Urban Agriculture

Why Urban Agriculture?

CrossFitters tend to care a lot about what we put into our bodies. We care about where it comes from, how it was made, what’s in it, how far it traveled, and what our food was fed. What we don’t know much about is how to fix the problems of food quality, food affordability, food security, and food transportation impacts like carbon footprint and ecological or economic exploitation.

urbag4We believe that “shopping at Whole Foods” is not the answer. CrossFit boxes working with local farms, CSAs, and ranches for food production is a very good step, and we support the farm-to-gym movement. But why not take it a step further? Why not gym-as-farm? Enter the CrossFit Somerville Urban Agriculture Team.

We can’t fix all of these problems and feed all of our members with our humble garden, but we can make an impact in a few serious ways:

  1. Test Platform – by experimenting with crops, methods, and techniques we can work on developing good ways to produce our own “clean” food in a way that is suited to our local urban environment.
  2. Education Platform – by involving our members, we are spreading knowledge about how to cultivate food. More people with this knowledge is a Good Thing.
  3. Proliferation – we aim to not just know how to farm at the gym, but actually help to implement these farming basics at our members’ homes if they want help. (Think of an old-timey “barn raising” but with chicken coops and vegetable beds.)

With all this emphasis on food, it’s shocking that more CrossFit gyms aren’t growing their own food with their members… yet. If you’re a box owner or member at another facility and would like your box to start growing, send us an email. We’d be glad to share resources and help you get started. We are happy to be on the leading edge of this movement, and would love to help you get started – in what we see as the best tradition of the open-source methodology sharing that CrossFit was founded on.

If you’re interested in joining the team and learning more, send us an email and we’ll put you in the loop!