Brave new world
It's an increasingly fashionable hobby and the trend is
being driven by the power of urban agriculture to deliver on so many of
our 21st century needs: healthy food, "buy local and
organic", "slow food". Agricultural sociologist Henk de
Zeeuw sees the movement in North America, Europe and
Australia as a result of "concerns about the quality of
industrially produced food or social and ecological concerns".
The creators of the 100 mile diet advise starting a garden as a way to reduce food miles, no
matter how small your home: "Self-sufficiency feels good, and
greens up our cities and towns. We live in a one-bedroom urban
apartment but grow vine beans, tomatoes and herbs in pots on our
balcony. We also have a 3'x12' plot in a community garden."
Those at Chicago's True Nature Foods market have planted
crops like buckwheat, burdock, comfrey, and artichoke on their roof to ensure a "food supply that
does not rely on fossil fuel for transportation that is dwindling in
availability, and growing in expense."
And in Berkeley, California, Jim Montgomery and Mateo
Rutherford grow all the food they need in their 6,000 square foot
backyard garden: a move they compare with the backyard gardens in the
US and UK planted during World War I and II to bolster the wartime food
supply. "We're growing a victory garden against having to use so much oil."
The director of the Vancouver nonprofit organization
City Farmer, Michael Levenston, sees this movement toward urban
agriculture as a "brave new world". While he says most North
Americans still garden for recreation, not food, this is changing as concerns over climate change and food safety are
propelling the local food trend. "You can't get more local than
your own home. We're going to see more of this in the future, no
question."
Edible cities
Today, cities consume much more than they produce: they
cover just 2% of the Earth's surface, but consume 75% of its resources.
As more of the world's population moves to cities- nearly 80% of the
world's population will live in urban centers by mid-century-,
traditional farms won't sustain us.
Jac Smit, president of the Urban Agriculture Network,
has been studying urban agriculture for several decades. Smit credits
such unrelated elements as the Internet and breakthroughs in drip
irrigation as helping drive the current trend, but he told
faircompanies what we're seeing now is only the beginning.
"Nutritionally self-reliant cities, metropoli, micropoli and
megapolitani will increase as global warming reduces rural agriculture
and as technology and systems improve."
Our cities are rich with potential. Smit cites a 2004
NASA study found that the 3% of the mainland US that was urbanized
(seen from space as night lights) had the agricultural capacity of the
39% currently being farmed.
It's not all hypothesis. Currently, some of the largest
cities in Europe and North America have extensive urban gardens:
- Almost
10% of Greater London is farmland, cultivated by 30,000 urban
gardeners.
- In Berlin,
15% of the city's land is used for agriculture. While the city has
80,000 allotment gardens, all are being used and there is a
waiting list of 14,000 residents.
- Montreal
has North America's largest community garden network with 8,000
18-square-meter city-owned plots, providing mostly organic fruits
and vegetables for personal consumption.
10x10 meter plots to feed a family
City plots can be surprisingly effective. According to a
report by the Community Food Security Coalition,
"in a 130-day temperate growing season, a 10x10 meter plot can
provide most of a household's total yearly vegetable needs, including
much of the household's nutritional requirements for vitamins A, C, and
B complex and iron."
According to Smit, government, private and institutional
studies all show that the intensive production methods typical of urban
agriculture produce 10 to 15 times as much food per square meter or
acre as typical rural agriculture. "Studies in Russia following
Perestroika found that the small Dacha Gardens produced ten times as much per acre as the State farms
with one-tenth the capital investment." [See "Urban
Agriculture: Improving the Environment for Living and Contributing to a
Sustainable Ecosphere" near the end of the page.]
Even in colder climates, personal gardens can flourish.
Alisa Smith and James MacKinnon, founders of the 100-mile-diet and Vancouver residents (where
the average temperature in January is 0-5 °C), grow a winter garden.
"We keep garlic, kale, mustard greens, turnips and cabbage going
throughout the winter. Spinach and Swiss chard are other good winter
greens. Friends as far north as Whitehorse, Yukon, have extended the
growing season with a backyard greenhouse."
Mandatory urban gardens
City governments have begun to give weight to the
movement. Cities like Chicago, Tokyo and Atlanta now mandate that a
percentage of all new buildings have roof gardens. In Vancouver's new downtown
neighborhood Southeast False Creek, developers are required to include
"edible landscaping" and productive food garden spaces for
rooftops and balconies.
In 2004, San Diego (California, US) city planner Nancy
Hughes began pushing to make San Diego America's first "edible city".
Her vision includes setting aside tracts of land inside city limits for
organic urban farming as a way to combat her city's reliance on well-traveled
food. "Why are San Diegans eating tomatoes from Florida when we're
blessed with a year-round growing season?"
While traditionally city officials haven't given farming
the attention they do housing, crime and transportation, this is
changing, according to the Worldwatch Institute's State of the World Report 2007. "Fortunately,
urban politicians, businesses, and planners are beginning to regard
urban agriculture as a tool to help cities cope with a range of
ecological, social, and nutritional challenges-from sprawl and
malnutrition to swelling landfills and the threat of attacks on the
food chain."
Gardens against climate change
Despite their power to produce, Smit explained to
faircompanies that the real strength of urban gardens is not their
fruits and vegetables. "Urban agriculture's greatest 21st century
strength and purpose is in mitigating Climate Change. Producing
products for the economy is secondary."
