An annual urban farm tour allowed tourists to explore some unconventional farms in Lee County this week. It showed tourists some local farms that are experimenting with new trends in farming within an urban landscape.
Included on the tour was one of two USDA certified goat dairy farms in Florida.
The farm, which is called Umbuzi Farm, is run by Jim Ellis and his family. They have managed this small goat farm just northeast of downtown Fort Myers for the past three years.
The property houses a large vegetable garden, some chickens and quite a few goats. The Ellises hope to grow their small business selling goat milk, cheeses and yogurt.
Nancy Ellis, whose husband makes the cheeses and manages the dairy and goat business, says when she first moved to their property all they had were a few sickly goats.
Once they decided they wanted to maintain the property by running a goat farm, she says they started to buy a herd.
“We had to go out of state to buy a lot of the goats,” Nancy says, “and now we have a herd of about 70 some and we just had like 85 kids so far this year.”
Jim is now doing pretty good business selling his products. He is just about to close on a deal selling his cheeses to Whole Foods markets in the area.
His relatively small operation was part of a Lee County Urban Farm Tour this week. Dozens of people loaded onto a bus for a day to explore different farms.
Jim told his guests getting a farm up and running is a lot of work. He says the hardest part is keeping the goats healthy, but he has been able to rely a lot on his family to succeed.
“Larry is my stepdad and he and I pretty much work together and we pretty much made it what it is today together,” he said.
Since more people every year are living in urban areas, the need for urban farming has grown drastically.
Roy Beckford, an agricultural and natural resources agent in Lee County, says the good thing is that an urban farm isn’t very different from a regular farm.
“Urban farm really means farms that are developed and run by people that live in an urban environment,” he says. That’s really all that is.”
Beckford has been organizing an urban farm tour since 2007. He says every year interest in alternative and small farming operations has become a huge tourism draw.
“We can only hold about 59 people on this bus, but I have more than 200 people who want to sit on the bus,” he says. “You know, we depend quite a lot on our tourist dollars. But also, second to tourism in terms of monies that we earn in this county is actually agriculture. So when you put the two of them together, it’s a win-win. It has to be.”
Beckford says there are still a lot of people, however, who know little to nothing about where their food comes from. He says educating those people—as well as people interested in farming—is the bulk of his job these days.
Nancy says the work maintaining a small urban farm can be daunting at times.
“It’s like a 70-hour week for my husband and 40 for my son and myself during kidding season—but we always wanted to be farmers and it is just a great environment to bring up a kid and we love the life,” she says.
