Scaling Urban Agriculture to Bring Many Benefits

The Growing Distance From Farms.

With a rural exodus induced by industrialization, many people continue to move into city centers. In doing so, they sever the links between themselves and where their food comes from. This process has only become stronger since the apparition of processed food, fast foods, supermarkets, and an increased focus on importation.  Resulting, cities have become extremely vulnerable to disruption of their food supply chain, placing increased importance on what is known as ‘urban agriculture'.

It has also caused the food system to become extremely unsustainable, dependent not only on fertilizers but also on long-distance transportation and “just-in-time supply chains, coming with serious ecological costs.

In response, a trend has emerged of urban dwellers willing to grow their own food. But instead of pursuing a “back to the land” approach, they are looking at turning urban space into productive lands.

While this idea is experiencing a revival, this is very far from a new concept. Many historical cities had what can be qualified as “urban farming”. Without modern levels of transportation, this was often required to provide fresh products to some of the largest cities of their time.

This included farms inside the walls of Constantinople and later Istanbul, floating gardens on the lake of Teotihuacan (modern-day Mexico City), or the complex canal and farm network spread throughout Angkor Vat in Cambodia.

Source: Modern Farmer

Even Paris's suburbs in the early industrial era were rich in walled orchards growing fruits like oranges and lemons, much more North than possible in an open field setup.

Source: Wikipedia

Types Of Urban Farming

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) breaks down the four primary types of urban farming:

Community Gardens: Often on public land or owned by an NGO, these gardens are co-owned and managed by local residents. Usually, each participant will be attributed a parcel (maybe for a symbolic rent) and will have to follow the common rules of the garden.

Community Farms: Also usually run by a non-profit with or without public support, these farms focus on working collectively and creating social links & education within the community through the common food production.

Commercial Farms: These usually privately-owned farms mostly differ from traditional farms by their acreage, ranging from small to essentially zero for vertical or indoor farming (see more on this below).

Institutional Farms and Gardens: These urban farms are generally linked to institutions like prisons, hospitals, churches, schools, etc. They might aim less at growing food at scale than on the benefits of health, education, and lifestyle that farming and gardening will provide.

Source: Unity

New Constraints

Urban farming is a very different environment than farming in open fields in the countryside. The first obvious difference is how small the cultivated parcel might be in comparison, ranging from a backyard to a small empty lot.

This, in turn, forces urban farmers to develop creative ideas about optimizing their space usage. To the extreme, this can lead to vertical farming or entirely soilless farming.

The soil might also be of especially poor quality. Access to irrigation water might be an issue as well. So urban farmers might rely more than rural farmers on copious amounts of fertilizers to achieve satisfying yields, something addressed in this video from NCAT:

Another potential issue is contaminated soil. Urban environments, especially formerly industrial areas, might see soil contaminated by chemicals or heavy metals.

Lastly, zoning laws might become a problem as well. Many residential areas might outright ban the production of food. This is even more common when it comes to farm animals, even as small as chickens or ducks, with the smells or noises likely to create issues quickly.

(You can learn more about the regulatory framework of urban farming on this page of the USDA)

New Opportunities

Direct Consumption

The first opportunity for urban agriculture is to entirely remove the step of commercialization, with its many inefficiencies and middlemen. Many people living in the city might enjoy gardening for their own consumption. This can provide plenty of benefits to the urban farmers and their community: physical exercise, community building, healthier nutrition, improved mental health, etc.

Direct Sales & New Business Models

Another advantage of urban farming is the overabundance of consumers literally a few hundred meters from the farm. Direct farm-to-consumer sales are, in general, a growing business model, but it makes even more sense in an urban setting.

Similarly, on-demand deliveries, or CAS (Community Supported Agriculture) baskets are easy to set, and a simple bike delivery system in a big city can reach hundreds of thousands of people in a few-kilometer radius.

CSA Basket – Source: WheelBarrow Farm

Other models can also be popular and successful, like You-Pick/U-Pick/Pick-Your-Own (PYO) farms. The activity of picking the crop can be left to the final consumers. That way, money is saved, and the consumer enjoys outdoor physical activity. While a professional 8-12/hours per day picking can be backbreaking labor, less than an hour picking will be more than enough to fill a full basket equivalent to a week's worth of shopping. This model is especially popular with fruit and berry farms.

The sale of high-quality ingredients to restaurants is also a good way to generate extra margins for farmers. Urban farms can produce organic, hyper-local food with a low carbon footprint and ultra-fresh, all compelling qualities for restaurants looking to produce tasty and unique meals.

