 About
Michael Olson
Agriculturalist
Olson cultivated his first crop at the age of six with what he
imagined, at the time, was the world's biggest tractor. He has since
participated in the commercial production of beans, beets, blueberries,
cattle, garlic, hay, oats, shallots, strawberries, turf grass, wheat
and wine grapes in the states of California, Montana and Oregon.
Olson also consults on farm projects throughout the world, with
projects ranging from the City of Watts to the island nation of
Cyprus, to the jungles of the Amazon.
Journalist
Michael Olson produced, wrote and/or photographed feature-length
news for a variety of media, including the San Francisco Chronicle
and Examiner newspapers, Skiing and Small Space Gardening magazines,
NBC, ABC, Australian Broadcast Commission, and KQED Public Television
networks. His production and photography helped win a National Emmy
nomination for NBC Magazine with David Brinkley. Olson is the author
of MetroFarm, the Ben Franklin Book
of the Year Finalist and Executive Producer and Host of the syndicated
Saturday Food Chain radio
talk show, which received the Ag/News Show of the Year Award from
the California Legislature.
Business Person
Olson designed, blended and packaged a fertilizer for container-grown
house and garden plants; certified and registered the product as
a "specialty fertilizer" with the State of California;
sold the product to the national lawn and garden market. As General
Manager of two newstalk radio stations, KSCO & KOMY in Santa
Cruz, California, Olson has over twelve years experience helping
local, regional and national businesses compete within the metropolitan
marketplace. Olson is currently President of the MO MultiMedia Group
in Santa Cruz, California.
About Metropolitan Agriculture
Definition
The industry which uses space-intensive technologies to produce,
process and market crops within a metropolitan area.
Participants
The United Nations Development Program (UNDP), in its 1996 Urban
Agriculture handbook, estimates that 200 million people around the
world participate in metropolitan agriculture. Participants range
the spectrum from the very poor, who use small plots of unused land
to grow subsistence crops, to the very rich, who use capital-intensive
production systems to grow high-value cash crops.
Scale
The size of individual metropolitan farms varies according to location
and capitalization. Location is the proximity to a metropolitan
area's urban center: whereas a farm near the center might be 1/10th
acre, one 40 miles out in the suburban fringe might be 100 acres.
Capitalization is how much money is available for infrastructure:
whereas a well-capitalized farm might have 10 acres of greenhouse
space, a poorly capitalized one might have 100 square feet of greenhouse
space.
Products
Given the eclectic tastes of metropolitan communities, there are
many crop opportunities available to the metropolitan farmer. (MetroFarm
lists over 1,000 crops in 36 different categories.) In general,
metropolitan farmers produce crops which provide advantages over
large-scale competitors in the countryside, including fresh crops,
exotic crops and high-quality crops (e.g. "organic").
Technology
Given the high cost of metropolitan real estate, metropolitan farmers
must rely on the centuries-old space-intensive technologies developed
in Asia-- where a 1/2 acre farm might sustain up to 20 people, the
chinampas of Mexico, the marais of 19th century Paris, and others,
as well as those technologies of modern science which increase the
productivity of space, like drip irrigation and synthetic soils
and fertilizers.
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