Why Urban Farming Is the Future
And why it's good to get a little dirty while helping BC feed itself. First in a series.
Cam Macdonald has a farm (instead of a lawn).
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Michael Pollan, Garden Fresh
The 'In Defense of Food' author on picky-eating kids, Obama's menu for America, the 100-Mile Diet and more.
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Hope Sprouts for UBC Farm
Ag oasis on campus worth keeping, say study, UBC officials.
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Let's Pave Streets Green
Would you give up your extra parking spot for a garden plot?
The first odd thing about Cam Macdonald's Mt. Pleasant lawn is that it isn't a lawn. It's a farm.
Standing out amid the typical suburban sea of grass patches are his potatoes, carrots, beats, peas, shallots, squash, parsnips and more -- enough to have given food to 70 people by the beginning of July.
The second odd thing is that it isn't even Cam's yard. It belongs to Heidi Gigler and Jug Sidhu, a non-gardening couple who heard about Cam's soul search for right livelihood last year and agreed to let him pursue it by turning their turf into food.
Does this small but significant act of land karma represent the beginning of a profound challenge to our very notions of private property and home ownership? Or is it just a simple way for a few more people to eat a little more food from where they live -- a driving force behind the soaring popularity of urban agriculture?
In any case, it's working. Cam is on his way to what could become a career, and the couple are thrilled with the look and taste of their front yard. "The problem," said Heidi, "is it's hard to keep up with the food."
They give some of the excess away to neighbours, including people they hardly knew before the creation of the front yard farm. "Now we're having constant conversations... It's really created a community."
Cam sees it as a first step. With his three partners, he hopes to hone his skills into a profitable business next year. Not bad for a guy who just got started in urban farming with little experience beyond "a year of reading a lot, talking to a lot of people who know what they're doing and just doing it."
It's only fair to mention that he did know a few things about indoor plants, having grown them during a self-apprenticeship in horticulture for which he now credits the Vancouver Police Department because it didn't arrest him. Of course growing food crops outdoors is different, but he swears it's not at all difficult. His advice: "Anyone can do it."
Many are, including some driven by a scary thought: we're running out of food.
Remember the global food crisis?
Until last fall when bankers took over the headlines, 2008 was known as "The Year of the Global Food Crisis."
Oddly, the crisis came at a time of world record grain harvests. Yet stockpiles went down and prices way up, to the breaking point.
Protesters marched in the streets of more than 20 countries. In the Philippines soldiers had to guard rice reserves. In Egypt the army was mobilized to bake bread.
Among the blamed was Big Ag, the corporations dominating industrial agriculture. Food giant Cargill saw its profits soar 86% during the worst of the crisis, while pesticide and seed seller Monsanto doubled its earnings, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Also pegged as part of the problem were commodity speculators, farmers planting bio-fuel rather than food crops, and swelling middle classes in China and India eating meat (animals need a lot of plants). Another probable cause was not always mentioned but may be the most ominous: peak oil.
Fossil fuels are used for the fertilizers and pesticides that power industrial agriculture. They're also burned to transport all those 2,400-mile salads. Our world food system was built on cheap oil, so if that era is about to end, it follows, so too is the way we eat, and live.
But hang on. It could get worse. And sooner than you think.
The mother of all monkey wrenches may be global climate change. Even in the near term, bigger storms and longer droughts will mean harder farming and fewer crops.
So with one crisis feeding another, which catastrophe will it be? Dwindling food stocks? Soaring energy costs? Global climate weirdness?
You could pick any one of them and worry yourself useless. Or you could do something about all three by growing a way out of the problem.
Can cities save agriculture?
It's called urban agriculture, and it's relatively new, at least on the scale now being tried. But it may be just what humanity needs if it's going to survive.
Too bold?
Let's break it down. Start with a simple question:
Can cities save agriculture?
Of course this would normally be asked the other way around. Rural farmers have fed urban residents since "agri" met "culture" 10,000 years ago.
It worked, and it didn't. Cities thrived, but not indefinitely. No society has ever been able to outlive its resources.
The limits, we realize now, as an urban species, with more than half our population in cities and a million more arriving every week, are planetary. Viewed through that lens, we can see a system being strained perhaps to the point of failure.
The worst effects are evident already in places like Botswana and Haiti. But not just there. In Canada more than 700,000 now visit food banks every month, including a rising number of families and those with jobs -- people confronting the new food realities for the first time.
If the old urban model based on exploiting surrounding resources won't work, the critical question of our time will be whether we can design livable cities without ruining the earth in the process. Or as educators in Queensland recently defined that clunky word "sustainability" for schoolchildren: we need to figure out how to provide "enough for everyone forever."
Ecology, energy, jobs, housing -- these and more will all figure in the ways we build a more sensible world, but the city of the future will largely be shaped by its food, something we're not used to considering in the big picture.
