Importance of Urban Agriculture

As some funny men used to say, and now for something completely different!

I will definitely be writing about Bethlehem, but it'll take some time and I want it to be good. And in the mean time, here's a little piece I wrote for the Ben Nobleman Orchard site that they didn't end up needing. So why waste a good little bit of writing?


If Jeff Rubin is correct in his recent book “Why Your World is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller”, then the Ben Nobleman Orchard, currently Toronto’s only community orchard, won’t be so for long. The reason is actually quite simple: the industrialization and globalization of food production of the past fifty years has increased the amount of energy used to produce every calorie of food on your plate. This rise in the energy intensity of our food has occurred in almost every aspect of the food system, from farm to plate; fossil fuels are now the lifeblood of the system that feeds us. First, there is the natural gas converted into synthetic fertilizer and the diesel that runs the massive farm machinery. Then there’s the bunker fuel that runs the shipping (or worse, the jet fuel that flies chilled vegetables around the world). Trucking to the supermarket, driving to the supermarket, even the plastic packaging that the food comes in depends on fossil fuel feedstocks. While there are many social and ecological impacts of this method of food production and consumption which provide reasons for diversifying our methods, the most important reason is a purely economic one: Peak Oil. According to Jeff Rubin, the lifeblood of our food system is getting inexorably scarcer:
“In a world of dwindling oil supplies and steadily mounting demand around the world, there is no such thing as cheap oil. Oil might be less expensive in the middle of a recession, but it will never be cheap again”
This is not going to happen overnight, but the gist is that oil prices are going to become both higher and more volatile in the near future. This will translate directly into significantly higher prices for foods that have a significant fossil fuel input. The farther food has traveled, and the greater diesel and synthetic fertilizer input needed in its production, the greater the price increase at the superstore. This is not a theoretical assumption: the $147 a barrel oil prices facing the world in the summer of 2008 were a large part of the doubling or even tripling of the global prices of staples like rice, wheat, and corn. In this sense, urban agriculture is not just a social or ecological issue (though these are important reasons for community urban agriculture), but a food security issue.
As an example, FoodShare Ontario recently conducted a survey of the distance food had travelled at both a Supermarket and a Farmer’s Market. The supermarket food had travelled an average of 5,364 kilometres from farm to market, while the farmer’s market food had travelled a mere 101. The energy intensity of food can also be expressed in terms of the number of calories used to produce each kilogram of a specific food item. Some estimates show that nearly 2,000 kcal of energy are needed to get each kilogram of frozen fruit to the table. Breakfast cereal is nearly 15,000 kcal, and chocolate is a whopping 18,000 kcal. The wonderful thing about community gardens and community orchards is that those numbers are virtually zero. From an economic standpoint, it just makes sense to increase urban food production, especially in underutilized areas like parks and lawns.
Not only is the problem not merely a theoretical one, but the urban agriculture solution has already manifested itself on the world stage. When the Soviet Union collapsed in the early 90’s, Cuba was left high and dry. Stifled by the US trade embargo, it had relied on vast support from the Soviets in terms of subsidized fossil fuels, machinery, and farm inputs like fertilizers and pesticides. With the end of this support, caloric intake in Cuba more than halved almost overnight. It was like Peak Oil in fast motion. But with intensive research into organic solutions to pests and fertilizer shortages and the blossoming of 2,730 urban gardens and 4,347 larger gardens on the outskirts of cities, most municipalities now produce upwards of 30 percent of their own food. Havana now produces more than half a million tons of food every year.
The benefits of urban agriculture aren’t limited to food security. Projects like community orchards are the epitome of the adage “think globally, act locally”. They help to strengthen the resilience of neighbourhoods and give neighbours a reason to get to know one another. They provide a way for urban dwellers to connect to the natural world and the soil, and also provide the health benefits of active lifestyles and added nutrition from the healthy food grown. They’re also a lot of fun!