Urban farming: how and why?
Since the dawn of the industrial revolution, vast swathes of the population of countries worldwide have been flocking from the countryside to the cities, leaving behind a pastoral existence for urban life. This trend continues in earnest to this day, which necessitates a step-change in how we produce food, and where we produce it.
We have reached the stage at which over 50% of the world’s population now lives in towns and cities. In the countryside, fewer and fewer young people are staying on the farm to pursue agriculture, but instead head to cities to join the throng of metropolitan life.
So, how can our food production systems cater for these swelling urban populations? Considering that the logistics surrounding agriculture contribute one of the biggest portions of climate change-inducing gases, there must be a more sustainable way of providing food for our cities.
When fields just won’t cut it
Our current agricultural system, though providing us with abundant yields of grain, vegetables and livestock that sustains an ever-expanding global population, is stretching our global biodiversity to its limits.
Vast swathes of crop monocultures, supported by chemical fertilisers and pesticides, have been reaping unrepentant toil on our environment and the ecosystems on which we rely for our very existence.
From desertification, deforestation, soil erosion and salinification through to eutrophication of our rivers leading to toxic algal blooms in our seas, the impact of our industrial farming methods are clear for all to see.
Furthermore, with climate change causing effects that we can see increasing year-on-year, many fields around the world will be diminished — from coastal regions affected by salt through to seasonal droughts in what are normally bountiful fields.
Granted — to cater for a swelling global population that is veering towards ten billion people by 2050 — our current agricultural methods, though they can be rendered much more sustainable and efficient, are necessary but not sufficient to provide nutritious food to a planet that is still home to 800 million hungry or malnourished people — many of whom live in what is described as the developed world.
The modern world need look no further than to produce food directly where it is needed — both to mitigate unforeseen climatic fluctuations and to increase sustainability in our food chains.
Urban farming, then and now
The sum total of all of this is that the world needs to produce around 70% more food in order to feed ten billion people by 2050, while using existing land that is being increasingly degraded.
However, this is not the first time that the world has faced such challenges. In fact, if we look back through history, we have always found ways to supplement the food that we produce in fields and pastures. Urban farming is not a recent phenomenon.
Although the news may be littered with articles about urban farming in various cities in the USA, examples of this practice in modern times date back to 1893 in Detroit, when the then-mayor encouraged citizens to plant vegetables in order to avoid malnutrition.
London, too, the world’s first truly global, industrial city, encouraged public green spaces not only for aesthetic reasons but also as a means of bringing more food to the swelling urban population.
If we go far further back, European explorers of the Americas noted highly productive green areas devoted to farming in the famous Aztec city of Tenochtitlan, while archaeologists suggest that the ancient Mayans may have cultivated crops close to their small urban centres.
It appears that for the Aztecs, urban farming was the norm, rather than a novelty — and in some communities the ancient practises still persist.
Stretching further back, the ancient capital of Yemen, Sana’a, still boasts working community vegetable gardens that can trace their history back through two millennia — and take up 13% of the space within the old city walls.
Clearly, civilisation and farming — both rural and urban — go hand in hand.
The Urban farming re-revolution
When we imagine modern urban farming, we might think of the allotment owner tending to their meagre patch of earth rented from the local council — yielding seasonal vegetables over the warmer months of spring and summer.
Yet, the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations estimates that 15–20% of global food production already occurs in and around urban zones, with a whopping 700 million people worldwide consuming fruits, vegetables and livestock grown and raised in towns and cities.
Granted, a lot of this farming is indeed in the name of subsistence, for example in Africa 40% of urban populations are engaged in agriculture. However, there has been a recent revolution in urban farming that has seen the practice truly blossom throughout modern cities — producing food and profits.
This is not surprising, considering that urban plots can be up to 15 times more productive than rural ones (especially when employing diverse strategies of growing crops, such as hydroponics), with one square metre producing perhaps up to 20kg of food throughout the year.
Tie this with lower logistical costs, and it is clear that farming close to the consumer can be a profitable enterprise, and from Montreal to Mumbai, urban farms are sprouting up all over the world.
Technology and agriculture
In a recent article in the Economist, it was argued that if agriculture is to continue to feed the world, it needs to become more like manufacturing.
This is precisely where urban farming, and particularly trends towards vertical farming and closed systems utilising hydroponics and aquaponics come into their own. The development of such systems goes hand in hand with technology, with everything being monitored — from nutrition, temperature, pH and humidity through to carefully controlled lighting recipes.
Considering the state of water stress that the planet is currently suffering, while the earth is reeling from the effects of an industrially polluted environment, the precise control of resources offered by such urban farming systems is of paramount importance to take agriculture forward in a sustainable way.
With the rise of robotics, including a completely robot-controlled farm in Japan, we can hope to deliver plants the specific treatments that they need in an incredibly precise manner — with minimal maintenance.
Furthermore, the capacity to produce fresh, nutritious food in a completely transparent manner, absent of pesticides, is becoming a reality in your own home — even without access to a vegetable garden or even a windowsill.
Applications and devices such as the plantCube will enable consumers to grow their own vegetables in a controlled environment, providing fresh herbs, vegetables and microgreens all year round, which can be harvested as and when they are required — in a dishwasher-sized device that can slot into any kitchen.
Back to the future
Urban farming, rather than being a modern revolution, has its roots ingrained deeply with the rise of civilisation itself. Its increasing popularity around the world, not only with subsistence farmers and allotment keepers, but with medium-to-large scale farms, as well as product developers, can only help to provide nutrition to a this increasingly urban world — and provides a key contribution to how we will sustainably feed 10 billion people by 2050.
