What Urban Agriculture Is And What It is Not
As the urban agriculture movement has become more mainstream in recent years, so has the amount of content and ideas about it as well. Urban farming is often touted as a solution to climate change, food security, personal empowerment, economic development or the savior of the pending collapse of the global food system. It may very well be many or some of these things. When a movement gains popularity, it’s original purpose and ideas can get diluted, much like a game of telephone. Adding more people to the conversation can undoubtedly bring a lot of creative and innovative ideas, but like anything that grows, some ideas work, and others don’t. That’s part of the evolution.
There are a number of claims made about urban agriculture that I agree with and have experienced myself in the course of my eight-year career as a farmer, but there are some that are so shockingly untrue that they deserve a further analysis to help paint an accurate picture of what urban agriculture is and what it is not.
The social, for better or worse
I’d like to begin with some positive acknowledgments that I know to be true that I have experienced with my farm, but I have also seen displayed by many of the farmers around the world I have worked with. The first and more poignant in my opinion is the social aspect of urban farming. Simply by farming in neighborhoods or publicly visible places, urban farms can do a lot to educate people about the importance of local and fresh food for their health and well-being, but can also inform them about how they might be able to grow it themselves, just because they see it happening. There’s a lot to this because the value of fresh food is self-evident in that the shorter the timespan between when the crop was harvested to the time that it is consumed, has many nutritional benefits. What might not be so obvious is the fact that when people in a community witness a small farm in production, they can absorb a lot of information about how they could potentially grow it themselves. It has been my experience that at every plot of land in the city of Kelowna that I have farmed (there has been about twenty), I have got to know at least ten people in the neighborhood very well. These people always pop by to say hello when we’re working on our farm plots, but more importantly, they ask questions about what we’re growing, and they see it all happen in real time. Many of these people have become radical gardeners. They’ve dug up their lawns and transformed them into very ambitious personal gardens. There’s something about seeing it done in person that makes the work seem so much more doable. In this regard, the social aspect has been 100% positive. In my entire career, I have never seen anyone walk by with anything negative to say. Everyone that I have spoken to is delighted to see the land used to grow food. The great thing about this is that I have never had to proselytize anyone about the idea or importance of growing food. When they see it, they immediately understand it.
Growing your food can be an incredibly empowering act. To know and see that you can feed yourself or family through your efforts. It’s exciting to think of how this experience could potentially help people who might not be able to afford organic and fresh food but could grow it themselves. For the most part, Organic is a trend that is mostly embraced by mid to higher income people. I don’t want to pretend to know precisely why that is, but part of the reason has to be the price. The main reason Organic is more expensive to produce is that more work is required to managed weeds. Thus the cost of labor is significantly higher and that all comes back to the retail price.
When you go into poor communities, it’s not hard to notice the difference in available amenities. You don’t see Whole Foods opening up in places like this and often there are not even places to buy groceries in general. This is a phenomenon referred to as Food Deserts, and there are many communities around North America like this. One famous example was the urban farm Growing Power started by Will Allen in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Will started this farm as a way to address the food desert and bring fresh food to people in the community. The sad reality of the farm though was the fact that it was not economically sustainable. The revenue from the food they grew was not enough to support the operation. Their primary purpose was education, and even the income from that was not enough. Growing Power officially went bankrupt in November 2017. Despite having large amounts of public funding and even donations from War-Mart, they were not able to stay afloat. In my experience, growing food is not as widely embraced in lower income communities as it is in the middle to higher income communities. It’s an uncomfortable thing to say, but it seems to be true. On a personal level, one thing I find troubling is that fact that many people in the urban agriculture space, especially ones with an academic background, like to theorize about why food deserts exist and they point to economic injustice as the cause. That may be true, and I can’t say otherwise because I don’t know for sure. There have been many farms like Growing Power that have made it their mandate to bring fresh food to these communities. It is a very noble idea in theory, but I’m not sure how practical it is. I have done a lot of work with non-profit organizations similar to Growing Power, and there is one aspect I see them embracing that I don’t think serves them or the communities they are trying to empower. They often play the game of identity politics. The idea that some people are privileged and others are victims. It’s usually the case in groups I’m working with where the people who are the organizers or benefactors of the organization repeat a narrative that those who are trying to help are the privileged ones and the people who are being helped are victims of circumstance. Conversations about privilege or even White Privilege have become commonplace in urban agriculture circles, and I don’t see it as constructive.
