Who was the farm planted for — the case against the green premium

The photograph of a farm in a sales or letting brochure always looks much the same: tidy rows, a straw hat, a child holding a harvest basket. Inside the frame, the plot looks open to anyone. Outside it, only three things need checking. Who actually does the growing? Who holds the key to the gate? And how many more years does the contract say the plot will be there? A farm that cannot answer those three questions may be selling not green but a picture of green. This article begins by grounding that suspicion in evidence.

To be clear, this is not opposition to farms as such. Over six days this series has followed what happens as urban agriculture starts being described in the language of real estate. Having spent that time on land values, taxes and contested research, the last day is for facing that language's side effects head-on. 'Green carries a premium' has long been an ally of urban farming: it is the single sentence that persuades an authority, courts a landowner and gets a budget through. But once it genuinely starts to work, the farm enters the property calculation. What happens once it is in there is best heard in the words of the critics.

The first is greenwash. When a property with a farm attached goes on the market, the advertising speaks of the green in the rendering, while the operation — who grows, who may enter, how many years before it was taken out — is barely recorded anywhere. The second is unequal access. A farm that functions as a premium is enclosed towards the people from whom that premium is recovered: residents, tenants. A farm anyone may enter and a farm supplied in exchange for rent are different institutional animals, however alike the photographs. The third is the displacement structure this series has already brushed against: the better the green premium works, the less able the people who most needed that green are to keep paying the rent. That last point was covered with its figures in our earlier column on green gentrification, so it is not repeated here; instead it is re-examined from the side of property rights.

Of the three, the first two are the ones a practitioner can actually move. The third belongs to a city's housing policy and cannot be solved by the operator of a single farm. Hence the shape of this article: the first half sets out the three objections, each tied to something checkable; the second half extracts the design conditions that can still stand afterwards — how to fix the rights to the land, who holds the keys and the budget, writing the removal conditions at the start — from instruments in New York, Boston, England and Japan. The last section draws the seven days together.