Why We Need Urban Agriculture

Growing food in the city isn’t just a trendy thing to do. Our very survival depends on it. If there are to be cities in the years to come, they must start pulling more of their own weight where resource production is concerned, and food is one of the most basic of resources.

For the time being, let’s set aside the issue of geophysicist M. King Hubbert’s “Peak Oil” theory that postulates that for a given geographical area, oil production follows a bell-shaped curve, and that after that area reaches peak production, efforts to extract oil are both increasingly expensive and decreasingly fruitful, thereby driving the price of oil to the point that it’s no longer profitable to drill. Some of you who slept through Earth Science in Junior High may think that the Earth is like a giant cherry cordial filled with more petroleum than humanity could ever find a use for, while others—the so-called “abiotic oil” theorists—believe that oil just happens, and that the millions of years’ worth of accumulated organic matter from the Carboniferous Period had nothing to do with it. Or, like many, perhaps you’ve simply never given the issue any thought, and you automatically dismiss any topic that makes you uneasy. To all of you, discussion of fossil fuel depletion sounds like the sort of thing brought up by people in tinfoil hats ranting about alien abductions and secret societies, so you tune out. For now, then, we’ll set aside concerns of fossil fuel depletion, despite it being an even greater certainty in the scientific community than global climate change. Instead, let’s talk about something there’s no denying: the economy.

For about the past 30 years, the trend in the United States has been to have our goods manufactured overseas for consumption here. We used to make things here and use them here, or make them here and export them to other countries. And to be sure, that still happens to some extent. By and large, though, almost everything we buy comes from somewhere else. Most of what we count as “wealth” here in the US is in the realm of finance: paper traded on speculation for other paper. Generally speaking, when statistics are released about the Gross Domestic Product of America, it’s not a measure of how many natural resources we’re harvesting or how many goods and services we’re producing. It’s principally a measure of how well the people on Wall Street are making out.

Finance is nothing to be dismissed out of hand, of course. It was a stock market crash that caused the Great Depression in the 1930s. Many people now have lost their retirement investments because of failures in the finance industry. Those imaginary numbers have real-life consequences for the people invested in them, and for everyone else who relies on credit or on other companies that rely on credit—which is to say, just about everybody. When banks stop loaning money, businesses can’t operate. When businesses close, people are out of work. When everyone’s out of work, nobody has money. Without money, most people can’t get what they need to get by. It’s a big deal.

Big a deal as it is, though, it’s not the whole picture, as measures of American GDP would have us believe. By giving so much business to developing nations, we’ve enabled them to become much wealthier. China now owns much of the US debt and is developing at breakneck speed. Last year, China, not the United States, was the top buyer of new automobiles. India has a much more solid manufacturing base than we do. Money is pouring out of America and into these other countries.

Consider how America’s tax dollars are spent. Right now, the US has the largest, most sophisticated military in the world. We’re fighting two wars at once, have troops stationed in over a hundred countries, and spend more on defense than all our enemies combined. Even so, defense is not our largest expenditure. Interest on the national debt is. Let that sink in for a moment. Estimates vary, but I’ve heard that the US government owes between $4,000 and $10,000 for each man, woman, and child in the country, and that debt is growing every day. Some people who keep an eye on such matters have suggested that we’ve reached the point of loaning money to ourselves, simply printing more money and letting the inflation that causes be balanced out by our deflating economy.

It’s only a matter of time before America defaults on its debts or, more likely, our foreign creditors withdraw their support in favor more attractive investments elsewhere. Would you invest in a country that doesn’t make anything and whose currency is declining in value? Debt becomes a very unattractive investment once it’s clear that it’s never going to be paid off.

For a more accurate measure than GDP gives us, look at state and municipal governments. Some states—California foremost among them—are essentially bankrupt. Many public service workers have had to take pay cuts. Police officers and fire fighters in some areas have jobs only because federal bailouts kept them from getting laid off. Why is this happening? The treasuries are running dry because these governments don’t have as much of a tax base as they used to. Businesses are shutting down and workers are earning less and spending less, and therefore paying less in taxes. Short of a Roosevelt-style work program (funded by yet more deficit spending), we have nothing in place to allow us to reverse this downward spiral because American companies have moved our industries to other countries.

“Okay, so you think we’re headed for a depression. What’s that got to do with putting farms in the city? We still had farms in the country in the last Depression.”

