Urban Agriculture has become a very popular topic lately. In the past few years, we’ve witnessed amazing people planting farms on massive rooftops, growing vegetables in schools with hydroponics, educating city folk about ecology — all in New York City. We’re seeing gardens bloom in abandoned lots, and bee hives thrive next to water tanks.
A lot of beautiful things are happening here.
But despite all the progress we’ve made with the genuine and determined efforts of our growers and teachers, most Manhattanites still don’t truly connect the food we eat with the people that produce it. Or the ground that is needed to grow it. Or the bees that are needed to pollinate it. Most of us are so removed from agriculture that we’ve forgotten that it pertains to us at all. When we do refer to agriculture, we call it a “sector” of the economy — or in esoteric language that’s more intellectual than visceral.
Urban Agriculture is exciting in that there is food growing in non-traditional spaces — spaces that may actually be more conducive to growing good food than farm land that has been polluted by years of chemicals and monoculture. However, until every rooftop and empty lot in NYC is productively growing food, rural agriculture will be feeding us, all of us, and those of us who live in the City need to start considering that rural agriculture is also ours. It is our life source, our privilege, and our responsibility to support properly as well.
As with all things man-made, there comes a time when the systems we’ve created no longer function well and need repairing. We created our current food system to match our needs, real and perceived, after the World Wars. Human hands were replaced with chemicals and machines and animals were replaced with tractors. This produced an unprecedented amount of food, opportunity for wealth, and upward mobility for many of our citizens.
It also created a dependence on fossil fuel and the toxins associated, soil erosion, and loss of biodiversity. It could be argued that it also created destructive monopolies, dependence on credit, decline of communities, and a society that values money and stuff more than it values people and tangible work.
No matter how you look at it, the industrial food system needs a good hard tweaking — we created the system based on conditions that no longer exist, and the consequences have turned out to be quite dangerous to the economy, environment and society.
As New Yorkers, we have access to an amazing array of opportunities and benefits that only a high density metropolis can provide. We are also we’re literally living on an island with the assumption that that there will always be farms somewhere. It can be easy to forget that these farms may be up the Hudson or they may be across the globe.
The moment we stop to think about where our food comes from is the moment we realize that we are dependent on those people up the river and across the country, or around the globe. We need them to survive, and we must value them and what they do, not as a separate entity, but as fundamental to our survival.
Urban centers across the globe rely on agriculture in the same ways. Why shouldn’t they be connected to agriculture that is nearby when possible?
We need smaller scale agriculture that is supported by people buying as much locally as possible — this goes for all urban centers across the globe. We need to train and pay our farmers well. We need to free ourselves from the vice grip of chemical agriculture and unnecessary long-distance transport of food that can be locally produced.
How? It’s not easy reversing damage. It’s going to take a lot of good economic and policy work and a lot of soil repair, along with the generosity of people who know how to grow, and the foresight of those of us used to eating food for a lot less than it’s actually worth. It will also require us to change our palates and our expectations the availability of foreign produce and products.
But I always return to the same answer — buy whatever you can from a local farmer, even if it isn’t as pretty or convenient. Learn about the Farm Bill and tell our government that you care about agriculture. Support businesses that promote sustainability and organic farming. Join a CSA.
Find a way to participate in and help create a new, more sustainable and vibrant food system. The first step is recognizing problem, followed by discovering the beauty of the solution.