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Some people really, really hate the idea of urban farms
By adamg on Sun, 06/26/2011 - 6:55pm
Meg Muckenhoupt doesn't get it:
Will urban food production ruin our economy, change our climate, and make our world a more miserable place to live?
The answer seems to be no, because current city set-ups and rural agriculture are already making our world a more miserable place to live.
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Comments
Farms are bigger than your hood.
There is a big difference between faming and gardening. Farms take acres and acres of land to work. You have large tractors and equipment barns and livestock etc. Gardens are a more fitting for a city. You can have a garden 2 to 3 acres big. A farm would take up an entire neighborhood or 2 or 3. I wish people would stop using farming and city in the same sentence. Gardening is the term to be used.
When you put a farm in a city it no longer is a city. It’s the countryside. And would you put a city in the middle of a farm?
Farm vs Garden
I think the real distinction between the two is not size, but whether you are growing the crop for sale to others (like Allandale Farm), or just for your own consumption (like the Fenway Victory Garden plots).
the real distinction is fuel usage
...and there, it largely comes down to the price tag at the market, because most of the cost is in transport. Then fuel used by the farm during production, and then fertilizers and pesticides (yes, even the ones cleared for use on "organic" foods, heh.)
Companies like major supermarket chains (Whole Foods, OH NOES) have well-refined supply chains and get their foods from large farms with efficient equipment and automation, etc. They have to; grocery business is highly competitive.
Their goods are transported by major fleet operators, in the backs of 18 wheelers and quite possibly rail cars.
That pile of organic vegetables from your CSA? Transported in the back of a box truck that probably doesn't meet nearly as clean an emissions standard, and which is carrying less goods for more fuel than the 18 wheeler. Grown in soil tilled by a tractor that probably pollutes more than a couple hundred modern cars combined, by the way.
End result: your "local" CSA box could have much more environmental impact than you think. Nevermind that all I hear from CSA people is how much food they get they don't want, which leads to wasted/thrown out food...
Are there any facts in Brettworld?
Or just elaborate "just so" stories and theories.
Next time, educate yourself about transportation, emissions standards, and CSA practices before shooting off your keyboard, mmmkay?
except he's right
and probably has
We already *did* put a farm in the city
It's called Franklin Park. Frederick Law Olmsted parked flocks of sheep there.
There are also forests in the Boston (Arnold Arboretum, Allandale Woods, the Riverway, Forest Hills Cemetery) and the completely artificial Esplanade. Heck, wasn't the Southwest Corridor supposed to be an economy-boosting highway?
We lower density in the city ALL THE TIME. Just because urban farms are being used for a different purpose doesn't automatically make them less worthy.
And what is the difference between gardening and farming, exactly? Why is a food-producing area 3 acres a garden? That's big enough to produce substantial crops and income, more than enough to support a professional farmer and seasonal staff if it's managed well. Farmers in Philadelphia and other cities adapt to urban conditions: check out www.spinfarming.com for one example. I'd call someone producing $10K of crops on a half-acre a farmer, not a gardener, fine thank you.
A few sheep a farm does not make.
Calling Franklin Park a farm because they had sheep there is quite silly. They have a zoo there now, does that make it a ranch?
A small garden plot that feeds 7 hippies 2 months out of the year is not a farm.
If you can get from one end of your "farm" to the other without using a pickup truck it is not a farm.
Urban planners have long agreed that you don't want to get your peanut butter in my chocolate. The best method of land use is dense cities with almost all skyscrapers surrounded by rural and wilderness with no suburbs in between.
Full of sheep dip
If you need a truck to get from one end of your farm to the other, you either live in a wasteland that you are squeezing the last measure of life from to make your dosh, or you are a corporate-backed, taxpayer-supported boondoggler. These days - probably both.
But I could be wrong. What did you grow up farming?
farmers and trucks
Farmer 1: "On my farm I can get in my truck at sunrise, drive all day, and not reach the other end of the farm until sunset."
Farmer 2: "I had a truck like that once."
Olmsted created "rural scenery" on purpose
Frederick Law Olmsted's intent was to create "rural scenery" easily accessible to city-dwellers--and part of that scenery was a pastoral landscape where sheep grazed. You can read his "Notes on a Plan for Franklin Park" yourself over at Open Library.
As for farm size --The Newton Community Farm is a little over two acres and produces enough veggies and fruits to supply a 78-member CSA for five months a year as well as farm stand and a booth at the Newton Farmer's Market. Is that not a farm?
Statewide, Massachusetts farm boosters also seem to disagree with you. UMass Extension reported in 2009 that the average size of farms in Massachusetts had decreased from 85 acres to 67 acres in 2004-2009, and that the number of farms with fewer than 10 acres had increased by 50% in the same time period. The Massachusetts Farm Bureau boasted in its May 2011 news that it recently gained zoning protection for 2-acre farms.
