Urban Ag

If you're confused about why this seemingly off-topic entry is the top story on my blog, check out my recent post covering Cleveland to Ann Arbor.  This is meant to be an appendix to that post...

The bane of Carleton College students is a comprehensive senior thesis project, not-so-affectionately known as “comps.”  Though neither came to fruition (I ended up examining farmer vulnerability to climate change in Tanzania), these were my original proposals for comps research, which I think help to outline the maelstrom of controversy surrounding urban agriculture.  Maybe someday I’ll get around to addressing these heavy-hittin’ research questions.

Statement of Individual Research Interest:

Economic Feasibility of Urban Agriculture in the Rust Belt

With the world’s population soaring, this generation is faced with a textbook Malthusian crunch as it scrambles to find more swaths of arable land necessary to feed itself.  Over the last half-century, food production has managed to keep pace with population growth, but at a steep cost to the environment.  In the present, we are faced with the challenge of sustaining growth in agricultural production, though we cannot afford to continue our tradition of destroying valuable wilderness to create new farmland.  With half of the world’s people now crowding into cities and the rate of urban migration accelerating, an appealing solution to feeding our growing and increasingly urban population while not disturbing existing ecosystems is to promote urban agriculture within cities.  I hope to examine the economic viability of urban farms in Midwestern cities such as Cleveland and Detroit, which have experienced depopulation to a much greater extent than similarly sized cities throughout the region, and as such, are better suited for widespread implementation of urban farming.

Implementation of urban agriculture on a massive scale is hampered by a multitude of factors that span economic and environmental concerns, as well as hot-button social issues.  Before a spade can even be laid into the concrete-strewn soil of any vacant lot, a number of obstacles exist that make a discussion of urban agriculture’s economic viability worthwhile.

Firstly, there is the issue of obtaining land in cities that, although “depopulated”, still contain hundreds of thousands of residents, many of whom probably do not wish to see their neighborhood put under the plow.  How much money would be required to buy tracts of land suitable for farming?  What would the costs be in relocating some residents to accommodate large urban farms?  In places like Detroit, where the city owns 60,000 of the 103,000 vacant lots, would the city retain ownership of farmland or sell it to private landowners?  If urban farmers are only able to farm on small lots that may not even be one acre in size, how can they compete with other farms that enjoy much greater economies of scale?

Then, once the farming begins, myriad other questions await.  To what extent (if any) can pesticides and fertilizers be used in such a densely populated area?  What is the cost to each farmer of remedying compromised and potentially toxic urban soil?

An aerial view of "America's largest contiguous urban farm" on Cleveland's West Side.

How many people will urban farms be able to employ?  If urban agriculture is to truly succeed and win the hearts of Detroit and Cleveland residents, then it must be able to help alleviate unemployment to some extent.  But it remains to be seen just how many people could find work on urban farms, and what the quality of that work would be like.  If the farming jobs created even remotely mirror the minimum-wage, dead-end jobs held by so many laborers in modern agribusiness, then I’d say that these projects are most ill-fated.  Workers need to be as enamored with the philosophy of urban agriculture as the policymakers themselves for the system to succeed.

Additionally, urban agriculture must be able to mesh with the culture of the inner city and cannot be perceived as a corporate intruder within the city limits that exists simply to provide wealthy suburbanites with food.  While vandalism and hostility directed towards urban farms will always exist in some capacity, it is essential that urban farms be recognized as entities that exist primarily to serve the residents of the cities that they occupy and with whom they share space.  If urban agriculture is going to be intensified in these cities, it is crucial that it retain its grass-roots character and is perceived as something to help the city first and foremost, rather than exploiting available space and having its benefits leached elsewhere.

Overall, I’m interested to see if the Jeffersonian small farmer can experience a renaissance amidst city streets, or if large commercial or communal farms would come to dominate these urban frontiers.

Later I scrapped the economic component and came up with this slightly more refined (and feasible) research interest:

Adhering to my initial interest in pursuing subject matter related to urban agriculture in the Midwest, I’d now like to limit the focus of my study to address the question, “what are the primary impulses that the urban agriculture movement is responding to?”  Though urban agriculture is often lauded as a silver-bullet solution that can help cities attain food independence (or at least inch closer to it), it is readily apparent that initiatives to promote urban farming often are not striving to meet this grandiose goal, but instead are oriented around campaigns with much different agendas.  For instance, many urban farms exist for the main purpose of educating urbanites about growing vegetables or to stress the importance of eating locally grown produce from both an environmental and a health perspective.  While education represents one key pillar of the urban agriculture movement that certainly warrants further investigation, other farms originate from the impulse for chic downtown restaurants to take advantage of heightened consumer preferences for regional produce, and make a political/environmental statement with their menu.  Still more farms exist primarily to beautify dilapidated neighborhoods, and others are run by community-oriented institutions such as churches and schools.  Some urban farms are even the product of city planners or neighborhood development agencies seeking to do something constructive with vacant space (while making the same political/environmental statement mentioned earlier).  And somewhere out there in the concrete jungle, some bold pioneers are farming independently for a profit.  I would like to assess (and hopefully quantify) the percentage of urban farms that have stemmed mainly from these impulses as well as identify other unforeseen or unexpected sources of inspiration.  My focus would likely cover farms currently in existence as well as ones that are still on the drawing board.