Bill Clinton has touted the beneficial effects of rooftop gardens on the
overall greening of cities. Greener roofs can provide a source of
rainwater capture, as well as, help control temperatures of cities- the
heat-island effect- and buildings, thereby reduce heating and cooling
needs. The rooftop garden on Chicago's True Nature Foods market
"helps regulate temperature making the inside naturally 15 degrees
warmer in winter and 15 degrees cooler in summer."
Smit lists other ecological benefits of urban
agriculture, including:
- Reduce
the greenhouse effect. Smit cites a study that "found that a tree in Los Angeles has 3 to 5 times the
beneficial effect of a tree in the Amazon rain forest."
- Reduce deforestation and loss of prairie,
given that urban farming is 5 to 15 times more productive per acre
as rural agriculture.
- Reduce
pollution from food miles (see our report Food (I): counting miles per bite).
- Sequester
carbon and enrich the soil with nitrogen fixation, particularly
because urban gardens involve multi-cropping versus the heavily
mono-cropped rural agriculture.
- Reduce
the use of chemical fertilizers because urban waste can be used as
a fertilizer.
A place for waste
Not only can using urban waste on city gardens help
reduce chemical fertilizer use, but urban gardens also give city
dwellers a place to recycle their wastewater and organic waste.
For Berkeley's (California) Jim Montgomery and Mateo
Rutherford, it all works as a closed loop between them, their animals
and their backyard garden. "What we take from the garden and
animals goes into the kitchen, and garden waste goes to the
animals", says Montgomery. Rutherford adds: "And the animal
waste goes into the garden."
In Brisbane, Australia, Scientist Vivienne Hallman feeds her worm-farmed compost to her fish farm and
harvests rainwater for their tanks. The fish waste, in turn, fertilizes
her plants. "As water is fouled by fish excreta and decomposing
food waste, it is used to irrigate vegetables and fruit trees, which also
gain from additional fertiliser from worm castings."
Each of her five 4,000-liter, unheated tanks "is
capable of raising 17 to 20 kg of silver perch under the non-stressful
growing conditions I favour. It's a total potential output of 80 to 100
kgs - more than enough for my family's needs, plus the potential of a
small saleable surplus."
$1 invested = $6 of food
From a financial standpoint, it makes sense to plant, or
raise, your own food. For every $1 invested, community gardeners
receive about $6 worth of vegetables. In 1991, the average urban garden
produced about $160 worth of produce.
This even seems more productive if you consider that the
alternative is often quite costly. Americans spend 30 billion every
year maintaining their lawns, according to Heather Flores who started
the guerrilla gardening group Food Not Lawns (she gave us a tour of
some of the fruit and vegetable gardens she has planted in Eugene,
Oregon. See the video Food Not Lawns).
"The lawns in the United States consume around 270
billion gallons of water a week-enough to water 81 million acres of
organic vegetables, all summer long." According to Flores, lawns
also use ten times as many chemicals per acre as industrial
farmland.
As an added bonus, while gardeners are saving "food
dollars" by harvesting their own produce, they also become more
aware of what they eat and their diets improve. Several studies have
shown that "the fruit and vegetable intake, as measured in terms
of recommended servings per day, is higher among gardeners than among
non-gardeners".
As Jac Smit told Brian Halweil for his book Eat Here (we
have a video with Halweil explaining the local food trend):
"It's a no-brainer. In contrast to pure greenspace or parks, which
taxpayers generally have to finance, urban agriculture can be a
functioning business that pays for itself."
Walls and windowsills
To get started with a garden, it doesn't take much.
Barcelona's urban garden shop Horturbà helps novices begin to garden in
their city apartments. Owner Josep Maria Vallès told faircompanies that
"many people are city people who don't know where to begin".
He gave us his some basic pointers (as seen in Spanish in this video):
- A
sunny spot: a roof top, courtyard, wall, windowsill, balcony.
- A
container- the one in their beginner kit is 66x48cm (26x19
inches).
- Instead
of regular dirt, they suggest an organic humus, like worm compost,
because it retains water better.
- The
easiest vegetables to begin with are those like lettuce, arugula,
radish, onion, garlic, and leeks.
- Vegetables
like tomatoes, melons and eggplant are good container plants, but
with a bit more experience: they require longer cycles and larger
containers.
Space should never be an impediment to getting started.
Vallès even has a recipe for the smallest garden possible. "A 2
liter bottle, cut in half: turn over the upper portion, with a rag in
the neck, place it on the inferior half . . . fill the upper portion
with earth and plant lettuce. In a month, eat it. It's a microgarden, a
portable garden!"
Urbaculture
tech
On the other end of the spectrum, the biggest urban
garden may be yet to come. Farmscrapers (aka sky farming, or vertical farming) are highrise greenhouses, so far
are only conceptual, but they're receiving interest from some of the
world's largest food companies.
Columbia University professor Dickson Despommier
envisions a 21-story vertical farm that could be as productive as 588 acres of land. Not
only would sky farming cut food miles, but given that transport costs
are one of the most expensive parts of traditional agriculture, it
could prove a successful business model. Currently, The Sustainable
Agriculture Initiative, with member companies including Coca-Cola,
Kraft, McDonald's, and Nestlé, has expressed interest.
The tipping point is close
Cities flush with urban gardens may be a reality in our
future, but for now, there's no excuse not to take back our gardens:
whether a windowsill or a wall. In the words of the Green Guerillas- an
urban gardening educational group that has spent decades setting up
community gardens in New York City-, "it's your city; dig it". (Dirksen &
Boullosa, n.d.)
