“Urban farms can help feed the hungry.”
– Rachel Surls, Sacramento Bee
TRUE FACTS:
The world’s human population has almost tripled in my lifetime. The United Nations’ Department of Economic and Social Affairs expects it to reach almost 10 billion by 2050. Meantime, about 815 million people are malnourished. How will we feed another 3 billion by mid-century? That increase is about equal to the total number of people who were on Planet Earth the year of my birth. What complicates matters is that, according to the EPA, the agriculture industry currently produces about 9% of the world’s greenhouse gases.
One proposal is to convert unused portions of urban landscapes into agricultural cooperatives. This idea goes by many names; urban agriculture, ZFarming (short for zero-acreage farming) , or vertical farming, for instance. There seems to be no shortage of true-believers. Even my hometown of Albuquerque – not exactly a farming mecca with its average annual 8.7 inches or rainfall – got a shout-out in the book Urban Farming: Sustainable Living in Your Backyard, in Your Community:
The non-profit Added Value runs two farms totaling 5.75 acres in New York City, which is huge for such a densely populated city. Growing Power has a 2-acre property in Milwaukee that is jam-packed with urban agricultural activities, another 5-acre property in the city for a school and community partnership project, and an additional 40-acre suburban property. It also runs three smaller farm projects in Chicago. Rio Grande Community Farms boasts an incredible 50 acres within the city of Albuquerque. (p. 80)
How realistic is this?
I imagine those numbers will come as a surprise to my kinfolk who live in America’s Breadbasket. Iowa alone has about 36 million acres of farmland. That “huge” acreage in New York I just mentioned comes out to roughly 0.00002% of Iowa’s arable land. Albuquerque’s urban farming is ten times as great as New York’s, so feel free to lop off one digit from my estimate of New York’s contribution.
Add that to the solution for world hunger, and you come up with almost nothing. The Rio Grande Community Farm in Albuquerque is a 501(c)3 non-profit, and is not even self-sustaining. As of May 24, 2018, the farm needs “$4000-$5000/month to meet bare minimum costs of operation including staff contractor fees.”
Anyone who has spent time in the American Midwest already knows that farming isn’t a hobby. It is a skills-set that has evolved over many generations, to the point where it is now capable of producing about four thousand calories of food per person per day. How many urban agriculturalists know how to deal with Bean Leaf Bettles, Corn Rootworms, European Corn Borers, or any of the other pests who wage war on our crops? How many of them know how to use permethrin, esfenvalerate, or Bacillus thuringiensis for pest control?
For meat-eaters and seafood lovers: I have nothing. The rosiest estimates of the benefits of urban agriculture make no allowances for livestock. In Texas, you have to count on somewhere between eight and fifteen acres per animal per year. That comes out to about 1/3 of a cow for each of New York City’s “huge” urban farmlands, provided you let that third-of-a-cow eat all of farmland’s veggies.
In 2016, Jeffrey Richardson and L. Monika Moskal published a study in the journal Urban Forestry & Urban Greening in which they describe their research that used aerial LiDAR mapping to estimate how much food Seattle could provide if it converted all of its available green space to urban farming. The answer was a miserable 1% to 4% of the city’s population, assuming a strictly vegetarian diet.
Urban gardening is a great hobby. But let’s admit that it is a bit elitist to imagine that urbanites, who have little to no knowledge of agriculture, will contribute to the problem of global food insecurity by cultivating tiny gardens during the weekends when they are not vacationing in the Hamptons.