Food security, food systems, food sovereignty, food policy. If these terms aren't familiar yet, they may well be soon. Others will emerge as the movement grows. The model city of the 21st century may turn out to be a living, green, healthy place in harmony with its own "foodshed," unless that sounds too much like a pantry in the back yard.
BC could be a leading example
We know a population of billions will still need large rural farms. And we hope we can always share the benefits of fair trading on a small planet, because no amount of eco-guilt will ever convince some (me) that drinking tea in Canada is a terrible thing.
But we are heading into an era where many more people will have to reconnect significantly with their food in all its stages: growing, distributing, preparing, eating, recycling. Starting with growing.
Urban agriculture is spreading in B.C. and around the world. Rarely mentioned a generation ago, it's the buzz term of our day.
It already offers an estimated 800 million farmers a chance to shape their own urban environment, cut grocery budgets, eat fresh produce, reduce carbon emissions, beautify developed areas, re-engage with rural growers and, fingers crossed, maybe even save the planet.
Modern urban agriculture is still in the experimental stages. In some places it's hip, in others a way to survive. Just how it turns out, and what the term means 25 years from now, is still to be determined, perhaps with our help.
British Columbians can lead the world in offering an enlightened model of city living centred on healthy food for all.
Why us?
Our cities are still new, on the historical scale, so we're not bound by medieval property lines or centuries-old thinking.
We like to think of ourselves as innovative in urban design, and willing to try new ideas if they'll lead to a healthier environment.
We have good growing conditions: rich soil, clean water and weather mild enough, near the coast anyway, to support year-round harvests of fresh greens.
We've escaped the worst of the urban sprawl riddling other regions in North America, thanks to the farmland protection act known as the Agricultural Land Reserve (ALR).
We'll back our growers where it counts, at the cash register, according to an Ipsos Reid poll that found eight out of 10 people willing to pay a premium for food that's fresh, local and grown with fewer chemicals and pesticides.
Finally, we're mad to grow it ourselves, to judge by the booming sales of vegetable seeds and long waiting lists for community garden plots.
Get dirty
Explanations for why so many more people are eager to grow their own food vary, but at least some of the interest stems from the urban angst brought on by all the predictions of a bleak environmental future.
So to put the answer to our simple question in simple terms: cities must save agriculture because nothing else can, and vice versa.
The appeal of doing something, with your hands in the soil, offers anyone a chance to be in on the solution. You could wallow in the end of the world as we know it, or you could take an active role as an engaged citizen while you bite into a sun-warmed tomato fresh off the vine. Which side are you on?
This series explores the boom in urban agriculture in British Columbia by looking at how we got here, how we rate comparatively and, most importantly, what we should be doing now to create a better food future. ![[Tyee]](http://thetyee.cachefly.net/ui/img/ico_fishie.png){kind=small}
Moonbug
17-08-2009
Sounds like a great series.
Sounds like a great series. I look forward to reading more. I know of a few young landless people that would love to be able to farm someone else's land
vogler
17-08-2009
interested
First time poster. We all need to eat and how much more enjoyable it is when eating fresh. I'm currently looking for a property to buy and farm with my folks and don't know where to buy or where we can afford. I like the idea of farming in the city and wonder how many people out there would be willing to yet there yards be used for vegetables or light impact animal proteins?
Rhea
18-08-2009
Very timely
We need to go back to the Victory Garden model, where everyone grew at least some basics instead of their own personal golf course. You can grow a surprising amount in a very small space, or even in containers - in fact, some things (like my tomatoes) grow better when in containers! Lettuce, spinach and carrots can be grown in a window box year round - and these crops are the ones often shipped at huge carbon cost and covered in pesticides from California. Plus, a veggie garden can look really good as well as tasting like it!
southdeltawalker
18-08-2009
Don't get rid of that ol' wheelbarrow!
I've been growing beans in my front yard for years now-old fashioned scarlet runners that attract the bees and hummingbirds. They are so prolific-the more you pick-the more you get.
I just smile when i see them at the farmers markets for $4.95 a pound.
This year in the backyard as well as growing veggies, i converted an ol' wheelbarrow into a garden.
There was enough lettuce for salads all June and July plus green onions, parsley and so much basil that i was giving away bags. There is kale still growing and the peppers are just about ready-all from the wheelbarrow!
Next summer the wheelbarrow will become a child's garden.
It is just the right size and a great way to introduce children to gardening and the joys of growing their own veggies.
Don't have an ol wheelbarrow? You can often find them at garage sales but you will have to move fast as i'm looking for another one!
