The Critical Need for Smart Agriculture for Truly Smarter Cities
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Rooftop greenhouse farm, Sky Vegetables, in NYC. Photo: Sky Vegetables
Smart cities are developing all over the world, marketing themselves as helping us innovate and become more technologically advanced as a mostly-urban species.
The EV charging stations, self-driving cars, 5G IoT devices, and solar rooftops paint a picture of smart cities that promise to bring a more resilient future in the face of climate change. Smart cities promote a vision of cities that can provide resources more efficiently and equitably to their residents.
But, can a city indeed be smart without agriculture - without the ability to feed all its residents sustainably? With food being produced miles and miles away from consumers, and not being as nutritious or fresh when it comes to our dinner plates, can we truly call this a smart way of living?
Spoiler alert: the answer is no.
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3D model of a vertical farm growing leafy greens. Photo: Agritecture.
The food system with all of its various stakeholders is an integral part of the urban ecosystem. And so, solving its challenges is critical to the survival of our species.
And, with urban areas being plagued by a multitude of issues, smarter agriculture can help change things around. Building resilience to natural disasters such as drought and extreme weather, by converting grey spaces to green spaces, reducing city-wide air pollution, creating spaces for social interaction and education, and supporting pollinators are benefits that come to mind beyond increasing food security.
Urban AgTech consists of a variety of solutions that can help us respond to these growing concerns to build a more resilient city for future and present generations. It involves developing smart urban farms in, on and around buildings, enabled by data science, IoT, AI, and automation. Urban AgTech is also about more than just food production. It's also about smart city planning using big data and satellites as well as software and hardware to improve local food logistics.
While Urban AgTech is not the only solution to our food systems crisis (it cannot provide for all of humanity’s consumption needs), it is an essential tool for cities and local communities to make their food system more resilient. Some estimates for the potential of urban agriculture project that 5-10% of our global supply of fruits and vegetables could be provided by urban AgTech alone. When you consider the wider peri-urban areas of cities, others project that 30-70% of a city's needs could be grown nearby depending on the city.
One of Farm.One’s vertical farms in NYC. Photo: Farm.One.
It enables individuals to take an active role in enabling the change they want to see. As a movement, it allows more creative solutions and inspires motivation and inventiveness.
In addition to the obvious benefits of locally grown, higher-quality foods, these farms can ignite a new generation of entrepreneurs who will understand the food, water, energy, and waste nexus better than any other generation before them. They will also know how to integrate those solutions into the complexity of 21st-century urban environments.
Cities worldwide are realizing this unused potential and are latching onto the trend to make their cities greener.
As one of the first cities to respond to the growing food concerns, Paris created the Parisculteurs program in 2016 to facilitate and accelerate the installation of agricultural projects throughout the city. The project aims to dedicate 1/3 of the city’s green space for food production and set up workshops and funds to support entrepreneurs. By making the city an incubator for urban agriculture, they have already grown to achieve 16 hectares of new rooftop farms, vertical farms, and greenhouses in Paris.
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By aiming to produce 30 percent of their nutritional needs locally by 2030, the Singaporean Government has established urban agricultural educational and training programs for locals. On the development side, they incentivize developers to include urban farms as part of their new green building requirements. For farming entrepreneurs, they’ve set up workshops and funds to support such projects. They recently launched two innovation centers to help them adopt technologically-advanced infrastructure and smart systems, such as IoT sensors and analytics, to produce climate-proof vegetables requiring less light to produce.
Square Roots’ urban farm in NYC. Photo: Square Roots
New York City is also responding to the growing food systems crisis by taking a policy approach. Since establishing a digital database of existing urban ag organizations and businesses in the city, in 2021, NYC passed a bill to establish an Office of Urban Agriculture that will help promote food security, education, community development, environmental protection, and improved health and quality of life. New York City will also establish the Urban Agriculture Advisory Board to advise city leaders on urban agriculture-related issues. The NYC Parks GreenThumb provides programming and material support to community gardens, while Farms at NYCHA uses community gardens to improve health outcomes in 12 neighborhoods in NYC.
Dallas has most recently made the green transition with their newly established team of landscape architects, planners, and designers. Seeing that Texas's household food insecurity rate is 18.4 per cent, and over 27 per cent of children under 18 in Dallas live in households that have experienced food insecurity in the past year, the City of Dallas is working with Agritecture to adopt urban agriculture master planning techniques. They emphasize ecosystem restoration and urban agriculture strategies such as public agriculture (food forests, community gardens, edible landscaping), urban agriculture (soil-based and hydroponics), and school agriculture programs.
While these are significant initiatives by cities to encourage innovation and urban agriculture production, few cities, if any, are using data-driven tactics to plan their urban agriculture projects to be as feasible and realistic as possible.
Putting in rooftops farms and community gardens may seem easy, but there is a lot of in-depth analyses that go into making each farm a success for the specific needs of users, the client, the community, and more.
In our 2021 Global CEA Census, we found that 41 per cent of respondents (CEA growers) had no prior experience in agriculture before starting their business, while only 7 per cent had previously started another agricultural business.
Because of this lack of experience, we see enchanting futuristic vertical farming concepts making cities green. But, is this what the world really needs - designs backed up with little data to prove that they’re financially viable or that they can, in truth, even feed their community?
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Agritecture and WayBeyond’s 2021 Global CEA Census spotlights greenwashing, future production, and sustainability metrics in the CEA industry. Photo: Agritecture and WayBeyond.
What we see a lot today is mostly feel-good concepts. We need to convert these into feasible designs that can be scaled to transform our local food production. And, to do this, we need data-driven technology.
Starting a commercial urban farm is complex work. Gaining access to the right funding, buying the right equipment, hiring the right team of growers, and setting your farm up for success is draining work, to say the least.
As we need to continue to inspire specifically young people, the voices of tomorrow, to enter the broader landscape of farming, this software is a huge resource to help enable this. Let’s continue to embrace urban agriculture but in the right way.
With the impending climate crisis, we don’t have time for cities to play catch up. We need data-driven innovation now. We need entrepreneurs to step up and create the farms of tomorrow, today. And, we need cities to support this transition in every way possible, but putting agriculture at the center of truly Smart Cities.
Henry Gordon-Smith, Founder & CEO of Agritecture. Agritecture advises cities, governments, economic development groups, and real estate developers on integrating agriculture effectively.
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Macro planning services are based upon Agritecture's unique Scenario Analysis methodology, which takes hundreds of viable urban agriculture models and applies them to the built environment over time to achieve specific food security and resilience goals.
Agritecture hosts workshops and events to help engage the numerous stakeholders that are involved in local agriculture. As experienced event producers, Agritecture organizes customized workshops, events, and roundtables to activate and accelerate urban agriculture in your city. While this is helpful on the city level, we still need support for incoming entrepreneurs.
Because of the numerous hurdles that we’ve seen incoming entrepreneurs face, we launched our proprietary software platform, Agritecture Designer, in 2020. The software enables anyone anywhere in the world to build their own farm models, plan crop selection based on their climatic restrictions and requirements, and create financial plans to paint a clear picture of the farm’s future viability. With over 169 vertical farms and 115 greenhouses modeled using this software, and 2000+ vision reports created, Agritecture Designer is already supporting entrepreneurs in making their agricultural dreams a reality.
