With an ever shrinking topographical footprint and a population in perpetual flux, the modern city has some feeding issues. A recent article in The Globe and Mail described the frustration of farmer’s market organizers over the shortage of independent farmers who are able to open stalls. The demand, it seems, is far outpacing the supply on a small scale, but also on a large one: the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that 80% of the earth’s agriculturally-viable land is already farmed, but the earth’s population is expected to grow by 3 billion by 2050 (NASA via verticalfarm.com). With the impending expansion of an already existent disparity, what can we do to feed all people?

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Last week, the New York Times featured a few part-time professional urban farmers in areas of New York City where a high demand and low supply of produce cause dietary and health problems. Increasingly, residents are seeing their abundance of abandoned lots as a new kind of food wealth.

In places like East New York, Brooklyn and the South Bronx, neighbors are getting together to create community gardens. But instead of toiling away on shared crops, each group grows and tends to his or her own plot. This allows more autonomy in deciding what to do with those hard-earned veggies. While some groups eat or give away their crops, many others decide to bring the fruits of their labor to market as a secondary source of income. One couple featured in the article, Denniston and Marlene Wilks, made over $3,000 dollars last year from four allotments. But the farmers insist it is not about the money: a South Bronx farmer, Karen Washington told the New York Times: “We’re selling so that people in our neighborhood have good quality. There’s no Whole Foods in my neighborhood.”

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It is a truth well documented that community gardens foster unity among neighbors, but Germany’s Stiftung Interkultur has taken this logic a step further in the creation of its Intercultural Gardens. Communities in Berlin, Gottingen, Hamburg, and Munich (among others) are home to large and diverse immigrant populations, often living in close proximity. To encourage interaction and community spirit between German residents of all extractions, the Stiftung Interkultur has built a series of community gardens in which residents can share their gardening skills and horticultural knowledge with one another. The idea was born out of recognition that social exclusion plagued many new immigrants to Germany. Further, members of the discussions at Stiftung Interkultur felt that environmental and sustainable eating considerations were directed at the middle class, causing a secondary level of isolation that affected the health and eating practices of urban immigrants.

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Walking through the landscape of downtown San Francisco a visitor might notice an abundance of empty lots, but it would be a mistake to assume that these are pieces of public property. Instead, much of this property belongs to developers who are waiting out the long and complicated process of obtaining builiding permits. The San Francisco Permaculture Guild wants to benefit from this potentially fortuitous inaction by creating temporary, shifting tenant gardens.

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Behold Gallus Domesticus, the backyard chicken and latest slow food phenomenon. Traumatized by images of chicken warehouses, disgusted by food recalls and perhaps even longing for animal companionship, urban dwellers are becoming enthusiastic chicken owners. Urban Chickens is their gathering place, Backyard Poultry their manifesto and Mad City Chicken their rallying cry. But just where does one procure a baby chicken? How many eggs can a person expect? And what level of companionship are we talking here? All this and more after the jump.

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Urban Agriculturalist is a series on the ways city and suburb dwellers use their land as a food resource.

What would you say if a farmer knocked on your door and asked to rent your backyard to grow raddichio or sweet peas? My guess is, you might inquire about his medication. But renting backyards is exactly what Wally Satzewich and Gail Vandersteen of Saskatoon, Saskatchewan started doing when they realized that their small-scale urban crops fetched a far higher profit than the large-scale vegetable growing that they did on a 20-acre farm north of the city.

People can’t believe their success with urban plots, says Vandersteen, “They think it’s too much work, but the truth is, this is much less work than mechanized, large-scale farming. We used to have a tractor to hill potatoes and cultivate, but we find it’s more efficient to do things by hand.” With fewer pests and gentler winds, empty urban lots sound downright ideal. But how could it be more profitable?

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The Urban Agriculturalist is a series on the ways city and suburb dwellers use their land as a food resource.

Toronto-based Food Share is an organization that I really admire. They take a wholistic approach to improving inner-city nutrition, employing principles of locavorism, co-op structure, and progressive, action-based learning.

I was browsing their site the other day and happened upon an initiative of theirs, which focuses on incorporating food studies into the required curriculum in Toronto’s public schools. Food studies and school gardens are nothing new for private, well-funded schools and highly-publicized individual programs, but an integrated curriculum in mainstream schools is a new phenomenon and a hopeful one that is inclusive of everyone.

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Urban Agriculturalist is a series on the ways city and suburb dwellers use their land as a food resource.

Struck by the high carbon cost of sending food to dense urban areas and communities in extreme climates, Andrew Bodlovich and Hogan Gleeson devised a highly efficient, waste-free aquaponic growing system in which vegetable crops and freshwater fish benefit from a symbiotic relationship. Each ecoCity Farm the size of one city block can sustainably feed up to 300 people with no waste, little water and minimal effort.

Barramundi, perch or other freshwater fish and crustaceans are raised in large tanks to harvest size. The wastewater generated from the population is filtered through a patented “bio-converter” which mineralizes any compound that could be dangerous to plant or fish health (e.g. bacterias, feces). The bio-converter works with vermiculture – colonies of waste-eating worms that turn undesirable compounds into plant-ready nutrients. After getting the worm treatment, the used water nourishes the vegetables. The veggies use up the minerals and nutrients from the fish water, effectively filtering it to its original, clean state. This newly plant-filtered water is sent back to the fish tanks.

This system of recycling allows for a zero-waste production plan. The system also conserves water at unprecedented levels – it uses only 5% of the amount of water used on a traditional farm of the same output. The co-founders attest that the only water lost is that which is drunk up by the plants themselves. This makes the system “drought proof.” And not a minute too soon for Australia, it seems.

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Los Angeles has a dearth of publicly owned fruit trees, but who owns the fruit they produce? The three activists behind Fallen Fruit dare to ask, “Is this my banana?” By their estimate, 22 different crops can be harvested from public land trees in the Silver Lake neighborhood of Los Angeles alone. Among these are citrus fruits, quava, walnuts and even prickly pear cactus pads, which can be turned into the Mexican delicacy, nopalitos. Their mission is to encourage city planners and officials to plant only fruit trees as part of municipal landscaping. Public funds and worker hours go into maintaining municipal land, so why not have these plants also produce edible harvest? Fallen Fruit also organizes fruit harvesting events, usually at night and usually in plastic lab coats for effect.

A less political example is the Fruit Tree Project of Vancouver - a community initiative that connects residents who have fruit trees on their property with soup kitchens and other community organizations that help eradicate hunger. The group also hosts canning workshops in an effort to encourage local eating during the winter months. The movement has an additional benefit: it is sponsored by Nelson Bear Aware, an organization that tries to eliminate human-bear conflict. It turns out, the spoiled fruit from urban fruit trees has been attracting bears for decades, exposing them to the possibility of being shot or run over.

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