Roxanne
18-08-2009
THE FARMER NEXT DOOR
What is helping to power the urban farming movement is a commercial sub-acre farming system called SPIN-Farming, developed by a native son of Canada, farmer Wally Satzewich. SPIN makes it possible to earn $50,000+ from a half acre. 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 farming system, it allows many more people to farm commercially, wherever they live, as long as there are nearby markets to support them. By using backyards and front lawns and neighborhood lots as their land base, SPIN farmers are recasting farming as a small business in a city or town and helping to accelerate the shift back to a sustainable, locally-based food system. Most importantly this is happening without policy changes or government supports. It is entirely entrepreneurially-driven. You can see some of these backyard and front lawn farmers in action at www.spinfarming.com
coyoteman
18-08-2009
Back to the future...
The collapse of Prosperity Capitalism, and the havoc it wrecked upon the planet is forcing this generation to look back to the Great Depression Generation, to relearn now to survive more independently. That part of it will doubtless be of benefit to ourselves and the planet.
All that remains to be properly dealt with and disposed of, still, is capitalism, the wellspring source of the economic and environmental devastation. That was one problem the Depression Generation didn't finish for us, unfortunately. (They tried, only to get diverted from it by WW2.)Hopefully this generation will get down to it for them, and the future generations.
Fiat lux
19-08-2009
We can rest assured that
We can rest assured that economists and governments will do their best to stop any urban farming, because it won't register on their phony GDP racket and any degree of self sufficiency is against their ideological religion and the demands of their corporate owners.'
People are supposed to "specialize" and buy everything. In other words incompetence and total reliance on their "betters" is the most profitable.
This is why governments, all over the world, have been going out of their way to destroy the most efficient food production system, the family farm.
In the warped minds of economists "productive" means profitable and only into the hands of the multinational corporate mafia.
Ed Deak, Big lake.
coyoteman
19-08-2009
Capitalism's Aversion to Popular Self-Sufficiency...
"We can rest assured that economists and governments will do their best to stop any urban farming, because it won't register on their phony GDP racket and any degree of self sufficiency is against their ideological religion and the demands of their corporate owners." wrote Fait Lux.
Which is the other side of the coin, and the other shoe to drop yet as well, of course.
They want a consumer/cheap labour population that is dependent on the corporate "market system" for its survival, and certainly not anywhere even approaching "self-sufficient". They will not want an independent and self-sufficient population anymore than they want a working class/consumer population that is an integral participant in a democratically owned and managed economy. Any movements in the direction of such will earn their ridicule and then, if necessary, outright hostility.
Be prepared for it. The Big Food Megaopolies are scarcely going to sit idly by or cheer the urban farm movement on, of that you can be sure.
Which certainly does not mean that folks should not insist upon it, over "the system's" opposition if necessary. Indeed, the contrary.
Go for it.
KitsBeach
19-08-2009
You can use my yard
I have a yard near 4th and Larch that I'd be willing to lend to someone with an interest.
The yard in the story can feed 70 people...maybe a small plot at my place could feed 10 or so...sounds good..!
x4estworker
19-08-2009
Is "urban gardening" efficient?
Urban gardening is just a slick new name for the backyard vegetable garden. I grow a vegetable garden every year. This year, especially, I have had to water every couple of days to make sure that things kept growing. Like many places in the Lower Mainland, my soil isn't that good, so I have to artificially fertilize so that the crop, particularly my corn crop, will mature before the weather gets cool in September. We don't have a particularly long growing season.
That raises a question of just how efficient it is to grow a backyard vegetable garden. Are these resources well spent? I don't grow a garden for any particular ideological reason, but because I enjoy growing things and like the taste of the food. If I was doing this on a commercial basis, I would lose my shirt because my veggies would be the most expensive produce in town. Once you factor in the water costs (we are metered), fertilizer, and my time, this is very pricey food.
I'm not opposed to the large commercial farms in the Fraser Valley, because those farms introduce economies of scale that allow farmers to put food in the supermarket at a reasonable price for people. Small is not necessarily always beautiful.
RickW
19-08-2009
Ed Deak
That particular tactic was tried years ago in Winnipeg, when the council tried to put a tax on the garden plots that people rented to grow their one veggies. It was done at the behest of the grocery stores, which argues that growing vegetables constituted an income, as it represented money that would otherwise have had to be spent in said stores.
It didn't work. But that doesn't mean the idea isn't sitting in some bureaucrats file somewhere......to be reconstituted if only because gardens are "so messy" compared to nice green lawns.......
Fiat lux
19-08-2009
X4 There's no such thing as
X4
There's no such thing as "efficiencies of scale". It is an artificially promoted concept for the enforcement of false monetary values transferring real costs on other sectors, the environment and the future.
I've been working on large commercial farms from 1948 to 1955 and organically on our own farm since 1979. Also I owned and operated custom manufacturing businesses from 1957 to 92 both in Vancouver and locally.
I know what real, not artificially enforced monetary costs are and own the 1991 copyright on the only unbreakable definition of economic efficiency.
