Urban Agriculture Can’t Feed Us, but That Doesn’t Mean It’s a Bad Idea

Research shows that the social and cultural benefits of city farms and gardens far outweigh the number of people they can feed.

Urban farm near low-income housing in Chicago. (Photo: Linda N./Flickr)

May 10, 2016

Willy Blackmore is TakePart’s Food editor.

http://www.takepart.com/article/2016/05/10/urban-agriculture?cmpid=foodinc-fb

Growing up in Iowa is a good way to become familiar with what a field of corn looks like. My eye is more readily drawn to its shiny, lopping leaves and the spike of an unopened tassel than to most any other plant. Driving across Los Angeles, as I do far too often, the crop still catches my eye, but the plots that it grows on here look nothing like the rolling farms back home that each measure in the thousands of acres. Instead, it’s a small berm pushed up against a park fence outside a homeless encampment, a narrow bed hemmed-in by wrought iron along a rougher stretch of Melrose, or an odd triangle of otherwise unused land created by a freeway on-ramp. All are home to tiny cornfields with no more than 20 stalks each.

It’s no wonder that corn is grown in the city. The grain, like the tortillas made from it, is such a mainstay of the Mexican and Mexican American diet that it plays a role in cultural identity too. Because nearly half of Los Angeles’ population is of Hispanic descent, corn plays a cultural and culinary role here, with golden ears as commonly depicted on murals in Hispanic neighborhoods, it seems, as Cesar Chavez or Aztec gods. But a dozen ears of corn (or, as was the case in my own tiny cornfield last year, one or two) aren’t going to yield all that much to eat.

Such small-scale gardening is not what some of urban agriculture’s biggest boosters believe can and should be done in American cities. Proponents of large-scale indoor or vertical farms—tricked out with high-tech moisture- and nutrient-monitoring systems to reduce inputs, and recirculating hydroponics or aquaculture systems that promise sustainable production—imagine a future in which rural farmland is used to grow row crops, such as corn and other staples, and high-nutrient, high-value vegetables are grown in tighter spaces more within the city limits. Not only would this shorten the supply chain, the argument goes, but it could provide jobs, reduce carbon emissions and water use, and generally help to create a more sustainable food system.
But the mini corn plots, with their low yields and high cultural relevance, might be a more realistic example of what urban farming is capable of doing for a city, according to a new review from the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future of previously published research looking at the promise and limitations of urban agriculture.
Related: Can Urban Agriculture Feed the World's Growing Cities?
“I don’t think these big sweeping urban agriculture ideas are going to happen anytime soon,” said Raychel Santo, a program coordinator at the Center for a Livable Future and a coauthor of the report. Of all the benefits of urban farming that proponents like to tout—Santo, a master gardener, said she comes to this with a pro–urban ag bias—the social aspects are the strongest. The promises of self-sustaining cities, enormous job creation, and the potential to upend the agriculture industry have yet to come to fruition.
Still, Santo said, “I wouldn’t rule out urban agriculture as something we shouldn’t be doing because it can’t be a panacea for all of our problems.” If urban farms cannot make the food supply carbon-neutral, they can help reduce heat islanding. If urban farms cannot bring an end to food deserts, they can help supplement people’s diets with affordable, nutritious fruits and vegetables on a seasonal basis. “I think that we have to be really careful about how we communicate the potential of urban agriculture,” she added. “If we overstate what it can do, we could lose a lot of its support” when such lofty goals aren’t met.
California, with its year-round growing season and booming traditional agriculture industry, is one of the places where urban farming has both been sold as something like a panacea and received a lot of support with hopes of making some of those promises real. The state has its drawbacks—the largest being the crushing drought that’s into its fifth year—as a potential hub for urban agriculture. But if the ag sector uses 80 percent of California’s freshwater resources, then why not redirect some of the comparatively small amount of water used to irrigate lawns and other landscaping to grow food in urban areas? After all, Los Angeles was once the top-producing ag county in the U.S.
In 2014, the state passed the Urban Agriculture Incentive Zones Act, which extends property tax breaks to landowners who use vacant lots that fall within certain boundaries to grow food for at least five years. Los Angeles and San Francisco adopted the act the same year, and a report from the Los Angeles County Assessor’s Office found that 57,000 lots would be eligible for the program.

