Growing food in cities: Permaculture

There are many types of urban agriculture -- from a downtown farmer's market selling produce grown (close-ish) outside the city, community vegetable gardens, organic, not organic, commercial hydroponics, home gardens to sell, to give away, or eat produce, container gardening, rooftop gardens, green roofs, etc.

Is urban agriculture a good thing? I say yes, but not all urban ag is created equal. On the downside would be design students who think you can grow hydroponic blueberries in thirty-story farm skyscrapers. It’s not as simple as ordering a blueberry bush and having it appear. If you've ever tried to grow blueberries (which grow on a woody bush) you'd understand that plants can be temperamental about where they want to grow, what conditions they need, and whether your efforts will quite literally bear fruit. So while I’m excited about pushing the limits of traditional agriculture, my excitement is tempered by realism: plants are experts at growing, provided that they’re in the right environment. Towards that end, urban ag should be looking for ways to let plants do what they do naturally: grow.

“Traditional” industrial agriculture takes advantage of economies of scale to produce large areas of food at a very low cost per unit. It also uses a great deal of fossil fuel energy, pesticides, and fertilizers which create costs to the environment that eventually catch up with us and someone (taxpayers) ends up paying for later (for example, paying to clean up a polluted stream, getting sick from contaminated shellfish because of high coliform counts, erosion of roads from poor soil practices, climate change, etc). Smaller gardens, often seen in cities where space is a premium, have really high yields per area of space, but require more human involvement in the form of time. You can't just plant a blueberry bush on your porch and come back three months later expecting a blueberry harvest. Urban ag requires more attention per plant than industrial ag plants get, but the benefit is high yield in low space and low embedded energy (tractor fuel, transport, etc). Read: Ch 2 of Bill McKibben's Deep Economy for more facts and figures about this.

Enter permaculture, a multi-crop production process that mimics natural ecosystems to produce high yield food. The idea is that the system of agriculture works better as a living system, and not as an assembly line, and this system should be a long-term investment (“perma” = permanent) in the productivity and quality of the land and soil. Permaculture methods have brought plants to the desert and improved soil quality in agricultural lands around the world (see CNN video below), but can permaculture work for urban environments, which are not really, well, natural at all? If you’re planning to grow things in the ground, such as in a community garden or abandoned lot, urban permaculture could have some great benefits, but for city dwellers like me with container gardens, other methods seem to be more practical, so I’m curious to learn more.

READ:

Redesign the city: a look at urban permaculture by Liz Neves is a solid, recent article. If you read more articles, you'll find that much of what's available online is based off of the guys who started this in the 70's, and it could use an image update to get some mainstream traction in this century.

WATCH:

The CNN International video does a pretty good job of making it seem cool:


In a more thorough discussion, I would include the applicability of (biochar + urban ag + permaculture) = better small-scale, high-yield food production.

From Wendell Berry and Wes Jackson in NYT on March 6, 2009:

"Any restorations will require, above all else, a substantial increase in the acreages of perennial plants. The most immediately practicable way of doing this is to go back to crop rotations that include hay, pasture and grazing animals.

But a more radical response is necessary if we are to keep eating and preserve our land at the same time. In fact, research in Canada, Australia, China and the United States over the last 30 years suggests that perennialization of the major grain crops like wheat, rice, sorghum and sunflowers can be developed in the foreseeable future. By increasing the use of mixtures of grain-bearing perennials, we can better protect the soil and substantially reduce greenhouse gases, fossil-fuel use and toxic pollution."