I think the 'really really
I think the 'really really hating' business is going in the other direction.
Density reduces energy
Density reduces energy consumption. Urban farms (unless we're talking rooftop gardens) reduce density and create higher impacts. There's a whole slew of facts that say "buying local" is worse for the environment. Also, buying local most likely means each farms sends it's own truck to the markets, whereas massive farms in the middle of nowhere can ship by rail for a long haul, and then disperse it by truck locally. Overall it makes for "greener" distribution.
Depends how it's distributed
If people are walking and biking to the farm to buy what they need, instead of buying things that have been shipped from California, well, then...
lots of corporate-farm apologists here
"There's a whole slew of facts that say "buying local" is worse for the environment..."
Baloney. There's plenty of ideological (pro-corporate) screeds that say this, but nothing even approximating consensus reviewed research.
It's a typical US-Reactionary response to try to make the idea of urban or close-urban farming an either-or proposition. Some folks do so love the Fallacy of Ad Absurdia. Same sort of nonsense that we heard when the gay-marriage law was being debated and we were breathlessly warned that it would lead to people marrying their pets and their daughters.
There are plenty of real-world counterexamples to the idea that the only profitable farming takes place in mega-large holdings far from cities. Relatively modest market gardens/truck farms produced large fractions of the food consumed in the cities of the American East coast prior to WW2 (which had population densities similar to today's); and this is still true in much of Western Europe today. And more directly to the idea of "city farming" being discussed in the blogs/articles above, the highly dense population centers in East Asia - like Singapore and Hong Kong - produce *hundreds of millions* of dollars worth of food within their city limits.
***
It's true that some crops - primarily cereal and textile - require large plantings in order to be worked at efficiencies that make business-sense. But even with these, you reach the natural economy-of-scale limits at a few hundred acres. After that you are effectively managing multiple plantings, no matter the overall size of the holding.
When you've got a decent transport infrastructure (btw, primarily paid for in this country not by the corporate users, but by us taxpayers), these crops are most profitably grown further away from population centers.
Otoh, for non-cereal crops (ie most veggies we eat), you can have profitable market gardens on just a few acres. Even the biggest truck farms I grew up around as a farm boy were rarely more than a few hundred acres in total (for multiple crops) - and most (like ours) were only a few dozen.
There's no reason that this sort of food production can't happen profitably and sustainably within close proximity to large population centers. It just requires smaller holdings that can fit into the quilt of land uses. That makes it unappealing to mega-corps.
The primary reasons mega-corp farming is so prevalent in the US since WW2 are the massive government subsidies and tax allowances given them by pet law-makers. In similarly developed countries in Europe where property tax rules are not so incredibly weighted against small family-owned farms, you find a significant percentage of prodution still taking place on small acreage holdings within a few score miles of the major population centers.
And recent hoo-haa wrt bean sprouts notwithstanding, food safety, availability, and cost/quality in Europe is comparable to that in the US.
Urban food production
Good post! The most annoying part of the Glaeser op-ed was the selective sort of cost-benefit analysis that he (and most other corporate farm apologists) uses to justify his position. Without a doubt getting huge, bright red waxy tomatoes in bulk to a huge supermarket is probably best done by the corporate farm system we have in place now. A bunch of "hippies" growing some wormy crap on their sagging roof in JP won't do. But maybe the issue is that we should question the existing system. By questioning I mean look at what it really costs us to maintain it. The tax breaks, the govt-supported ag R&D, crop subsidies, maintenance of the transportation infrastructure, and mitigating the effects of too-intensive forms of corporate farming (soil loss and sterilization), animal waste contamination, pesticide and fertilizer effects -- all this adds up to be a ridiculous expense that of course we (society, taxpayers, whatever) shoulder. (And we can also add in the whole immigrant-worker part of the equation, but I'm tired of talking about that.)
The benefit is that waxy tomato is readily available where expect to find it at a very low cost. As was noted, somethings will continue to be grown in bulk, but there are many things that could and probably should be handled differently.
That'll never fit on a cue card
Therefore it must be wrong. Plus there is too much sense being made thus it isn't salacious enough to discuss.
Ergo, corporate farming is the ONLY way. The ONLY way.
Why would I want to grow my own food?
When I can but strawberries that have so many pesticides in then you can't even taste the fruit at my local Shaw's? And at $4.99 a package, it's a bargain compared to digging in dirt and bugs and yuchhhhhhhhh!!!!!!
I eagerly look forward to the day I see food riots in America, and if you don't think we'll see them in our lifetimes, well......
I'm a big "buy local" fan.
I'm a big "buy local" fan. I'd love to see something like the Brooklyn Grange Farm in Boston.
http://www.brooklyngrangefarm.com
I think it's pretty innovative and I would eagerly support such projects in my area. I live and work in converted mills with expansive flat rooftops. Would be nice to continue to enhance the reuse of these old structures with green roofs that also provide food.