So far, just one garden in Potrero Hill, a neighborhood in San Francisco, is using the program, earning roughly a $6,000 annual tax break, according to Eli Zigas, food and agriculture policy director at the nonprofit San Francisco Bay Area Planning and Urban Research Association, which advocated for the act on the state and local levels.

“We never expected it to be a huge number of parcels in San Francisco,” owing to the high real estate prices and premium on space on the peninsula, Zigas said. “But we had hopes that more property owners would take advantage of it by now. The hope is that more landowners in other jurisdictions will pick it up.”
Even if the incentive has yet to be wildly successful in the Bay Area, the demand for the tax break, as it were, should help put to rest the notion that “urban farming is making San Francisco’s housing crisis worse,” as one Atlantic story declared in 2014. As Zigas said, echoing the findings of the Johns Hopkins report, the goal is not to find enough land for a city to feed itself. Even if that were the case, the money in tax breaks that property owners could earn by turning their land into farms pales when compared with the revenue they could earn by developing housing in the top real estate market in the country.
“It’s hard enough to make a living selling what you grow as a rural farmer. It’s even harder when you have the urban costs of doing business and the cost of living in a city,” Zigas said.
When developing policies or projects to expand urban agriculture, it should be understood that “the primary benefit is educational,” Zigas said. “The real value of urban agriculture isn’t in terms of the number of people it feeds but in the number of people it touches and educates.” Much like a public park or an urban nature preserve, which allows urban residents to connect with the native ecology of a place, urban farms can provide residents a way to connect with the natural process of growing food—and that connection has value, even if it doesn’t mean that a lot of what they eat is grown within city limits.
Santo noted that “gardening can increase community well-being and social interaction between neighbors,” as well as civic engagement, support for farmworkers, and awareness of other social justice issues in the food chain that feel more immediate when you’re, say, doubled over harvesting your own strawberries instead of picking them out of a grocery-store display. (The caveat is that much of the research showing such benefits comes from the social sciences, and a direct causal relationship cannot be shown.)
Even if the social and educational potential of urban agriculture is great, as first lady Michelle Obama has shown with her focus on teaching and community gardens, there are still questions about access and audience that the report says need to be addressed. Just look at the one plot taking advantage of the tax incentives in San Francisco: The median list price for a home in Potrero Hill is $1.1 million, according to the real estate website Redfin, just above the median price for the city as a whole. Potrero Hill is not the neighborhood that has the most to gain from the kind of social and educational benefits that urban agriculture can provide.

Even in communities where food issues—from access to hunger to diet-related disease—are more acute, the Johns Hopkins report highlights the common problem of white, well-off organizations using cheap, accessible land in such neighborhoods while “unintentionally excluding people of color from participating in or reaping the benefits of such efforts.” As Brandon Hoover, director of sustainability at Messiah College, wrote in a paper quoted by Santo and her coauthors: “Is urban agriculture just another form of urban renewal, displacing underprivileged communities in the process, or is it an inclusive practice that works with marginalized people in the remediation of ‘their’ land?” On the flip side, community-led projects intended to serve minority or lower-income neighborhoods “have experienced disparities in access to land, government funding, and political support compared to urban agriculture efforts led by white and middle-class groups,” according to the report.

Santo pointed out that “there are a lot of studies showing that for lower-income or minority groups, this is a good way for them to maintain some food sovereignty” and to access crops that they might not be able to obtain at local grocery stores.

That’s the case with many of the mini corn plots found in backyards (and front yards and freeway medians) and community gardens. A recent study of corn varieties grown by Hispanic communities in Los Angeles and Riverside found that the gardeners are helping to conserve a significant amount of biodiversity, both in terms of the variety of corn grown and the DNA of the plants themselves. While growing the same criollo or heirloom corn in Boyle Heights that was sown across acres at a family’s ancestral home in Mexico has significant personal and cultural relevance, the genetic diversity maintained in such corn varieties—which are often drought-tolerant and can be grown with few inputs—could help provide the basis for future varieties that could withstand the harsher climate rural farmers are coping with.
“Urban agriculture, while it can’t feed an entire city, at least maintains the knowledge of how to produce food,” Santo said. It allows generations who have never known rural life to have both the seeds and the understanding, even on a small scale, of how to feed themselves. That, she continued, could make us more resilient in the uncertain future.

