Food and the City: Urban Agriculture and the New Food Revolution (34 page)

My travels in Cuba and the opportunity to meet several dozen urban Cuban farmers forever changed how I look at cities. I see food-growing capacity everywhere now. Cuba opened my eyes to how deeply ingrained our consumerism is. It's the tail that wags the industrialized world's food system. The Cuban Model can teach us a lot about what a more balanced, resilient, sustainable food system looks like. The question is, will enough of us watch, listen, and learn, or will we risk going hungry? We are not just faced with peak oil but with peak water, peak land, and even peak micronutrients like phosphorus. All of these are necessary to continue with industrial agriculture.

W
hen I started to write this book, I set out to answer a few simple questions. Why the overnight interest in urban food gardens, urban chickens, and urban beekeeping? And what else was happening in cities that were taking back control of their food supplies and systems?

Having visited as many places as I could until I simply had to stop looking and start writing, I'm now left with the task of pondering the future of food and our cities. Where will these sparks of the food revolution take us? Will our cities look like variations of one of the Cuban cities I saw in 2007, or will we build forty-story vertical farms to feed our growing urban populations? Is there enough critical mass and commitment to continue this urban food revolution, or will large cities spiral down to become extreme food deserts?

Of course, I don't know the answers to these questions. No one does. But what I have seen has given me hope that at least we are collectively heading in the right direction. There's a tremendous amount of energy being poured into greening our cities by private citizens, small and large businesses, and municipal governments, and it is starting to yield some impressive innovations and results.

The city of New York is now home to at least two major commercial rooftop farms. Brooklyn Grange Farm is a 40,000-square-foot (3,716-square-meter) organic vegetable farm on a rooftop in Queens.
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Eagle Street Rooftop Farm, also in Queens, covers 6,000 square feet (557 square meters) of flat roof and supplies organic produce and honey to area restaurants, to the farm's CSA subscribers, and to its onsite farmers’ market.
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Lufa Farms, a 31,000-square-foot (3,000-square-meter) greenhouse farm that began producing twenty-five varieties of vegetables in 2011 on a rooftop in Montreal, Quebec, is leading the way for year-round rooftop production.
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The company claims that it produces enough fresh food to supply one thousand Montreal families with weekly baskets of lettuce greens, tomatoes, eggplant, culinary herbs, and even spices.
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Also in the summer of 2011, Gotham Greens in Brooklyn, New York, announced its first harvest from its 15,000-square-foot (1,393-square-meter) rooftop greenhouse.
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It aims to produce eighty tons of fresh produce year round.
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At street level, homeowners are digging up their lawns for home-scale veggie gardens. Entrepreneurial urban farmers are seeding and weeding piecemeal plots for commercially grown urban produce to be sold at a farmers’ market near you. Outlaw urban chicken keepers are winning approval for their backyard flocks of laying hens. And municipal governments are catching up with the grassroots movement by starting to support more community gardens and plant public orchards in lieu of ornamental landscapes.

Schools are incorporating culinary education into their curriculum with the spread of school food gardens at all levels of education. The Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD)—the second-largest school district in the United States with its nine hundred schools—is making great strides toward becoming the nation's greenest and healthiest.
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Despite budget stresses, it supports one hundred schoolyard food gardens in an effort to teach students about healthy food, growing techniques, and basic food literacy.
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(The LAUSD also deserves recognition
for being an early initiator of soda sales bans in 2003 and for bans on other junk foods in its schools in 2004.) Universities and colleges are even offering degrees and certificates in urban agriculture and urban food-security issues.

Many city halls (Colorado Springs, Portland) and government buildings (the White House) now have demonstration food gardens and keep bees (Chicago, the White House) as a show of how with-the-times they are. More importantly, they are loosening the restrictions on zoning to encourage food production in residential, industrial,
and
commercial zones. Some cities, like Toronto, Ontario, have begun to mandate green roofs on new commercial buildings.
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Urban beekeepers are winning the battle of public approval for their “hobby.” And, of course, there are a number of new television programs, books, and magazines on urban-farming techniques and memoirs.

This is certainly encouraging news, right?

For those who have been working in urban agriculture for many years (and in a few cases, many decades), they know that the excitement level is high right now, but they also have a realistic view of what it will actually take to change our habits, behaviors, and expectations of how we will live if we want to truly address sustainability in our lifestyles.

“Where do you find the time to grow your own food? Any type of sustainable living takes time,” warns Ron Berezan.
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Berezan is also known as the Urban Farmer, and since 2004 he has been a full-time urban-agriculture consultant, landscape designer, and educator. He's in perpetual motion at his many workshops on how to incorporate food into residential and city landscapes in the service of filling the skills and knowledge gap for those who want to lead more sustainable lives but who are generally one and two generations off the land, as most city dwellers are. “I'm biased,” Berezan says, “but I can make a pretty strong argument that if you want to do one thing to lessen your environmental impact, grow your own food.”
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However, Berezan is well aware that the time it takes to grow food and
the physical effort involved are major barriers in our time-pressed, smooth-handed urban world. This is where permaculture and edible forests come in for Berezan. He is one of a few maverick urban-agriculture thinkers who are venturing beyond the usual urban-agriculture paradigm of raising planters where lawns once were and rethinking the model of sustainable food production. Permaculture, Berezan says, is “an ecological design methodology for determining how we can meet
all
human needs—including food—but also energy, water, shelter, and how we can do that in sustainable ways by designing these systems based on ecological design principles.”
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At first glance, permaculture techniques tend to yield wild, unruly, seemingly unkempt gardens, but designed correctly, they produce a tremendous amount and variety of food for a fraction of the effort of a traditional garden and with greater biodiversity that incorporates flowers to attract pollinators, water sources for pollinators and small wildlife, and sunflowers that germinate where the birds drop a few seeds.