I have always made the case to my friends, colleagues, and clients, that I see no utility in this viewpoint, whether it is true or not. One person might be privileged because of their economic status, background, or any other variant, and someone else might be a victim for the same or opposite reasons, but what is the expected outcome when telling a young person in a disadvantaged community that they are a victim? What value does that bring to them? How is it helpful to anyone to be reminded that life isn’t fair and you just got a shitty deal? It’s like telling someone in a wheelchair that they don’t have the mobility you do, so why bother trying. Why would you say that to someone? Is it to cause them emotional harm? Does it make you feel better about yourself? I’m not so sure that is the motive of people who recite this narrative, but it is indeed the outcome that I have seen time and time again. Nothing is empowering about telling a person they are a victim. It saddens me greatly when I see well-meaning people repeat this narrative and I have never found any real justification for it.
A platform to educate
There’s no doubt that urban farms are a great place to teach. An urban farm is more accessible to people because it is closer to where more people live. It’s just more convenient to the public, making them a great place to educate people about agriculture. The more substantial effect of this might be that over time, the more people that learn about growing food, the more potential resilience that we can build into our societies, and I think that is a great thing with a potentially substantial positive effect. Call it a great stabilizer in the case where something catastrophic were to happen to global food production. I don’t see any potential downside with more people knowing how to grow food.
Niche market
Another thing urban farms are, for better or worse, is niche market. It’s not about production for the masses to be commodified and traded on the stock market; this is about serving a local demand for healthy, fresh and close-to-home food, at a premium. There is no doubt that we urban farmers are charging more than what you’d find conventionally at a grocery store, and that’s ok. I don’t think it’s a bad thing to be selling an expensive product. Most urban farms are organic and organic food is more costly and rightfully so. It takes more work to produce. I find the mission of some groups who feel that organic food is a right and thus should be subsidized or free, a terrible idea because it devalues the hard work that goes into bringing those products to market. When it comes to spreading the gospel of healthy and clean food, the food is only one piece, the well being and sustainability of the farmer is just as important. If you’re giving away food for free, someone along the line isn’t getting paid, or something is being subsidized by outside forces, and I don’t see that as sustainable.
A solution to climate change?
Urban farming is not a solution to climate change. I grind my teeth when I hear people making claims such as this. There’s no doubt that industrial agriculture has many adverse effects to the environment, whether it be massive pollution from industrial machinery, topsoil depletion through excessive tillage or nitrogen fertilizer run-off that pollutes our rivers then ends up in the ocean. Urban farms are small. We don’t even make up for a measurable percentage of global food production, so to think that we can solve these problems is very misguided. If we want to address major environmental problems of industrial agriculture, we need to change the big farms that are producing the lion’s share of food. The claim that urban farms can solve issues like this bothers me because it is not true. Why repeat an untruth? Who does it help? Is it to gather more support for a cause? If we want to grow the movement, we need to be honest about the things it is and not try to make it into something that it is not.
Hi-tech urban farms will produce the world’s food
The last one that gets me is the claim that large-scale technologically advanced urban farms are going to be how we produce all of our food in the future. You may have seen sci-fi looking sketches of skyscraper urban farms in the middle of huge cities that have fruit trees growing and cows grazing grass. It is an idea that is being promoted by large governmental organizations such as the UN that we’ll eventually move all people into cities and we’ll get everyone out of rural areas, to let them go back to being wild. I first read about this idea in James Lovelock’s book, The Revenge of Gaia, where Lovelock proposed that the best way to avoid significant environmental collapse was to get everyone off the land and into cities. A similar idea was also introduced at the Rio de Janeiro Climate Summit in 1992 and was called Agenda 21.
The idea is to let all the rural areas in the world, go back to being wild and push everyone into cities. I think it’s a horrible idea mainly because these types of farms would be extraordinarily expensive to build. We already have a significant problem with large-scale farmers being burdened by debt for the expensive equipment they use such as combines and automated tractors. Imagine how much more debt a farmer would have to incur to start a skyscraper urban farm? Who is going to pay for that? Maybe that’s the model though. Perhaps the actual idea is not to have anyone own everything. Assets like these would almost have to be the property of the state or mega-corporations who could afford to build them. This type of farming might be possible at some point, but crop selection is going to be most important to make the economics get even close to reality. Growing corn, wheat and raising cows is not going to be what makes sense. They’re going to have to focus on crops that are the very high-value ones such as microgreens, salad crops and anything else that can capture a high price.
When looking at the broader picture of urban agriculture, it’s important to keep it in context. I think we are kidding ourselves if we believe that urban farms are going to feed the majority of the world’s population. However, I think that the primary purpose of urban farms shouldn’t be that. It’s crucial that they make a profit and grow a lot of food for people to eat, but there’s a higher purpose here as well. Urban farms can connect people to one another and the land. They can educate and empower people to grow their own food. These are all good things and shouldn’t under-valued. However, they are not going to stop climate change and feed the world. Let’s be honest about these things and move forward.
