennifer Redmond
LAKEWOOD – Back to the future.
Quint and Jennifer Redmond want to wed urban development with the farm, building subdivisions for sustainability and for profit. He also encourages folks in existing neighborhoods to grow food at home and in common areas, becoming “micro-farmers.”
Their trademark “Agriburbia” concept seems to be catching on.
With a project in Milliken already approved, platted and waiting for the economic picture to improve, Redmond’s company, the Golden-based TSR Group, has designs on other sites for it’s concept of clustered homes surrounded by orchards or vineyards or cropland.
A couple of those possible project sites are in Lakewood.
“I think the suburbs and the ‘exburbs’ are going to be the most lush and the most rich place to live,” Quint Redmond said at a recent Ward 1 monthly meeting.
Redmond said he often finds resistance when trying to get the concept across to other land planners. Most people in the profession swear by the Transit-Oriented development model, which thrives on high-density housing.
Quint said the Agriburbia concept was met with amusement before oil prices soared in the past few years, resulting in higher food costs as grocers tried to cover spiraling transportation costs.
“People literally laughed me out of the room a few years ago. I had to leave the room to compose myself,” he said. “I’m the anti-planner. I don’t believe that everyone is going to live in a TOD.”
But the concept, he said, works even with the “New Urbanism” philosophy of more dense development when room for gardens is built into the equation.
Click the image below to learn more about Agriburbia concepts and planning.
Quint holds a bachelor’s degree in geology, a master’s degree in urban regional land planning and another master’s degree in landscape architecture. Jennifer has a degree in biology, also earned masters in urban land planning and grew up on a farm in Pennsylvania.
Their Milliken project, Platte River Village, envisions nearly 1,000 units – houses, town homes or garden flats – clustered on part of a 618-acre parcel near the South Platte River. Milliken’s Town Board unanimously approved the project and a metro district to serve it in 2007 and some lots already are reserved.
TSR’s proposal drew the endorsement of the Town’s planning staff, which recognized the economic potential of the agriculture-based development.
“The application contains a variety of housing types, commercial and agricultural uses that will help diversify Milliken’s housing supply and benefit its economic base,” a staff report said.
The dwellings at Platte River Village would cover about a sixth of the total acreage. Just more than 100 acres will be set aside as a natural area and 23 acres of previously farmed ground will be restored as natural habitat. About 30 acres are set aside for park use. The rest would be used for an organic vineyard, publicly owned civic farms and 2-acre “steward plots” owned by individual residents.
At maximum use, including gardens around the homes, the community would vastly increase the site’s current agriculture production of $354,000 a year. Nearly 50 percent of the previously tilled ground will remain in production.
“The net agriculture value, if everyone plays, is $3 million,” Redmond said.
And it will use only one-third the water used by the current farming operation.
The metro district will install a $1.5 million drip-irrigation system to keep the crops green and growing. Plans call for bio-swale containment of runoff water, providing natural irrigation for orchards.
The project will be “ready to go for the new generation of micro-farmers,” Redmond said.
Platte River Village residents who aren’t into growing their own produce can participate tin the community-supported agriculture part of the concept through old-fashioned sharecropping. The property owner would simply swap the use of their land for a cut of the crop.
And the plan includes a community building with a commercial kitchen so produce grown there can be processed and canned there. Any excess can be sold to local grocery stores, bypassing the traditional fuel-hungry regional food marketing system.
“It really has to do with the price of transportation,” Redmond said. “Traditional agriculture is in trouble. The farmer is starving to death.”
The idea isn’t confined to new development, TSR also advises homeowner’s organizations, neighborhood groups and others about adopting community-supported agriculture and micro farming.
“There’s only so much arable land on the planet,” Redmond said. “There’s 31 million acres of lawn (in the U.S.) … 15 million acres of that would feed the entire country.”
But the very economy that brought Agriburbia to the forefront also is crimping its implementation.
“The economy that’s creating the climate of support is also the same economy that is preventing us from doing anything of scale,” he said.