Our food system today has almost nothing in common with that of America before 1945. In 1920, over 20% of the American work force were farmers. Something like 40% of all Americans lived on farms. Today, it’s more like 2% living on farms and about one percent actually working as farmers. Farms then tended to be smaller affairs. They mostly grew food, ate some of it themselves, and sold most of the rest locally. Then the Green Revolution came after World War II. A lot of farm kids moved to the cities and suburbs to work in factories. Huge machines allowed one farmer to work hundreds of acres growing grains for the commodities market.

One of the inherent fragilities of this newer system is that it depends on oil. Petroleum runs the machines and provides the raw materials for the fertilizers and other chemicals necessary to make industrial farming work. As Cuba found out the hard way when the collapse of the Soviet Union cut off their supply of oil, relying on Green Revolution techniques to feed your people means that when there’s no more oil, there’s no more food.

“Hang on! You’re talking about oil. You said this wasn’t about oil. It’s about the economy.”

America is a net importer of oil. We produce a little, but nothing like we did in the middle of the 20th Century. We’re way past our peak. We have to import most of our oil now, just like Cuba did. And increasingly, we rely on our oil coming from countries that don’t like us. More importantly, though, we have to buy that oil. No money and no credit? No oil for you! Once the funds run dry, so does the pump.

Do you think that we’ll just take that oil by force? Remember—tanks, planes, and armored personnel carriers all run on oil. Our military strength is actually pretty pitiful if the enemy has a ready supply of oil and we don’t. That means we can’t very well just go take more if we run out. Even if we found ourselves in a situation where the American government was willing to invest its last reserves of oil in a military campaign to go seize someone else’s oil, what are we using to power our tractors and factory farms back home in the mean time? Being broke means you can’t rely on expensive food production methods anymore.

This brings us back to the issue of cities. Many more people live in cities now than ever before. This lifestyle, done the way we’re doing it now, is possible only because of cheap energy. Food is shipped in, goods are shipped in, even the electricity often comes from somewhere else. In many cases, life in cities would be impossible without air conditioning or water piped in from many miles away. All of this depends on cheap energy.

“So we’ll use coal! We have mountains of it!”

What powers the coal diggers? How do you run a coal mine without money? If you could supply enough coal to make energy as cheap as it is right now with all the imported oil, how long do you really think it would last, considering both our rate of consumption and the fact that our population of consumers is growing exponentially? If we only used it at our present rate, estimates are that there’s enough coal in America to last over a thousand years, but when you factor in rates of growth, about 70 years is the most generous, realistic estimate. That means we carry on the same as we are now, and in 70 years, there’s no more coal. Ever.

“So what about solar? And wind?”

We’ve burned through about a hundred-million years’ worth of stored sunlight in about three hundred years. Do you really think the sunlight that falls on Earth in one year is going to provide a whole year’s worth of power at our present rate of consumption? Moreover, trying to switch our entire power grid and transportation infrastructure over to renewable sources would require a massive investment of energy and materials—resources we just don’t have in abundance anymore. Maybe we could’ve done it back in the 1970’s, but it’s just too late to do it now and still expect to have the same sort of lifestyle under the new system.

Do you get it yet? The American empire is about to fade off into the sunset. It happens to all empires eventually. They spread out bigger and bigger, eating up the resources of all their subordinate territories, getting fat and unproductive, and then the supply lines get overstretched. Every great civilization that grows eventually overshoots the resources that sustain it. It happened to Mesopotamia, it happened to Egypt, it happened to the Maya, it happened to the Anasazi, it happened to Rome, it happened to Spain, it happened to England, and now it’s happening to us…and there is no silver bullet that just makes everything all better and provides our country an eternal lifestyle of Cadillac Escalades transporting us to malls with massive parking lots for a weekend dose of shopping therapy. We can nose down and throttle up like the ground doesn’t exist—what we’ve been doing–or we can level out and try for a gentle crash landing that we can survive.

One of the first steps is to make sure people will have food. There’s a saying that the best security is a well-fed neighbor; food riots that have occurred in other countries in the past couple years suggest there’s some wisdom in this statement. If we can no longer rely on industrial farms in California to load up trucks full of food to ship to the rest of the country, though, how will we eat? The answer is obvious: grow the food where the eaters are. These days, most of the eaters are concentrated in cities, so that’s where we need to grow the food.

“But that’s just not practical. You need thousands of acres to grow enough food for everybody!”

