Published on July 28th, 2010 | by Guest Contributor

Growing the Home Farming Movement with Triscuit

I’ve always been a fan of Triscuits, both because they taste good and because they’re actually healthy. It’s great that Kraft puts out a cracker with an ingredient list you can understand: Whole wheat, Soybean and/or Palm Oil, Salt. (Of course, you get into the flavored ones and it’s a whole different story). Now I have another reason to appreciate the Triscuit brand: they are sponsoring a Home Farming website that aims to support the growing home-farming movement.

Image Credit: Triscuit’s Home Farming Movement

Triscuit's Home Farming Movement offers a live map of urban gardens around the country.

“Triscuit has created this site with help from Urban Farming, a non-profit organization, to help build a home farming community where both beginners and more seasoned gardeners can dialogue and gather information towards their common mission: to reap food that is deliciously fresh, penny-wise, healthier for themselves and the planet.” — Triscuit’s Home Farming Movement

According to Triscuit’s own numbers, almost 2/3 of Americans are interested in growing food in their backyards, 3 out of 4 prefer foods with simple ingredients. Out of that research, the Home Farming Movement was born. Triscuit will be putting basil or dill seeds into four million packages of their crackers, along with instructions on how to plant and care for them. In addition, they are working with Urban Farming to create 50 community-based home farms around the country, with the first already underway in Los Angeles. The website also hosts a Google-based Live Map that logs urban farms across the U.S. to help users find, volunteer at, or start their own urban farm.

It’s a pretty straightforward mission, and one that I think succeeds in bringing a brand name into the green sphere without straying into “greenwashing.” The fact that they are partnering with UrbanFarming.org lends additional credibility to their site and mission. Urban Farming is a Detroit-based non-profit that started in 2005 with a mission “to create an abundance of food for people in need by planting gardens on unused land and space while increasing diversity, educating youth, adults and seniors and providing an environmentally sustainable system to uplift communities.”

Triscuit’s Home Farming website includes pages on “Growing Vegetables at Home,” a “Crop Guide,” “Community Forums,” and “Expert Advice.” The Community Forums looks to be growing, with hundreds of posts from home gardeners either asking or answering questions, and the Expert Advice page has a good selection of starter videos for beginner home gardeners from Paul James, the gardener from GardenerGuy.com.

In essence, Triscuit is hopping on the trend of home gardening by teaming up with an active non-profit, employing a well-known gardening expert, and offering a branded forum for people who may dream about having an urban farm but not know where to start. I love it for the fact that it will get people who never thought of themselves as urban farmers to try their hands at it and see if they, too, have a green thumb.

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Tags: Growing the Home Farming Movement with Triscuit, home farming, home gardening, urban farming, urban gardening

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Guest Contributor is many, many people. We publish a number of guest posts from experts in a large variety of fields. This is our contributor account for those special people. :D