The Sustainable Couple: Kelli’s Homestead

by Jessica Lane

http://104homestead.com/happy-sustainable-couple-kelli/
“To me, homesteading means engaging in a give-and-take relationship with the earth. That means growing your own food, cooking from scratch, raising backyard livestock, collecting rainwater, simplifying your life, reducing your impact, and basically not being a jerk to Mother Nature. She is, after all, part of the reason why we are surviving.” – Kelli

The Sustainable Couple

Homesteader Profile: Kelli, her husband, John, and their two dogs live on a 1/3 acre urban homestead in a large Eastern Iowa city. They share details about our homesteading adventure, including our gardens, our chickens, our home, and more at The Sustainable Couple.

Kelli’s Homesteading Journey

Our urban homestead and The Sustainable Couple was born about 5 years ago. We had lived in our new-to-us home for about a year and we wanted a small garden. At the time I was working as a high school language arts teacher and had the summer off. Tending a garden seemed like a nice summer hobby. I did a little research, discovered we’re right on the line between Zone 4 and Zone 5, and rented a tiller from the hardware store. What started as a simple 6’x8′ garden in the ground eventually became six raised garden beds, each measuring 4’x8′ for almost 200 square feet of raised bed space. We also have some edible landscaping under the shade of a few big trees, which adds about 50 additional square feet of space.

You could say that gardening was a gateway urban homesteading drug, because then came the compost bins. I even tried vermicomposting for a few months, but killed the worms by accident. And then canning and preserving the harvest.
Soon I realized that watering my garden from the faucet – and paying for city water – was not a good idea. So naturally we needed rain barrels, and installed 14 of them, complete with an irrigation system to get the water from the barrels to the garden.

With all of that wonderful organic produce, I began cooking from scratch. It’s a fun challenge to see if we can avoid buying processed foods from the store (our local food co-op). Then came our small backyard flock of laying hens, which we lovingly refer to as “The Ladies”.

Any urban homesteader will tell you that the moment they get an animal that produces something for the homestead, they feel like they’ve achieved the dream. For us, it was the yard birds that made it happen. Not only do we feed these partially free-range girls a 100% organic diet on a budget, but they supply us AND several neighbors with eggs. We sell about 2-3 dozen eggs a month. It’s not much, but it more than pays for their feed bill.

After about 5 years we realized we were building up this little homestead in the city without even knowing it. Our home was built in 1840, it requires a bit of upkeep. This is where my electrician husband gets to shine! Nearly 100% of our home renovations are DIY, frugal, and earth-conscious.
Heck, frugal, earth-conscious renovations don’t stop with our house. Our chicken coop is actually a retro-fitted HAM radio shed!
But we’re not done yet, folks. We’ve got some big plans for this year. In 2015 we hope to add more edible landscaping to the front of our 1/3 acre lot. You’ll see that we have quite a large front yard:

This is a lot of space that isn’t being used for food production. Talk about a missed opportunity! So, this year means blueberry and raspberry bushes, maybe two fruit trees, and lots and lots of herbs and ‘pretty’ vegetables (like rainbow chard).
In our home, we’re going to continue composting nearly all of our food waste (which isn’t much). We’re going to continue preserving our harvest, sharing bumper crops with the community, family, and friends.
Lastly, in 2015 we are going to refocus on making home the center of our homestead. To us, this means spending more time on our passions, with our family and with our friends. This means slowing down, unplugging, savoring the minutes. It means asking “Why?” and “Why not?” It means putting our homestead before our day jobs at times, because the heart of the homestead is in the hard work and love between the two people who share it: The Sustainable Couple.

Kelli’s Advice for Urban Homesteaders

Think big. Not in scale, but in idea. You can do nearly everything on a small, urban piece of yard or patio that a person with a few acres does in the country. You’re altering the scale and process by which it is done. We live in the heart of a city of 40k+ people. We live 5 blocks from a bustling, vibrant downtown district. We have chickens, and 6 raised beds in our backyard, and rain barrels, and a front yard garden, and edible landscaping. Last time I checked, this rivals some homesteaders who live on acreages. Think big, friends.

A small but growing number are finding success growing crops within the city

 

Rachel Tayse, co-owner of Swainway Farms, feeds the chickens in the backyard of a home in Clintonville.

