Urban farmers come in several forms. There are those agrarian devotees who plant a large portion of their backyard each spring with an eye toward canning, freezing, and drying much of their winter food supply. Other serious local growers cultivate a patch of land at a community garden or volunteer their time and energy on outlying farms as part of a Community Sponsored Agriculture program. Still others plant small plots as much for art as for agriculture.

And if the hordes of people who show up every Saturday at our local farmers’ markets are any indication, there are also plenty of folks who love fresh produce and maybe even yearn for the sort of self-reliant emotions a backyard garden can evoke but have no talent or time for the grueling work required to grow food. For these urban agricultural refugees, there’s now a new option: hire a farmer to tend your own land.

While the concept may sound peculiar, it attracted a full house to a pub on East Lake Street in early February to hear more. There, they learned that the rent-a-farmer deal is part of a program called Backyard Harvest, put together by the Minneapolis-based Permaculture Research Institute. And it must have sounded more than slightly appealing: The assembled crowd ponied up almost $6,500 to support the effort. Two dozen South Minneapolis yards are now enrolled for this season. For those inclined to dig in themselves, PRI offered several classes on urban agriculture in April. For current programs and appearancs, visit pricoldclimate.org.

Backyard Harvest is modeled after similar initiatives in the Bay Area as well as Seattle and Durham, N.C. As PRI coordinator Krista Leraas describes it, the program is more than just a farmer rental service for time-strapped, brown-thumbed urbanites. It’s designed to strengthen the local food infrastructure “one yard at a time” by persuading more people to eradicate their lawns and connect more viscerally with the origin of their food. The program will also try to use food-centered celebrations to build community.

It’s most visible service, however, will be to help train young urban farmers (yuffies?) and connect them with a willing customer base. For $1,200, those clients get a designated farmer who creates and maintains a 100-square-foot garden plot in their backyard. The farmer prepares the plot, plants, weeds, harvests — all the sweat-laced, mosquito-swatting chores that can make horticulture so challenging. The client gets to do the eating.

Leraas and PRI are the local emissaries of a global permaculture movement that originated with a couple of Australian visionaries, Bill Mollison and David Holmgren, who in the 1970s crafted a design philosophy for sustainable agricultural systems. The core values of permaculture include “Earthcare” (acknowledging that we are not separate from the earth we live on), “peoplecare” (supporting people as they change their way of living and helping to develop healthier societies), and “fairshare” (limiting consumption in ways that are equitable).

Permaculture villages have since sprouted all over the world, but typically in rural areas and in more temperate climates than ours. Longer growing seasons and milder temperatures make it easier to grow your own food and heat your home sustainably. But there are small things we can do in our unforgiving northern clime to embrace permaculture philosophy and utilize some of its tools, Leraas says. “One simple step towards cold-climate permaculture is to plant food in your yard, in particular perennial fruits and nuts like cherries, pears, hazelnuts, raspberries, or even hardy kiwi.”

And living in an urban environment shouldn’t be an obstacle either. “Once we look at the city’s elements as opportunities to create beauty through design, we begin to find solutions,” writes St. Louis–based community organizer and home builder Jeff Brown in a recent issue of EarthLight magazine. Brown recommends building greenhouses and planting gardens in vacant lots. Our lawns could be transformed into sustainable food-producing farms, he adds, by combining backyards into arable land. Plus, you can grow climbing plants on the sides of buildings. And you can get all the water you need to irrigate these crops by building water catchment systems on your roof.

“Remember, it is a conscious choice for us to see ‘impediments’ to rebuilding sustainable cities,” Brown writes. “Urban areas have lots of energetic people who, when putting their minds and hearts together, can create beautiful, healthy, living environments in the midst of supposed chaos.”