Why the Climate Crisis Requires 21st Century-Like Victory Gardens and High Tech Solutions

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Introduction

In the valley near my house by the banks of Toronto’s Don River, there is a moist and shady spot which is perfect for wild growing ostrich ferns. These beautiful plants are quick to emerge in early spring, as spiral coils of dark green stems and folded leaves. A third of the fiddleheads on each plant may be sustainably harvested, which although a bit bitter, can be a healthy cooked spring vegetable. Within the city, a few people harvest fiddleheads, as well as other forms of natural bounty which grow mostly in the ravine systems which twist and turn across the landscape on their way to Lake Ontario. Here one can find raspberries, blackberries, mulberries, the young leaves of stinging nettles, apples and pears from remnant orchards and dandelion leaves, to name just a few wild edibles. While an enjoyable and special way to connect to the land, this bounty barely registers as a blip against the enormous requirement for food in cities.

*In the spring people sustainably harvest wild fiddleheads in the ravine near my home, but it is a drop in the bucket compared to the daily food requirements of three million people.*

The Perversity of Market Based Food Supply

The millions of people who live in cities require an average of 2000 calories each of food energy per day and for the most part, markets meet this need. There is still hunger in too many places among too many people. Feeding city dwellers requires both regional agricultural production and the importation of millions of tonnes of food from far flung places. Apples from Israel, garlic from China, tomatoes from Mexico, olives from Greece, lettuce from California, oranges from Spain and the list goes on. Our modern-day supermarkets offer a veritable world tour of agricultural production. In Canada, which grows food for export, approximately 30 per cent of all the food purchased still comes from abroad (Statscan). Two benefits of these far-flung supply chains include widespread access to a high variety of food, and relatively low-cost food. In our current system, food arrives where consumers are willing to pay, despite the local seasonality of production. It can be minus 20 degrees Celcius outside and the land covered in snow, but my grocery store offers mangoes, pineapples, blueberries and all kinds of unseasonable food, because there is a demand and ability to pay for it. Some of the negative impacts of our current food supply include an increase in resources required to produce, process, package, store and transport the millions of pounds of food needed to sustain us in our urban centers. This results in excessive greenhouse gas production and contributes to the estimated 50 per cent rates of overall food spoilage.

*Eating plant based protein sources such as soy, lentils, beans, and nuts can help reduce our carbon footprint.*

The Importance of Your Food Choices

Food choices are regularly cited as one of the main ways that people can reduce their carbon footprint and thereby make a contribution to climate mitigation. For example, animal and dairy protein production are enormous contributors to greenhouse gas emissions. So, reducing meat consumption on Meatless Mondays can make a difference. Moreover, by reducing animal protein in our diets by 50 per cent overall, we can reduce the carbon associated with our diet by 40 per cent (BBC). Another dimension of dietary based greenhouse gas reduction is to buy locally – the 100 mile diet idea being an extreme version of this. You can now calculate the ‘food miles’ associated with different foods (Food miles). Producing food locally has a wider range of benefits than just helping to mitigate greenhouse gasses.

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The Growing Local Food Production Imperative

Rooftop farms, whether enclosed green houses or open farms or a combination of both, have demonstrated they can provide a wide range of agricultural products – from honey and cut flowers to carrots, apples and fresh greens. One of their greatest unsung benefits lies in their ability to generate urban employment opportunities, and help train young farmers, so that we have a ready supply of labor as the existing generation of aging farmers inevitably retires. Many rooftop farms also have important social mandates, both in terms of building community by sharing a rooftop meal at harvest time, and supplying fresh food to communities in need. Ben Flanner’s article on the Rooftop Orchard and Food Forest at New York’s Javits Centre in this issue of the LAM speaks to not only this social function, but also the opportunity to support greater biodiversity balancing this with food production.

*The constraint on the growth of Controlled Environment Agriculture appears to be the lack of qualified staff.*

In terms of high technology food production, Controlled Environment Agriculture, or CEA, is an idea popularized by visionary professor Dickson Despommier (listen to our Sustainable Futures podcast interview with Dr. Despommier). CEA has been growing in leaps and bounds. The major constraint to its more rapid growth, is a lack of qualified human resources. Produce that can be grown vertically, inside buildings uses significantly less water, land and energy per pound of food, than traditional agriculture. Recent advances in lighting technology related to how various wavelengths of light can enhance plant growth, have significantly reduced the energy use associated with vertical farm production. In 2022, it was estimated that the vertical farm sector in the US was already worth $5 billion, and growing steadily. According to Mike Dixon, a research scientist at the University of Guelph and expert in Controlled Environment Agriculture research for space travel, we need about 50 square meters of area to grow enough food, provide enough oxygen and use enough carbon dioxide to sustain one person for one year. (Listen to Sustainable Futures podcast with Dr. Mike Dixon) This is accomplished by stacking food production vertically inside a building. Building more CEA food production capacity, and expanding to protein-based crops, rather than leafy greens, holds the promise of helping feed city dwellers in the decades ahead, when the impacts of climate change begin to seriously erode traditional farming.