(You can read more about the different urban farm business models in this publication from the University of Wageningen in the Netherlands and in this article)

Resource abundance

A city is a rich environment when it comes to waste. This can be food waste from restaurants and supermarkets, which can recycled into organic fertilizers through a form of composting.

Or surplus materials, abandoned buildings, and other “trash” that can be turned into greenhouses, cisterns, irrigation systems, etc.

Urban farmers can benefit from the material over-abundance of city life to reduce costs and further improve their ecological impact.

Job opportunities

It is unfortunate that even in rural areas, many farmers (or their spouses) need side jobs to keep their heads above water financially, especially while a farm (a rather capital-intensive type of business) is still starting and racking up more costs than revenues.

In rural areas, this problem can be compounded by the rarity of good high-paying jobs.

In cities and suburbs, urban farming activities can be supplemented by a much larger pool of potential jobs, from gig jobs to white-collar occupations.

New or Unique Products

Some products might be in high demand with urban consumers but are hard to transport or store well. So fresh local production might come at a premium.

Another factor can be that niche products can become more profitable with millions of people right next door. What could only be sold online (a complex task) or through resellers & distributors (which reduce margins for the farmer) can now be sold directly to the connoisseurs, and the farm’s marketing can rely fully on word-to-mouth to do most of the sales.

This includes, for example, microgreens, delicacy/specialty mushrooms, herbs & medicinal plants, or microalgae like spirulina.

Source: Unsplash

Not Needing Soil At All

Urban farming methods can also be broken down into low-tech versus high-tech.

So far, we have mostly discussed the low-tech options, with small lots, community farms, or rooftop cultivation.

More recently, technological progress has opened the possibility of cities becoming much more food-independent thanks to vertical farming. We explored this technology in further detail in our article “A Deep Dive into Vertical Farming and its Global Impact“. To resume shortly, a few of its advantages are:

• Minimizing space use.
• Reliable crop production independent of seasons.
• Water efficiency.
• Reduced pesticide use.
• No herbicide use.

This nascent industry has struggled recently with profitability, mostly linked to high-energy costs. But further improvement in automation and more advanced designs might be enough to make it work.

For example, the “usual” hydroponic vertical farm system (growing plants with no soil, only water) can be combined with aquaponic, allowing the system to grow plants AND fish simultaneously, with the same water. And the fish “waste” turns into precious fertilizer.

Source: Urban Farm Tech

Scaling Up Urban Farming

Short of a technological breakthrough, urban farming will likely need a mix of different solutions to scale up.

Small & Decentralized

One simple and essentially cost-free step would be to relax regulations on gardening and farming in urban areas. Many manicured lawns could (and probably should) be turned into gardens, producing abundant fresh products. A good example is the Russian cottages (“Dachas”), which, despite representing only 3% of arable lands, make up 50% of the value of food grown in the country. This gardening activity involves 70% of the population.

Source: Small Farmers Journal

Such a shift in our culture would provide plenty of positive “side effects” as well, from less food waste to healthier nutrition and more outdoor physical activity.

Community And Commercial Farms

A somewhat common option in Europe has been the “workers' garden” or allotments, where a few acres are split into tens of hundreds or small lots for very small-scale farming.

Source: Pinterest

Larger commercial urban farms are also becoming more common, as urban centers realize the value of local food.

Filling Every Corner

Some abandoned lots can be converted into urban farms. Small sections of parks can be converted into urban gardens. Decorative trees can be replaced by edible fruits or nuts trees. Hedges can be made of hazelnuts and raspberry bushes.

Urban beehives on rooftops can produce honey, as demonstrated in a famous Parisian initiative.

Urban environments can be rich in opportunity for the ones willing to think creatively.

Municipal initiatives and support are preferable. But some might decide to start without it. This is also behind the idea of “guerrilla gardening“, planting micro gardens in unused spaces without looking for the consent of the legal owners.

Source: Wikipedia

Vertical farms

It is likely that some form of farming will stay firmly located in the countryside. For example, grain cultivation or cattle farms are hard to imagine in a city's borders.

But for vegetables, increasing the efficiency of vertical farming and/or falling energy costs might make it possible.

So, in the future of cities, some buildings might be farms on 5-15 levels, with ultra-automatized food production consuming only a fraction of the water, fertilizers, and pesticides traditional farming requires.

If you are interested in learning how you can invest in the sector of urban farming, our articles “5 Best Vertical Farming Companies” & “From Babylon’s Hanging Garden to Modern Day Homes” might also interest you.