By JD Malone The Columbus Dispatch  •  Wednesday November 25, 2015 8:02 AM

http://www.dispatch.com/content/stories/business/2015/11/25/urban-acres.html

On Canyon Drive in dense, residential Clintonville, a sign in the window of a particular small house reads: “Organic farm, please do not spray.”
Step into Joseph Swain’s backyard and it is clear that this is no residential garden. A pair of long raised beds and a small hoop house take up much of the narrow lot. Chickens peck and scratch in a pen tucked into a corner. Bright green garlic shoots poke from the dark soil that hasn’t been covered with straw for the winter.
This is urban agriculture — small plots, novice farmers and a belief that people want locally grown food.
Swain’s business, Swainway Urban Farm, is for-profit, and he’s been at it for seven years, making him just about the longest-tenured urban farmer in Columbus. Swain and his partner, Rachel Tayse, farm two backyards and grow indoors in a warehouse in Clintonville.
They believe Columbus has a lot of room for urban farmers.
“We’ve grown every year,” Swain said. “We’ve never been able to meet demand.”
The city has only 15 or so commercial farms — which, unlike the roughly 250 community gardens, operate as full-fledged businesses. That’s a far cry from Rust Belt cities such as Cleveland and Detroit, which have dozens of urban farms, but the number is growing.
“There is not near the vacant land here like there is in Cleveland and Detroit,” said Mike Hogan, associate professor and local-foods program leader for Ohio State University Extension. “But there are new (farms) popping up all the time.”
Hogan saw an opportunity to help folks interested in growing food in the city by tapping into Ohio State’s massive agricultural knowledge and resources. His master urban agriculture class, offered through the Extension program, has graduated more than 100 people in the past 18 months.
Joel Harris, 29, a former soldier who did a combat tour in Iraq, is one of them. He opened Heirloom Produce this year and started growing leafy greens and root vegetables on a pair of reclaimed, vacant city lots he leases for $10 each.
He’s learned a lot, both from Hogan’s class and from running his own business.
“I was beyond happy,” Harris said of his success this year, “and I don’t have any agricultural background at all.”
Harris sees a lot of room for both his business and many others like it in the city. He sees the proximity to a large population and relative economic stability as positives that outweigh the higher cost of obtaining land and stricter zoning.
“Columbus is a great market. We’re right here where the demand is. There is no doubt there is room for more,” he said. “There’s money to be made.”
Harris sold mostly at farmers markets this year but hopes to move into restaurant and wholesale accounts.
Swain and Tayse also sell at farmers markets, like those in Clintonville and Worthington, and to several restaurants, including the Crest, as well as the Bexley Natural Market and Weiland’s Market. Restaurants and wholesalers offer more-consistent year-round business than seasonal farmers markets.
While urban land represents only 3 percent of the 2.3 billion acres in the country, according to the USDA’s 2007 land-use report, it is home to 81 percent of the country’s population.
Those people need to eat, and one of the hottest food trends in the past few years is buying locally produced food.
“We’re in the right place to do this,” said Bruce McPheron, dean of Ohio State’s College of Food, Agriculture and Environmental Science. He noted that Ohio State is the only major agricultural institution based in a big city.
“We are a great test bed.”
McPheron sees Hogan’s class as a way to reach a new segment of farmers who might not have hundreds or thousands of acres to grow Ohio’s traditional commodity crops. He also hopes to seed business opportunities here in Columbus.
“There are a lot of people who want to get into the business,” McPheron said. “There are ways we can make a living doing this so it isn’t just a hobby,” he added.
There are challenges to growing in Columbus, including the relatively high price of land and lack of vacant lots compared with other large Midwestern cities, Hogan said. That is also a good thing, according to Tayse.
“Land is much more expensive in and around Columbus due to scarcity,” she said, “but it also means that there are more consumers with good jobs who might pay for locally grown organic food."
Swain and Tayse see Columbus’ potential for more urban farmers as the next piece of their business. They plan to open a retail store in the front of their warehouse in Clintonville in the spring. It will focus on supplies and consulting for urban and suburban farmers and gardeners looking for ways to grow food for themselves or for sale.
The pair also started the Columbus Agrarian Society to educate others and provide urban growers with a community support system.
Hogan’s classes tour Swainway Urban Farm, and he uses it as an example of how growers can adapt to the city. It is an important stop for his class, Hogan said. It shows hobbyists that urban farming is more than a fad or a trendy thing for city hipsters.
“There is more than potential,” Hogan said. “It is real.”
jmalone@dispatch.com

How to feed 10,000 people from food grown on 3 acres in the city

by Lynne Rossetto Kasper

http://www.splendidtable.org/story/how-to-feed-10000-people-from-food-grown-on-3-acres-in-the-city

Growing Power

Will Allen is proving that city farms work -- big time. He’s not conjuring up theories; everything that he is teaching in cities across the country he learned over the course of 20 years with his hands in the dirt, a little money in his pocket and a survivalist’s smarts for innovating.

