Brief thoughts on “scaling up urban agriculture”
January 8, 2024
Morning AgClips shared coverage of a recently published study from the University of Florida. The article wonders: “Can small farming flourish in the heart of a city and suburban neighborhoods? Are there best practices in urban agriculture, and can they be adopted in an accelerated fashion to ultimately promote resilient and self-sustaining communities? If so, are there benefits to building such a system that can accelerate local food production without burdening the environment?” The report, entitled Scale up urban agriculture to leverage transformative food systems change, advance social–ecological resilience and improve sustainability, purports to address these questions.
Access the paper here (https://doi.org/10.1038/s43016-023-00902-x)
The study’s major contribution is a framework for scaling urban agriculture. This framework acknowledges something often left unsaid in similar studies investigating the benefits and risks of urban agriculture - that, if urban agriculture can be a response to transformative, wicked problems (like climate change, urban hunger, crime, etc), then it, too, must be transformative. A transformative solution inherently means a solution which transforms, which has the capacity to change the status quo, to remake systems. The authors write that “to create premises for reconsidering functional organization of urban space, people’s consumption behaviour [sic] and dependence on current food regimes.” Such a statement has massive implications. Such a statement suggests a pathway to balancing affordable housing with copious green-space, reducing consumption, and weakening the market power of industrial agriculture systems.
The specific takeaways, frameworks, and conclusions presented in the study are not groundbreaking for those already engaged in urban agriculture work. The authors state the usual benefits (provisioning, regulating/supporting, and cultural), risks, and challenges. They illustrate the diversity and context-dependence that are inherent to urban agriculture systems. Even the authors’ stances on disrupting the current system, a system which usually does not encourage urban agriculture, are built on existing literature. However, it is significant to see this perspective from established institutions of higher learning. The study is the work of authors from established, traditional agricultural universities, including the University of Florida, the University of Arizona, and New York’s SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry.
One example of the disruptive potential of urban agriculture here (https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv1hp5hpc.15)
The authors do concede that, while “properly scaling up urban agriculture has the potential to induce transformative change…. these pathways should be perceived as working hypotheses, considering both divergent radical and neoliberal processes that operate in a co-productive manner.” So, they are not bought into a fully radical transformation, at least not in this publication. Perhaps this concession is practical - if expansion of urban agriculture comes as a result of more government investment and as a result of entrepreneurship and value-added markets, the entire system cannot be broken, at least not all at once. The fact that this report encourages the scaling up of urban agriculture in order to “question underlying logics and values that govern urbanization, land marketing, current food regimes and urban planning systems… [to] enhance self-reflexivity and foster urban food movements and radical transformation of food systems to reconnect land access, food production, sovereignty, ethics and consumption; and [to] challenge neoliberal urbanism and advocate alternative urban economies and living recentred [sic] around food” is groundbreaking and encouraging. Striving for such outcomes could be an antidote to the worst effects of the current, wicked problems created by, in the authors’ words, “capitalism and modernization.”
The authors reach their conclusions due to a systems thinking-approach. They consider “urban food systems, due to their intertwined links to diverse domains including social, environmental, energy, health, political and economic systems, present a promising lever to induce such transformative change towards urban resilience and sustainability.” This approach makes the paper a worthwhile read.
Despite appreciating most of what was published in this report, I did encounter some reasons to pause. First, this paper did a good job aggregating much of the existing urban agriculture conversation into one place, but does not address all fundamental challenges. For example, the benefits and risks of urban agriculture are stated, but are not measured; nor does the paper offer a framework for measurement. It can be dangerous to present the two - benefits and risks - side-by-side and seemingly with equal weight as if they cancel each other out. Without a way to quantify these benefits and risks, advocates may never be able to illustrate the full opportunity that urban agriculture presents. The authors concede that “further investigation is also needed to empirically test, examine and validate processes and theories underlying scaling up of urban agriculture.” I agree, and challenge that this testing will prove immensely difficult without frameworks for measurement.
The authors also present research stating that a “global meta-analysis showed that urban agriculture yields are on par with or greater than conventional agricultural yields, with some crops (for example, cucumber) ∼4 times higher. Even for staple crops such as wheat, urban vertical farming has potential to produce several hundred times higher than field farming, although still cost and energy intensive with current technology.” While this may be true, and has been represented similarly in many other papers, it is misleading. Urban agriculture operates at significantly different scales than conventional, rural agriculture. While more produce per acre may be possible in urban contexts, urban growers are often operating on less than one acre while their rural counterparts operate on hundreds or thousands of acres. Such scale also allows for the use of heavy machinery, thereby supplanting expensive human labor with machine labor. These conditions should be considered when thinking about the opportunity presented by urban agriculture - rather than supplanting rural agriculture, it should be seen as supplementing and offering different benefits providing incremental value.
More about growth factors on American farms: A Parametric Estimation of Total Factor Productivity and Its Components in U.S. Agriculture (https://doi.org/10.1093/ajae/aay010) and Productivity and Economic Growth in U.S. Agriculture: A New Look (https://www.jstor.org/stable/44788097).
I would also challenge that “the processes and pathways through which scaling up urban agriculture occurs and what enabling factors could catalyse upscaling remain elusive.” Hundreds if not thousands of publications about the benefits and opportunities of urban agriculture exist, and in the US, non-profits and land-grant extension agents in many states are already tackling these challenges. If decision makers and politicians and businesspeople wanted a solution, they could easily find one - even better, they could work in tandem with their communities to develop localized solutions. So the question remains - how do we create a catalyst for the framework for growth that the authors propose? Meaning: how can elected officials with power and resources be motivated to respond to their communities, rather than business interests and the promises of status-quo economic development? Especially if this framework will result in a transformation that those with power and resources may not wish to realize.
This paper spoke to me for many reasons. While the progressive and “transformative” stance of the paper is not novel, the origins (from historic, established universities) and communications strategy (publication on a mainstream agriculture news site, Morning AgClips) struck me as unusual, good omens for the widespread application of this kind of research in the near future. Additionally, the authors focused on scaling urban agriculture, mentioning that “despite the benefits of urban agriculture, its impacts have been constrained due to small-scale implementation.” My current project with Cornell Cooperative Extension and the USDA seeks to increase investment in urban agriculture from the federal level, and I hope publications like these, with commensurate media coverage, encourage more investment at all scales of government and society.
More about the USDA’s pilot urban service centers here (https://www.farmers.gov/your-business/urban-growers/urban-service-centers).