In this Urban Agriculture Business training, you'll examine the life-blood of any successful urban agriculture business operation: cash-flow, efficiencies and forecasts. These granular details may be less romantic than digging your hands in the dirt, but they can help you succeed long term.
The next time you read headlines like "Couple makes $85,000 a year on a 1.4 acre lot" or "$1,000 a week from a front yard garden" you'll know how they did it!
This course isn't only useful for those striving to make a profit, however. Hobbyists, amateurs and others will also benefit from learning about the tools used in the business world.
We will examine ways to minimize start-up costs, how to comply with local city codes and ensure that you define the strengths and weaknesses of your planned enterprise. We will also consider the future of urban agriculture overall based on what's happening right now.
After completing this Urban Agricultural Business Overview course, you'll be able to:
You also might be interested in the Free Introduction to Urban Agriculture.
Gail Langellotto, OSU Professor and Guest Home Horticulture Instructor. Gail has a M.S. and Ph.D. in entomology, and has published research on topics as diverse as the costs of starting and maintaining a vegetable garden, pollinator-friendly gardens, and the benefits of gardening to healthy eating. Her OSU Extension Service and outreach efforts are focused on communicating research-backed management practices to home gardeners. For the online Master Gardener and urban agriculture PACE courses, she supervises overall course development, and reviews and contributes to course content.
Mykl grew up in a military family and has traveled around the globe. He started down his agricultural path after picking the makings of a salad directly into a bowl while standing within a greenhouse in his backyard in Colorado.
Mykl came to the Pacific Northwest to enter the agricultural sector and really immerse himself in an environment of plant growth. . He spent a handful of years at Oregon State University to retrain in a new undergraduate degree so he could finish with a Master’s of Horticulture. He's worked on a handful of farms and tended ever-larger gardens, often on someone else's land. He is now creating and teaching courses at OSU as the Instructor of Urban Agriculture.
In addition to his work for OSU's certificate program in urban agriculture, he is experimenting with a system to convert food waste into insect protein. Outside the university, Mykl gardens when he can and runs a number of nutrient cycling experiments.