He grows food in ways that few have seen before -- and he grows it sustainably. Allen’s 3-acre farm sits in the poorest part of Milwaukee and now feeds 10,000 people a year. It brought him a MacArthur grant and his neighbors good, healthy eating. The story is in Allen’s book The Good Food Revolution: Growing Healthy Food, People and Communities. [Ed. note: Read an excerpt from Allen's book here.]

Lynne Rossetto Kasper: It’s 1993, you’ve got a good job, you are driving through one of Milwaukee’s poorest neighborhoods, and you see a collection of broken-down greenhouses and a field of weeds. You decide to cash in your 401(k), buy them and become an urban farmer. Were you crazy?

The Good Food Revolution

Will Allen: I think my wife thought I was crazy and probably some other folks as well. But one of the things that I saw was a community that was densely populated: It was in a location that was halfway between two freeways, five blocks away was the largest housing project in Milwaukee, and the closest retail grocery store was about 4 miles away. I looked at this as a place where I could sell my farm produce.

LRK: You already had a farm and you decided to use this as the farm stand?

WA: Yes.

LRK: But instead you ended up producing 40 tons of food a year from those 3 acres.

WA: You could quantify it in a number of different ways. We grow enough food there to feed about 10,000 people in a very intense and integrated food system. We grow about 150 different crops in an unusual way.

We started out as a for-profit for the first 2 years. I was working with kids in the neighborhood, teaching them about where their food came from. Some of my friends said, “Why don’t you start a nonprofit?” I said, “No, I like working with kids. If we start doing this nonprofit piece, I would need help.” They volunteered to be the first board and do the administrative piece, because I said, “I don’t want to sit in the office and write grants.” That’s how we got started back in 1995.

LRK: What is the scope of Growing Power today?

WA: We’ve grown from those early years to where we are today. We have more than 20 farms and 110 employees, we have 15 regional centers around the U.S., and we farm about 200 acres. We’ll be hiring another 150 people in the next year or so and increasing our greenhouse year-round production to more than 100 acres in and around Milwaukee, Madison and Chicago.

LRK: This is all urban farming that serves what are known as food deserts of major cities?

WA: It’s really about serving everybody in a community because people are not eating very good food that is shipped in. During the shipping process, much of our food loses nutrient value -- a lot of times it is 7 or 8 days from the time it comes off the vine or the stalk before we get it into our bellies. What we are trying to promote is local agriculture, working with farms in the city. When I talk about urban agriculture, I’m also talking about farms that are right on the fringe of the city.

We are building hoop houses -- which are a cheap version of an A-frame greenhouse -- all over the place, wherever we can find land, whether it is asphalt, concrete or hard-pinned clay.

But the key to this whole piece is the fact that we grow soil -- we grow compost. So we collect food waste from a number of different places and we have a large-scale compost operation. We wouldn’t have been able to scale up like we have done without growing this soil.

LRK: There was something about worms as livestock?

WA: That’s what I consider them. I wasn’t the originator of that term, actually; it came from Heifer International. Having cows and pigs in the city isn’t very practical, so what they came up with were worms and fish. The worms are a catalyst for breaking down food waste into worm castings for fertilizer. Being able to grow fish allows families to have protein in these food-desert areas.

LRK: What do you see as the major issues in food today?

WA: I think the major issue is that, as citizens, we don’t know very much about the food we eat. We just take for granted that it’s healthy. Over the last 10 to 12 years we’ve had multiple food scares.

A local food system makes a lot of sense to me, because the money stays in that community and we can create thousands of jobs. We are losing rural farmland and rural farmers. So what we need to do is not only grow soil, but grow farmers, train farmers to be able to farm a different kind of way. Not like our fathers and grandfathers farmed, but this new kind of farming where you are thinking about square footage and growing in unusual places inside the city inside buildings and on rooftops.

What’s driven me is to be a part of ending world hunger. The United Nations stated in 2010 that the only way to end world hunger is through local food systems. It benefits everybody to have a local food system. My energy and the energy at Growing Power goes into creating and quantifying these things because people don’t believe that you can grow a significant amount of food inside a city. It is not the total answer. It’s going to take a renaissance of farmers as well as urban farmers to develop this sustainable food system.