Inner-City Farms
By Lisa McLaughlin
Farm aid, the annual concert dedicated to raising funds for the American family farmer, has been held in such agricultural strongholds as Manor, Texas, and Ames, Iowa. But the most recent venue, the distinctly nonrural borough of Manhattan, is not as incongruous as it seems. With its estimated 600 small-scale farms (which are often large-scale vegetable gardens), New York City is part of an urban agricultural boom in the U.S., where rising food and fuel prices are making city farming seem less and less outlandish. In July volunteers began transforming the front lawns of San Francisco's city hall into the first edible offerings on that site since 1943, when civilians across the country were encouraged to aid the war effort by growing victory gardens.
These days, urban gardeners are waging lots of different wars--against global warming, foreign-oil dependence, processed food, obesity and neighborhood blight. Turning an old parking lot into a working farm not only helps reduce a city's carbon footprint but can also generate revenue for a down-and-out part of town. To demonstrate how much food can be grown in a small space, a 2006 pilot project on a sub-acre lot on the outskirts of Philadelphia hauled in $67,000 from crops like salad greens and baby vegetables. In Milwaukee, a 1-acre (0.4 hectare) farm filled with greenhouses, tilapia tanks and poultry pens grossed more than $220,000.
"It's a way to address a lot of pressing urban issues," says John Bela, a landscape architect who is designing the garden at San Francisco's city hall. He's also working with a group called SF Victory Gardens 2008+ to coordinate a backyard-garden program aimed at increasing access to healthier food among lower-income families.
There was a time when city dwellers could more or less provide for their own food needs, but since the Industrial Revolution, the distance from field to fork has greatly increased--the average meal now travels 1,500 miles (2,400 km) to reach your plate. And, notes Bela, "the hidden cost of the food chain is the transport." Thus urban agriculture aims to help people save money as well as the environment.
The trend toward city farming is already big in Canada and Europe and is gaining ground in the U.S. amid escalating concerns about the environment, pesticides and food safety in general. "Knowing exactly where your food comes from is a concern for a lot of people in the face of salmonella and E. coli scares," says Johanna Rosen of West Philadelphia's Mill Creek Farm.
As Rosen and other activists can attest, horticulture--with its regular, seasonal rewards--is also an ideal vehicle for community-organizing. For instance, in Portland, Ore., where vacant lots are scarce, an ad on Craigslist asking for unused land gave rise to City Garden Farms, a quarter acre (0.1 hectare) spread out over 12 backyards. Not much arm-twisting was involved. "This adds to the value of our community," says co-founder Martin Barrett. Indeed, edible gardens have become so trendy that in St. Louis, Mo., a housing developer is including an organic farm as a subdivision amenity, and in Queens, N.Y., the current exhibition at P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center is a stylish farm.
Seed catalogs are also capitalizing on the urb-ag movement by offering smaller varieties of vegetables that can be grown successfully in more compact spaces. And the catalog companies are reporting that sales of vegetable seeds have soared in the past several years, outstripping those of flowers for the first time since the 1950s.
Meanwhile, Dickson Despommier, a public-health professor at Columbia University, is pushing a way to get population centers to produce a lot more of the food they consume. His Vertical Farm Project envisions hydroponic skyscrapers that would be as productive as 588 acres (238 hectares) of land. A 21-story farm is expected to cost about $84 million to build. That's a lot of cabbage to grow some lettuce, which is perhaps why the first tower in the works is in Las Vegas. In a city that already has a giant pyramid and mini Eiffel Tower, why not a modern Hanging Gardens of Babylon?
For more city crops, go to time.com/urbanfarming