The Climate Crisis and Our Food Supply

Droughts, fire, flooding, hurricanes, extreme temperatures are projected to worsen in the years ahead. All of these will have negative impacts on traditional farming practices as we continue to warm our planet. Author, professor and anthropologist Ronald Wright, in his Massey Lectures, “A Short History of Progress”, examines the factors that have sustained and destroyed multiple human civilizations. Sustainable agriculture practices have proven to be a foundation for the sustainability of past civilizations. The climate crisis he writes, calls everything into question:

“Studies show that the world's climate has been unusually stable for the past 10,000 years - exactly the lifetime of agriculture and civilization.... steady warming will be bad enough, but the worst outcome would be a sudden overturning of the Earth's climatic balance - back to its old regime of sweats and chills. If that happens, crops will fail everywhere and the great experiment of civilization will come to a catastrophic end (Ronald).”

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Even if worse case scenarios are to be avoided, the threads which form the food systems supporting urban life are likely to become thinner and weaker over time due to climate extremes. The initial impacts to the food system will be felt through price spikes for supplies that are impacted. This will have a disportionately negative impact on economically disadvantaged people and countries. According to a special report on Climate Change and the Land by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC):

"Observed climate change is already affecting food security through increasing temperatures, changing precipitation patterns, and greater frequency of some extreme events (high confidence)... Under average conditions, global food system markets may function well, and equilibrium approaches can estimate demand and supply with some confidence; however, if there is a significant shock, the market can fail to smoothly link demand and supply through price, and a range of factors can act to amplify the effects of the shock, and transmit it across the world. Given the potential for shocks driven by changing patterns of extreme weather to increase with climate change, there is the potential for market volatility to disrupt food supply through creating food price spikes (Special Report).”

CEA and Vertical Farming in particular, still have unrealized potential to shield some degree of food production from the impacts of climate change. The dream, for many, like Dickson Despommier, is not only to grow enough food inside skyscrapers to support the needs of urban populations, but also enough so farmland can begin to be restored back to its natural state as a forest or prairie and provide much needed support for biodiversity and ecosystem services.

Victory gardens became popular after a North American public campaign. They can become popular once more to encourage locally produced food and help future proof cities against climate change driven food supply disruptions.

Bringing Our Food Supply Home

Food supply is an enormous challenge and opportunity. The challenge has a lot to do with the scale and complexity of the current system and embedded corporate interests in its preservation. In terms of scale, even if all the rooftops of New York were converted to farms for example, they could still only produce about two per cent of the caloric needs of its roughly eight million inhabitants. Hence, a wide range of food producing approaches and technologies are needed to help future proof cities against disruptions in food supply. While the capacity of green infrastructure, as it is currently practiced, is not primarily focused on food, when combined with measures such as CEA, it can help to strengthen our resilience. Many seeds have been planted recently and historically. (See Not Far from the Tree article in this LAM).

A precedent for urban food production was set during WWI and WWII, when there was a public campaign in Canada, the US and the UK to encourage people to grow food in containers, and in front and back yards. This food was needed to make up for the loss of farm production, as millions of farmers became soldiers. So called Victory Gardens resulted in a boost to morale and a large local production of potatoes, beets, cabbages, and other useful vegetables. In addition to gardening, homeowners were also encouraged to keep hens in their yards for eggs. Cities such as Toronto and others, have recently been experimenting with allowing small hen houses on their private property.

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The Challenge of Surplus

“We know not the value of water until the well runs dry“, said Benjamin Franklin in an astute observation of our strange understanding of value. When something is plentiful, we tend to give it less value. Food production is typically laden with subsidies, many hidden, keeping prices lower to help meet social policy objectives. Low food prices often make urban farming uneconomical, stifling its growth. Yet in the case of food supply, we cannot afford to wait until the shelves run bare in our local grocery stores, particularly in big cities. Past incidences of food scarcity have repeatedly resulted in anarchy - and the eventual breakdown in civilization. As a key feature of green infrastructure development, increasing urban food production capacity has enormous unrealized potential. Public and private subsidies can help expand capacity and will result in employment, reducing greenhouse gas emissions, managing stormwater, improving air quality, addressing social injustice, and improving the health and well being of often nature starved urban dwellers.

*Having access to fresh food can have a positive effect for many city neighbourhoods.*

Conclusion

Some degree of ‘back to the future’, to Victory Garden like days, will likely be required to help us prepare to manage the future impacts of the climate crisis on our food supply. We need to develop a culture which engages in and values local food production. We need public policy support, public institutional support, and private investment in productive capacity, research, technology and training to produce food in, on and around buildings in our cities. Net zero and carbon positive buildings are great, but ones that also support food production are even better.

We also need to protect regional farmland from sprawling urban development, a seemingly never-ending challenge. Grow cities up and use green infrastructure to make them more livable. Regional agriculture capacity is critically important because we are a long way off from feeding cities within our city boundaries. Strategic investments in education coupled with job opportunities can result in a new generation of urban dwellers who will know how to produce food in a more sustainable manner, and be ready to generate surpluses to feed local populations in times of need.

At its core, the challenge is for more decision makers to recognize the need to begin the rapid implementation of our 21st century versions of a Victory Garden, to get ahead of the curve, and thereby reap the many benefits of urban food production in all of its manifestations.

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Steven Peck, GRP, Honorary ASLA, is the founder and president of Green Roofs for Healthy Cities and editor of The Living Architecture Monitor.

Why the Climate Crisis Requires 21st Century-Like Victory Gardens and High Tech Solutions

Introduction

The Perversity of Market Based Food Supply

The Importance of Your Food Choices

The Growing Local Food Production Imperative

The Climate Crisis and Our Food Supply

Bringing Our Food Supply Home

The Challenge of Surplus

Conclusion

A Rooftop Orchard and Food Forest Flourishes on the Javits Centre in New York