The foods coming off those large farms are covered with poisons that can not even be washed off. I've used them on the corporate farms, without any protective clothing and saw my friends dying of multitude of cancers. I was spared and only suffered paralysis from heavy metal poisoning, some of the worst months of my life.
When we're forced to buy vegetables in the winter, they often end up in the garbage. Even after hours of washing we can taste the chemical fertilizers and sprays.
The meats are even worse. The worst being pork and chickens. They're swimming in various growth inducing chemicals. When we sell our organic calves at the sales, they're pumped full of antibiotics, growth hormones, steroids and then with grains to put stinking tallow into the meat, making them and the suckers who buy that garbage meat, fat.
When we look at the energy inputs of those farms, they're often hundreds of times of that could be used on small scale. The same for the forest and other industries.
In short, they're wasteful, causing all kinds of problems to the environment and humanity, while making huge profits to the middlemen.
We have the whole world covered with the pollution caused by "efficiencies of scale", with daily growing cancer, obesity, diabetes, autism etc. epidemics that we didn't have even 50 years ago, when big business started enforcing these these criminal economic practices, based on false monetary figures that transfer the real costs on humanity in the forms of sickness, starvation, and destruction.
The long term efficient economy is that uses the physical definition of " the most work done with the least resource/ energy inputs"
The presently used definition as "the biggest profits for the least monetary inputs" is the biggest fraud in human history.
Small and overlapping self sufficient economic systems are the most beautiful and it can be proven very easily.
As far the prices of organic foods in the stores are concerned, they too are fraudulent, because most of them should be cheaper even in monetary terms, especially beef that could be sold literally at half of the present junk meat prices, but the markets are fixed and controlled by a couple of multinationals who steal both sides blind.
Ed Deak, Big Lake.
x4estworker
20-08-2009
The Real World begs to differ with you, Fiat lux
You paint a very apocalyptic picture, which the vast majority of people don't share. Maybe I’m the exception (I really don't think so), but I have been eating food grown on commercial farms for my whole life (50 something years) and have yet to be afflicted with anything more serious than the flu. That, of course, is only anecdotal but I have yet to see any credible science that supports your vision of the world.
An exhaustive study just completed by the British government established that there are absolutely no positive health benefits from eating organic foods versus food grown using the commercial agricultural model. Organic is a highly overrated concept and one that will not feed the masses of people even in North America. Of course, people convinced of the very dubious benefits of going organic pay more and that certainly benefits organic farmers’ bottom line.
How will purely organic farming, with its lower yields per hectare, feed the 350 million people in North America, much less the masses in the rest of the world? As it is, in British Columbia, we have to import vegetables from California and Mexico through the winter to meet our needs.
While urban gardening might be a fun and trendy concept, it's not going to meet our food needs in the long run. Even with my fairly substantial vegetable patch, our vegetable needs for four people are still only partially met for about two and a half to three months a year. It's just common sense that you can't grow enough for the whole year on a little backyard patch of ground. Just where do you think the rest will come from?
mjscox
20-08-2009
our little garden
My wife and I live in an apartment which includes a continuous deck running along the back of the building, which has planters dividing each owner's deck space. In most of the planters are flowers or shrubs. In ours, this summer, is kale, several lettuce varieties, beans. Next year: more food! We're going to ask our neighbours if they wouldn't mind us planting food in their planter, in exchange for which we'd split the results with them. We also have a bee-friendly bush, the one with the round blue flowers that you see everywhere--I only wish there were more bees around.
mjscox
20-08-2009
website idea
That posting by "Kits Beach" offering a yard at Larch and Fourth got me thinking that someone could come up with a website specifically tailored to urban agriculture in which you could advertise your yard, or offer to help someone who wants to be an urban gardener but doesn't have the know-how. And it would have planting tips---often the beginning urban food garden will have too much of one food (we put in too much lettuce), or the plants aren't arranged to take best advantage of the light and watering conditions. I'm too busy to create that site. Go for it!
Critical thinking
20-08-2009
Good entrance to a difficult subject...
Let's be practical. Show me a "sustainable city" today. Even more thought provoking, show me one that is being actively designed for construction.
RE: "whether we can design livable cities without ruining the earth in the process." My sense is not that this is an impossible design task. More likely it is an immense social engineering task which society as a whole hasn't experienced enough pain to bring to a place of prominence.
Unfortunately green leafy veggies just won't cut it for most people, as a long term diet.
RE: "to support year-round harvests of fresh greens". We need and want: carbohydrates and or proteins. Typically this means: nuts, oils seeds, grains, meat, etc. Not easy to imagine producing sufficient quantities of these in the typical, Canadian urban environment.
On top of this we abuse the best growing climate and perhaps soil in all of Canada with the continual expansion of urban sprawl and transportation corridors within the Fraser Valley.
Solution: decentralize our economy and repopulate the rural landscape. It's sustainable.