Photographs by Reagan Louie

Even if you’re only the slightest bit familiar with California’s $30 billion–plus farm economy, you may have heard the lament: urban development is steamrolling the state’s agricultural belt. Every day, bountiful fields surrender to big-box stores, fast-food restaurants, and residential sprawl. More than 100,000 acres were paved over in the Central Valley alone in the 1990s, and experts estimate that nearly 1 million more could vanish within a generation. Today’s Country Mouse is tomorrow’s City Mouse (or, more likely, a critter skittering across a cookiecutter suburban subdivision).

But while this threat is real and not to be taken lightly, it tends to obscure another phenomenon that is, in its own quiet way, gaining traction: cities up and down the state—and, indeed, across the United States and around the globe—increasingly are championing agriculture and forging beneficial bonds between urban and rural locales.

These links can take many forms, some more commonplace than others: bustling farmers’ markets, "buy locally grown" campaigns, urban-to-ag water recycling programs, agricultural greenbelts and parks nestled in and around densely populated areas, city educational and recreational initiatives that regard the farm as a valuable asset. In each case, the key to success is getting people to recognize that the places furnishing our fruits, vegetables, milk, and meat are not separate from the regional metropolitan framework but, rather, an integral piece of it.

"It’s really important that cities begin to embrace the countryside because that’s what they’re based upon," says Sibella Kraus, director of Berkeley’s Program for Agriculture at the Metropolitan Edge, which is exploring ways to encourage urban planners to incorporate farmland into their blueprints. "The food system is the base of civilization."

In effect, this nascent movement marks the bridging of two trends that many know by the buzzwords "smart growth" and "sustainable agriculture." The former involves organizing cities around compact neighborhoods with a lively array of residential, retail, and leisure-time choices. The latter refers to cultivating food in a way that, without sacrificing profitability, promotes environmental health and socio- economic equity.

Put them together and you have what Kraus calls "New Ruralism"—a model beginning to generate considerable interest from a variety of quarters. Early last month, more than 200 people gathered on the Berkeley campus for a twoday symposium on the subject, and it wasn’t just academics, farmers, and foodies who attended. City planners, developers, architects, and others who have the ability to literally reshape our landscape are beginning to take heed of New Ruralism’s precepts.

Previously, "a master-planned community would be put in, and it would just swallow up all the agricultural land right up to the farm on the other side of the fence," says Renée Robin, a land-use attorney in San Francisco. "Now, people are asking, ‘Why not have the farm be on our side of the fence?’ It makes the whole community more desirable."

In some ways, the basic notion behind New Ruralism is quite old. In his 1898 book, To-Morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform, Ebenezer Howard called for seamlessly merging urban and rural environs into what he termed the Garden City. "There are in reality not only, as is so constantly assumed, two alternatives—town life and country life—but a third alternative," he wrote. This is one "in which all the advantages of the most energetic and active town life, with all the beauty and delight of the country, may be secured in perfect combination." Howard’s aim was to counteract the poverty, squalor, and overcrowding of 19th-century urban England.

These days, different drivers are at work: a focus on eating things that are fresh and good for us (and, in the wake of a recent string of E. coli outbreaks, not mass produced); a desire to be conscientious stewards of the land by, in part, endorsing small-scale agriculture as opposed to factory farming; and a push to alter the ways we grow, process, and transport our food so that they’re more energy efficient.

As with many young movements, it’s easy to get caught up in the promise of this one and forget that the various concepts falling under the rubric of New Ruralism probably strike most people as utterly foreign—even a little wacky. So although it may seem as if everybody you know in the Bay Area would just as soon slit their wrists as feed their kids a piece of fruit that has been sprayed with pesticides, keep in mind that as of 2005—the most recent data available—a mere 0.5 percent of all U.S. farmland was organic. Likewise, some 4,300 farmers’ markets may have sprung up around the nation, but that pales in comparison with nearly 14,000 McDonald’s. The golden french fry still reigns over the purple potato.

Nor is the credo to purchase locally grown applicable year-round across much of America, with many farms freezing over in the fall and winter.

"There are a lot of pieces" to making New Ruralism a widely accepted reality—"and a lot of things still to work out," says Wayne James, who tends 20 acres in Santa Rosa. Recently, James and I stood beside his operation, Tierra Vegetables, where my tongue tingled from a taste of his chile jam.

His farm couldn’t be woven any tighter into the fabric of urban Sonoma County; a row of homes abuts his fields, their second-story windows and rooflines peering down upon his carrots and kale. Just across Airport Boulevard, where Tierra’s farm stand is perched, a new housing development went in last year to accommodate Santa Rosa’s ever-expanding population (now at more than 157,000).

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