That’s right, but we don’t need those thousands of acres to all be in one place like they are now. That’s what we need to get away from. If everyone who has space to do so is growing a garden or keeping small livestock, small farms surrounding a city can pick up the slack. Consider the following from author Sharon Astyk:

“In 1943, for example, the city of Baltimore had more than 14,000 community gardens, producing enough food to meet all the produce needs of the city.  In 1944, all the victory gardens in the US produced the same amount of produce as all the vegetable farms in the US put together.  In the 19th century, urban Paris was exporting food from 3600 acres of intensively farmed land that produce more vegetables than the city could consume.

“Underestimating the power of urban agriculture is one of the deepest flaws in reasoning.  Most nations of the global south produce substantial portions of meat and vegetables within city limits – Hong Kong and Singapore, for example, both produce more than 20% of their meat and vegetables within the city limits.  In 2002 with more than 6 million people, Hong Kong was producing 33% of their produce, 14% of the pigs, 36% of the chickens and 20% of the farmed fish eaten in the city limits…”

She goes on to say that much of the feed for this livestock comes from tons of food waste from right inside the city.

Interestingly, eating locally grown food is both the necessary result of, and part of the solution to, a collapsed economy. Figures vary from state to state, but chances are that there are billions of dollars pouring out of your state because you and your neighbors are buying food that was produced somewhere else. In his 2010 State of the State Address, Ohio Governor Ted Strickland recognized the need to stop this fiscal hemorrhage, citing that Ohioans spend 43 billion dollars annually on food, and only about 3% of it comes from Ohio farms. By localizing food production, you keep that money in your community. Local commerce increases, jobs get created, and the overall standard of living rises. Michael Schuman, author of The Small-Mart Revolution: How Local Businesses Are BeatingThe Global Competition, explains the phenomenon in this two-hour lecture at Carnegie Mellon University. (Skip the first 13:30. It’s just one guy introducing another guy who then introduces the guest lecturer.)

Cuba has served as our guinea pig in the field of relocalizing and urbanizing food production. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, and with it, the Cuban economy and their import-dependent industrial food system, the country rebuilt their agriculture from scratch. Factories started gardens for their workers’ lunches. Households grew vegetables wherever they had space. Community gardens, hydroponic operations, and “organoponicos”–raised beds filled with vermicompost created from garbage and animal manure–were all put in place to grow food in the cities. There were still shortages, though, so in a last-ditch effort, the communist nation relented and allowed private farmers to start selling their crops for profit.

The plan worked…too well, according to the Cuban government. The farmers were so successful that they became relatively wealthy. People in other professions started abandoning their jobs to grow food to sell. When the government then tried to shut down these private market gardeners, the public resisted. They enjoyed having easy access to fresh, high quality food, even if it was more expensive than the stuff in the state food stores. Last I heard, the government had changed the program so that the farmers have to give a portion of their crop to the government, and they have to reach a quota before they can sell the surplus.

I mentioned earlier that most people these days live in cities. We need to have farms in the cities not just because that’s where the eaters are, but because that’s where the labor is as well. If we try going back to growing our food without petroleum, we’re going to need a lot more farmers than we presently have. Before the tractor came into widespread use, nearly 40% of Americans were farmers. Some advances in intensive agriculture have been made since then, but we’re still going to need a lot more than one percent of the populace to grow food.

Presently, most urbanites have no experience with how their food is produced. This has led to an epidemic ignorance that farmer and author Gene Logsdon has termed “Acorn Tree Syndrome,” so named after a teacher friend of his discovered that the majority of his students didn’t know what kind of tree produces acorns. If city dwellers are this ignorant about nature now, how can we expect them to suddenly bootstrap their way into new careers as farmers when it becomes necessary? We can’t, and it’s for that reason that we need urban farmers in cities today, if for no other reason than to act as an educational resource so city folks can learn where food comes from and how to produce it themselves.

And finally, having all these new farmers move from the cities to the countryside would be a waste. It would put them in a logistically inferior location, obviously, but it would also allow a lot of urban infrastructure to sit vacant. Why build a new house in the country for a farmer if he already has one in the city and can do his job without relocating? If the farmer is going to be employing several people who live in the city, why stick his farm out where it will necessitate a long commute? By keeping the farm in the city, you take advantage of pre-existing roads, utilities, buildings, processing plants, markets, and a labor pool. Really, in this age of urbanity, we shouldn’t even be farming in the country until we’ve run out of room to do so in the cities.