Food and Sustainable Prosperity

by Brenna Spurgeon

Urban agriculture has now clearly established a place for itself in the U.S. landscape. Canada and Europe are already experiencing trends in urban agriculture, and concerns about food safety and the environment are pushing the movement in the U.S. An article in TIME highlights emergent and ongoing endeavors in Manhattan, San Francisco, Philadelphia, and Milwaukee.

Manhattan has approximately 600 small-scale farms (mostly vegetable gardens), showing that farming in the Big Apple is becoming less unexpected, partly spurred on by the rising food and fuel prices. Since July, the lawn of San Francisco’s city hall has been transformed into an urban farm, reminiscent of the early forties when citizens were encouraged to grow “victory gardens” to aid the war effort. The city’s other current agriculture project, SF Victory Gardens 2008+, is organizing a backyard-garden program for lower-income families to improve their access to healthier food.

People are proving that results can be successful with only a small plot. Baby vegetables and salad greens grown on less than an acre outside Philadelphia grossed $67,000 in a pilot project. Greenhouses, tilapia tanks and poultry brought in more than $220,000 on a one-acre farm in Milwaukee. In Portland, Ore., City Garden Farms covers only a quarter acre, but is spread out over 12 backyards. Urban agriculture is proving to be an ideal way to promote community organizing.

The trend has grown to the extent that a housing developer in St. Louis, Mo. is including in his subdivisions an organic farm, and Dickson Despommier, a public-health professor at Columbia University, is promoting his Vertical Farm Project: “hydroponic skyscrapers that would be as productive as 588 acres of land.” The first tower to be built will be in Las Vegas, an interesting ecological choice: a hydroponic tower promoting urban food sustainability… in the desert.