Urban Agriculture Could Potentially Produce a Tenth of the World's Food.

This weekend, the Carolina Farm Stewardship Association is holding its popular Piedmont Farm Tour, which opens forty-five Triangle-area farms to the public. General interest in traditional farming is well-established here; this is the twenty-third year of the tour. But meanwhile, there's a rising fascination, in the region and around the nation, with another kind of farming: urban agriculture.

There seems to be momentum behind the conviction that the collective cultivation of underutilized public spaces such as empty lots and rooftops just might save the world. Growing food in a city is hands-on and hyper-local, it requires few chemicals and gives off little in the way of greenhouse gasses, and in low-income neighborhoods where grocery stores are scarce, it can be a vital source of healthy food. As a result, the practice is attracting a mix of urban-planning nerds, antipoverty advocates, the sustainability crowd, and millennials seeking a better future. Some of that enthusiasm was quantified in January, when a study published in the journal Earth's Future found that densely planted urban farms could potentially produce up to 10 percent of the world's food.

But if urban agriculture gets people salivating, what about the other unoccupied patches of green right before us: private lawns, those monocultures that many Americans spend more than an hour a week manicuring even though they produce nothing useful? There are roughly forty million acres of lawn in the U.S., according to a 2015 NASA study—three times more acreage than any other irrigated crop. That's a lot of land, and an enormous amount of lost potential. The average lawn is roughly a fifth of an acre, which doesn't sound like much. But unlike big farms, gardens tend to be intensively managed, which means they can often yield an impressive amount of vegetables. Michelle Schroeder-Moreno, an N.C. State crop-science professor, says that the student farm she runs produced nine thousand pounds of food on about 1.25 acres last year.

That's nothing, says Steve Moore, a professor in Elon University's environmental studies department. "Using biointensive techniques, you can grow a complete diet easily in 4,000 square feet—one-tenth of an acre—for a single person," he says. And those figures don't even include other activities that can occur in a private yard, like raising animals.

The resulting food is usually organic, requires few petroleum products, produces very little CO2, and is as fresh as can be. Homeowners can plant heirloom crops that are at risk of vanishing forever, bolstering the nation's food security. And for those who are moving toward homesteading—aiming to be self-sufficient by capturing rainwater, using renewable energy, and growing and preserving all their food—the reduction in emissions and energy and water use can be profound.

Linda Borghi travels the country preaching the gospel of plowing one's own patch of Eden. "Look at lettuce, how far it has to travel," she says. "By the time it gets on your table, do you think it has any life force left in it? The best time to eat anything is right after you cut it."

Borghi, a New Jersey resident and founder of the Farm-A-Yard campaign, is one of a handful of true believers. But what's surprising is how uncommon it is to see a front yard in the Triangle that's been rototilled and planted, much less one in full homesteading mode, complete with animals and a composting system. I polled individuals and organizations like CFSA, Cooperative Extension NC, and food councils around the Triangle, and found that only a tiny handful of Triangle residents intensively cultivate their yards.

"It's a lot of time, and honestly it's a luxurious, privileged hobby. We don't each have to work two jobs to live," says Celeste Burns of herself and husband Alexander Johnson, explaining why she thinks the phenomenon is relatively rare. She's right: if you're going to garden a lawn, you generally must be a landowner—or you must convince one to give you access to their property. You also need some serious surplus time and energy. "Not too much sports watching or internet gaming in our house," says Burns.

She and Johnson have filled their two-thirds of an acre in Durham with a huge range of fruit trees (pawpaw, sand plums, native persimmons, Asian pears, and figs) and a lush garden of plants largely raised from seed. They demonstrate that urban homesteading is possible, along with the likes of Amanda Matson, a Raleigh resident who lives on a quarter-acre lot in a neighborhood north of N.C. State. When she moved into the house five years ago, she and her husband set a goal of achieving fruit-and-vegetable independence within five years.

"Since then, we have been able to grow all the veggies we need on site, and we're well underway to our goal of growing or foraging all our own fruit," says Matson. Their yard stands out: in summer, it's home to six-foot-plus cornstalks, nonlinear vegetable rows that make use of every square foot, and vertical trellises to save precious space. Matson cultivates the usual suspects—potatoes, beans, onions, peppers—plus some unusual ones, like asparagus, tomatillos, and yardlong beans. And there's tons of fruit: apple, nectarine, and sour cherry trees, kiwi and grape vines, and blueberry bushes. Matson gathers free resources like coffee grounds from the local cafe for the compost pile, wood chips for the garden paths, and rainwater. Tomatoes are canned for the winter, green beans are frozen, and cabbage is turned into kimchi and sauerkraut.

