Urban Agriculture: Revolutionising Food Production
The Need for Urban Agriculture
According to a report published by the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) in 2019, 14% of agricultural products produced globally is lost before reaching consumers. Plant products (fruits, vegetables, roots, tubers, oil crops, cereals and pulses) account for over half - 55% - of the global share of pre-retail food loss.
These losses are mainly attributed to inadequacies in the supply chain (improper harvest, poor storage and transport, quality control) as well as climate variability. With the majority of the world’s population living in urban areas (55% in 2018, projected to increase to 80% by 2050), it is wise to have at least a portion of farming activities integrated into urban areas, bringing fresh produce in closer proximity to the people that consume them, thereby reducing food lost through the supply chain.
Urban Agriculture as a Sustainable Means of Farming
Urban agriculture refers to the practice of crop cultivation and animal rearing in and around cities for the purpose of food production. The nature of urban agriculture could vary in its nature of operation and scale - from small scale and decentralised community gardens to larger scale and centralised cultivated spaces and urban farms.
Due to its inherent integration into the geospatial fabric of cities, urban agriculture inevitably brings with it an array of socioeconomic and environmental benefits. Urban gardens help to functionalise unused urban spaces and hence offers the economic benefit of optimising land use. In addition, community gardens serve as shared spaces that could help promote socialisation and bonding between individuals living in proximity, thereby improving societal cohesion.
Commercial urban farms provide employment opportunities to city dwellers, and by growing crops in a controlled environment and harnessing technology in its operation (irrigation, water recycling and rainwater harvesting), water consumption could be greatly reduced. As a whole, through strategic positioning of sites of production within the region of demand, urban agriculture greatly shortens or even eradicates the supply chain, reducing logistical, energy and environmental costs associated with the storage and transport of produce (eg. cold chain requires produce to be stored and transported in refrigerated environments).
The Way Forward
Although urban farming has been gaining traction across cities globally, its adoption and implementation could be more ecologically sensitive, and able to adapt to challenges posed by climate change.
Permaculture can be the solution towards making farming in urban spaces more ecologically sustainable. Permaculture refers to the engineering of agriculturally productive ecosystems that mimic the diversity, stability and resilience of natural ecosystems. The integration of permaculture systems with existing urban parks could create large-scale food-producing landscapes that increase biodiversity, while retaining the intended recreational and aesthetic value of the original spaces. In addition, these scapes could provide an array of ecosystem services to cities; reducing the urban heat island effect through evapotranspiration (microclimate effect), and ameliorating pluvial floods by serving as sites for stormwater storage (stormwater management). However, permaculture is still rather land-intensive and is difficult to implement in built-up land. In such a case, vertical farms can be a promising solution to functionalising built-up areas with food-producing capabilities.
Vertical farming refers to the practice of growing food crops along inclined surfaces or in vertically stacked layers. It could be integrated into existing structures by introducing fixtures onto the building surface to allow crops to grow or be implemented indoors. While both provide the advantage of utilising vertical space in land-scarce cities, the former could provide transient vertical greenery to ameliorate urban heat, while the latter could provide stability in food production using controlled environment agriculture (CEA) technologies, hence allowing adaptation to climate change.
Conclusion
All in all, the growing global popularity of urban farming across cities signals a paradigm shift in the patterns of food production; where spatially there could be a decline in traditional rural agriculture, and more urban producers sprouting within cities, and in terms of practice, sustainability, ecology and the use of technology would be taken into greater consideration in the design and operation of food-producing systems.