In other words, permaculture principles are designed to create or foster productive landscapes that provide food and other needs in a way that is more self-sustaining and self-regenerative. Permaculture attempts to imitate natural ecosystems. Rather than the arduous task of domesticating food plants and animals, a permaculture gardener builds systems that mimic nature's ecological balance. The designer then steps back a bit and lets nature do the work. It is sometimes explained as reaping what you do not sow. It also acknowledges that modern life and sustainable living need to meet somewhere in the middle. Permaculture is sustainable not only ecologically, but as an activity it's a
sustainable
sustainable system.

Edible forests (also called forest gardening) incorporate a permaculture concept that builds on the fact that forests and woodlands tend to produce an abundance of food such as berries, tree nuts, mushrooms, fruit, tubers, and root vegetables, for starters.

According to the United Nation's Department of Economic and
Social Affairs and the World Bank, “about 1.6 billion people depend heavily on forest resources for their livelihoods, including 60 million indigenous people who are fully dependent upon the forests and an additional 350 million who depend on them primarily for income and subsistence.”
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Therefore, it's also important to note that forest gardening, like permaculture, is not a new or Western contribution. These old principles, forgotten during industrialization and only recently rediscovered, never dropped out of practice in many other societies that sustained themselves on a much smaller ecological footprint. And edible forests are part of an idea from which hunter-gatherer food cultures have never departed.

Edible forests imitate forests and woodlands, taking food-producing levels into account: tree and bush fruits and berries, tree nuts, ground-level food and fruit plants, roots and tubers, and climbing vines. By considering the growing levels in three dimensions, rather than just two, the food yields increase tremendously. It's what vertical farming is to land-intensive surface agriculture.

The interest in edible forests and permaculture workshops has grown substantially since Berezan started offering them. Not only are these methods more resource-wise, giving more output per square foot than other growing systems, but by letting natural systems play out, there is less work for the grower. Annual food crops self-seed at the end of the season. Perennials die back and provide a layer of new organic matter to compost into the soil. Trees provide shade and protection for tender crops. Animals like chickens devour dandelions, scratch at the soil, control bugs and pests, all the while providing a mobile fertilizing service.

I start to imagine the wooded parklands in most North American cities that could be dripping with free, self-regenerative foods. Most cities, however, do not allow foraging on public lands, and some cities, like New York, are even considering banning it outright or handing out fines. Foraging in Central Park seems to have become a trendy activity, and park officials are finally saying that it has gotten out of hand.
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I
don't think we'll be sourcing much food from public edible forests in North American cities anytime soon.

Nor do I think North American cities will do away completely with the supermarket, nor will they suddenly sprout an urban farm for every five thousand citizens. But a few SPIN farmers to complement the few sturdy farming families who have managed to stay on their urban farmland is enough of a start to change people's minds about how they get their food, and from whom. And it's the beginning of moving toward a network of urban and regional farms. As long as there is sustained interest in local food, entrepreneurs will rush in to fill the demand in the market.

The fact is that there will be no singular urban-agriculture solution that will work for every community and every city. Each city will have to address its own limitations and needs: We won't go back to living in the forests any sooner than we'll be able to achieve total food security through urban farms on each corner.

If I can allow myself a few predictions at this point, it is that balance will move slightly more back to a middle ground. We won't completely give up the benefits and flavors of the international food trade and industrial food production, but we won't be at its complete mercy either.

If we learn to give space in our urban settings to food production and food producers, we'll be healthier, happier, and more connected to the physical realities of our short existence because of it. We've still barely scratched the surface of ballooning healthcare budgets that are directly influenced by our food choices. We could truly be pennywise, whereas now we are being pound-foolish.

We need to put an end to our strange fascination with trying to outwit and dominate nature, and start appreciating it. And we'll start to look at feeding ourselves and one another as a basic human right. If we can even begin to walk along the road to any one of these goals, the various experiments and initiatives in urban agriculture—from a few beehives on a rooftop in Paris to a fight over a dozen acres of farmland in a city—will have been worth every last moment of effort.

I have come to see, perhaps a bit romantically, that the urban farmer or backyard food grower has taken up the mantle of what was once the small-scale farmer: a deliberate keeper of the open-source technology that agriculture has always been, a rebel stand against the artificial idea that corporate interests can fiddle a gene or two and claim ownership of a technology that has existed for longer than we can measure.

And I began to grow more and more convinced and hopeful that nature was already one hundred steps ahead of humans, that it has so much built-in redundancy and biodiversity (specifics like bluefin tuna and cod aside) that overall, it can repair itself despite our human efforts to engineer scarcity.