"I love the challenge," Matson says. Most of her family raises food in the country, "but I kind of like the constraints of a city."

A couple miles to the south lives Will Hooker, a former N.C. State horticulture professor who specializes in permaculture. Hooker and his family have lived on their property since 1994, and many of the fruit trees there—persimmon, hazelnut, pineapple, guava, pomegranate, and pecan—are mature and produce well. There's also a big garden packed with greens and flowers and trellised vegetables, a grape arbor that provides shade to the house in the summer, chickens, bees, and ponds stocked with mosquitofish. Hooker harvests rainwater and powers his house in part with solar panels.

"I learned by reading, by talking to people," says Hooker. And he's still trying out new ideas, including several different composting systems and experimental agricultural methods such as growing a tomato plant from the bottom of a hanging five-gallon bucket. But it's organized, and he's constantly on the lookout for errant weeds.

Though few people are doing it, the Triangle is a pretty welcoming place for intensive gardening and even homesteading, provided you don't live in a neighborhood with a homeowners association that prohibits it. The growing season is long and forgiving, and in most of the region's municipalities, bees are allowed without a permit, chickens with a permit. Ambitious residents can legally slaughter the fowl in their backyards. Some residents of Hillsborough, Carrboro, and Raleigh can keep a couple of goats on their property, as can Durham residents on larger lots near the city limits. And the area is full of relevant classes and gatherings.

But it can be intimidating to jump right in. One place to start might be with a local business like Bountiful Backyards or Grow It Yourself, whose staff will set up front yard gardens for a fee, then teach their clients how to maintain the beds themselves. Or plant a fig or plum or apple tree; once it starts fruiting in a few years, it will bear gifts that require little work to maintain.

So why not head out of the city this weekend to check out some farms and get inspired, courtesy of CFSA? Many are very small operations, and some of their activities could easily be adapted to the yards of urban dwellers who want to maximize the potential of their own personal greenspace.

Yes, there are several 24 hour a day operations around the world, many in the U.S. That’s not the problem here. Mechanized agriculture uses haute technology. Nontraditional agriculture not so much.

If the division of labor doesn’t exceed population growth, then we have problems. Malthus was wrong, but only in his timing. Each new advance brings us closer to a black swan event and then it’s cataclysmic.

The trouble with the greenies is that they inevitably turn to collective action to deal with the problems that they think the evil free market has saddled us with. They refuse to acknowledge that it is collective action, i.e. governments, that place us on the fast track to division of labor on steroids. The problems we have in production, distribution, and consumption are not results of free markets. They are results of collective action because the appetites of the collective are always greater than the sum of its parts (individuals).

A really cool use of technology to feed people is the vertical harvest concept. There are several sites that do this. My favorite is Vertical Harvest of Jackson, Wyoming. They feed people in the middle of winter in a valley that is sometimes cut off from the rest of the world by snow. Cool stuff, but highly dependent on division of labor. It takes both new technology and old technology for a solution.

I see no downside at all to some one with a yard who wants to grow edibles in it. They cost me nothing and ask nothing of me. What’s the big objection? Of course they will not feed one tenth of the world. That’s stupid. But other than that, conservatives should love that they want to do their own thing, and leave them the hell alone.

“Poor people in Africa and elsewhere have far more acreage and still starve.”

Part of it is the labor required, part could be the learning curve.

Robots will transform both. They will start work fully loaded with best practices, and wirelessly get updates when available. In a home garden, they could hunt all night, killing every invasive bug, one at a time, or just blow them away every day with the water spray. Perfectly consistent weeding and watering.

Indoor farming (underground, underwater or multistory) is becoming more feasible over time as well, as LEDs grow cheaper to buy and operate, and are tuned to the optimum frequencies of light for the crop.

Why the hostility? I grew up in the urban jungle and some of my fondest memories as a boy was growing tomato plants and other vegetables in my tiny postage stamp yard. How small was my yard back then? The living room that I'm typing this from is twice as big as that yard was. But it was very satisfying to bring in fresh veggies from the garden that I planted myself. I used to get those egg carton type containers and start my plants in the windowsills of the house while waiting for the last frost to transplant them outside.

It’s an interesting place with a compelling story. The city had to take it over, though. It started off as a private venture but they just couldn’t get it done without a lot of government money. They have automated systems they had to order from some place in Europe because we don’t have anything as reliable in the states (at least that’s what the VH folks say).

They don’t have many options in a location where it gets 30 below and has several feet of snow in some years. It supports what you have said about getting more produce out of a small amount of space.

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