Crop Mobs are where are bunch of urban young people go play farmer for a day. The idea is very similar to Habitat for Humanity, except instead of building a house for poor people you do weeding for someone who owns millions of dollars worth of land (probably mortgaged, though).

This reminds me of Madrona Farm in south Saanich. After buying the farm off their grandparents, the current owners discovered that it’s not actually economically viable. Since it’s in Saanich’s Agricultural Land Reserve, it can’t be developed, but the worry is that it could become a “hobby farm or gentleman’s estate”*.

Madrona’s solution was to solicit donations from the community with a food security pitch. I think it would have been more logical and fair to either:

• organize Crop Mobs to reduce the cost of running the farm; or,
• setup a Community Shared Agriculture system, where people buy shares of the farm in exchange for a share of the produce

Treehugger has noted that donations and volunteers are not a sustainable model for agriculture. (Read the comments, too.) Subsidized agriculture leads to inefficient uses of agricultural land and delays the development of sustainable models. Either people are willing to pay a high enough premium to make local agriculture profitable, or they are just giving lip service (and the occasional feel-good donation) to food security. Although the Crop Mobs suggest that a theme park where you get to play farmer might be an excellent business model…

* hobby farm noun.

“a farm run at an ongoing loss as a lifestyle choice by people with the means to do so”

gentleman noun.

“a man with an income derived from property”