To create a more sustainable world, we need to figure out how to mass produce and mass market sustainability. A new franchise-ready, sub-acre farming system called SPIN-Farming provides an example.

SPIN can be used as a "force multiplier" to re-create sustainable food systems because it can be deployed quickly and widely.By leveraging the three best assets the world has - urbanized landscapes, technological agility and an environmental ethos - it is also serving as a catalyst for inventive activity by designers, planners and developers to create the best of all possible worlds.

SPIN-Farming makes it possible to earn significant income from growing vegetables on land bases under an acre in size. SPIN farmers utilize relay cropping to increase yield and achieve good economic returns by growing only the most profitable food crops tailored to local markets. SPIN's growing techniques are not, in themselves, breakthrough. What is novel is the way a SPIN farm business is run.

SPIN provides everything you'd expect from a good franchise: a business plan, marketing advice, and a detailed day-to-day workflow. In standardizing the system and creating a reproducible process it really isn't any different from McDonalds. By offering a non-technical, easy-to-understand and inexpensive-to-implement system, it allows many more people to farm, wherever they live, as long as there are nearby markets to support them, and it removes the two big barriers to entry – sizeable acreage and significant start-up capital.

Every day more and more first generation farmers are using SPIN as an entry point into the profession and uniting behind a new kind of farming that spans class, generations and geography and giving rise to a new multinational farming class that practices engaged, rather than escapist, agriculture that is human in scale, joyful in spirit and appropriately scaled for an urbanized century.