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Urban farms could be incredibly efficient—but aren't yet
In some ways, hyper-local food is a counterculture movement, focused on growing herbs and vegetables in the same dense urban environments where they will be eaten. It trades the huge efficiencies of modern agriculture for large savings in transportation and storage costs. But is urban farming environmentally friendly?
According to researchers at Australia's University of New England, the answer is pretty complex. Within their somewhat limited group of gardeners, urban agriculture is far more productive for the amount of land used but isn't especially efficient with labor and materials use. But the materials issue could be solved, and the labor inefficiency may be a product of the fact that most urban farmers are hobbyists and are doing it for fun.
The researchers—Robert McDougalla, Paul Kristiansena, and Romina Rader—defined urban agriculture as taking place within a kilometer of a densely built environment. Working in the Sydney area, they were able to find 13 urban farmers who were willing to keep detailed logs of their activity for an entire year. Labor and materials costs were tracked, as was the value of the produce it helped create. The energetic costs of the materials and labor were also calculated in order to assess the sustainability of urban farming.
The plots cultivated by these farmers were quite small, with the median only a bit over 10 square meters. Yet they were extremely productive, with a mean of just under six kilograms of produce for each of those square meters. That's about twice as productive as a typical Australian vegetable farm, although the output range of the urban farms was huge—everything from slightly below large farm productivity to five times as productive.
For the vast majority of crops, however, the urban farms weren't especially effective. They required far more labor than traditional farms, and, as a result, the total value of the inputs into the crop exceeded the income from selling it. In other words, the urban farmers were losing money, at least by traditional accounting measures.
PNAS, 2018. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1809707115 (About DOIs).
(Score: -1, Troll) by fakefuck39 on Sunday December 30 2018, @12:33AM
low carb is healthy for fatasses. the rest of us, you know - the people living in the cities, work out, so healthy for healthy people is low fat - we need the carbs for energy. that "shitty urban apartment" you talk about is in a skyscraper. I can walk to get groceries, I can walk to the opera, and the top restaurants in the state.
I can also walk to work - the neighboring skyscraper, 89th floor, without going outside. The jobs here in this urban slum of yours you see, pay almost twice as much as the ones outside of this "slum." Idiots like you live in the suburbs because you can't afford the city, so you spend an hour, twice a day, driving or taking the train back and forth from your suburbs. I sit at home all day, and only go in for the meetings. You are stuck at the office - because you don't have the highly paid skills to afford living next door.
We eat plenty of carrots. What "you get out of" as you so put it "the urban slums" - is money. You don't want my money for your produce - well I never asked you. Don't feel like having a farm and selling me the carrots in my skyscraper or the world-famous chef running the 100k revenue per day restaurant across the street? No one needs your farm or your carrots. Plenty of others willing to sell to where there is demand.
You grow your carrots, because clearly you can't run the banks, the phone systems, manage global companies. You're a fatass living in the middle of nowhere, with only generic skills - while you were learning to grow carrots, I was doing calculus. What you don't seem to want is farming subsidies, where they take taxes - which come out of the cities, and give it to you in a flat check. Yet you complain. Fucking useless loser. Go eat your carrots.