URBAN FARMING PLATFORMS

To become resilient in food production, urban areas need more than the conversion of empty neighborhood lots and terraces into gardens. They need true farming platforms that can bundle commonly needed goods and services into an easily accessible package located in the middle of the community. One good example of this is the Community Food Center put together by Will Allen (a MacArthur award recipient) in downtown Milwaukee WI. In a small two acre space, the food center has packed 20,000 plants, thousands of fish, and hundreds of livestock. This farming platform prototype includes (note the intensity of the operation):

• Greenhouses, hoop-houses, and hydroponics systems that support the growth of plants, fish, worms and a wide variety of livestock (chickens to turkeys).
  
• Agricultural services such as a large rapid composting system and an apiary (beehives).
  
• Self sufficiency via a retail store and energy production from anerobic digester that produces energy from farming waste.
  
• Training services and classrooms to teach the community how to do nearly everything the farm does for themselves (with an eye towards helping entrepreneurs start their own efforts).

In short, this looks like an excellent prototype for a local farming platform that can serve as the basis for a revival in community agriculture. In particular, given the small footprint of this model, it may be the perfect way to return abandoned urban retail space to productive use in the years to come.

Comments

[Anonymous]

I have zero experience in this area, but on the internet this business of small food distribution is portrayed as something dangerous: http://www.newswithviews.com/NWV-News/news116.htm

Is this true in any way?

[Dale Asberry]

Wouldn't this sort of concentrated system be particularly vulnerable to roving gangs?

[John Robb]

Dale, it's much easier to defend this than a global distribution system.

[Duncan Kinder]

How capital intensive would such an urban farming platform be?

Could one be generated from current cash flows or would one require loans to establish one.

It seems to me that resilient communities should be designed to favor platforms that could be generated from current cash flows over those that would require loans for reasons that now surround us.

[gmoke]

I remember the groups working in the South Bronx in the 1970s including the Scarab compost machine that the Bronx Pioneers were operating in a pilot project and the folks at Banana Kelly gardens.

The Food Project in Boston or ReVision House are other models that can be adapted in other cities and towns. I would also suggest that permaculture be integrated into the models as in the Fruition Project in Santa Cruz, CA or the Tree People of LA.

There are plenty of people who have been working in this direction for over thirty years. That's a lot of experience available for the asking.

[gmoke]

Oh, yeah, I forgot to mention New Alchemy Institute and all the work that they did. The Institute may have disbanded but the people involved are still there and still working on similar paths.

We hippies were right and it is nice, though frustrating, to see the rest of the world beginning to catch up.

[Aaron Black]

30 years of hippies? This stuff goes back centuries from the religious communes of the 1700s to the anarchists of the 1800s to the modern science movement of the early 1900s. Then throw in some thanks to the life support system miniturization and integration work from NASA. "Living Machines" have always been a perennial solution waiting for it's day in the sun.

Ayn Rand noted it was the nature of innovation to increase the independence of the individual. Think household refrigerator.

[g48]

That sounds like something we're working on in Northern CA, except that we have a 4-acre site for it. Agriculture is outside of my range of competence, but I will admit to some skepticism in relation to the claimed carrying capacity of high-density food production systems. Such systems could be more vulnerable to random disruptors including nature (weather etc.) than systems that are less complex and intensive. However I may be seriously mistaken.

---

Dale, in the evolving discussion of community defense, the first line of defense is trade. Trade keeps the peace, and prevention of violence is the best cure. A network of micro-agriculture and micro-industry in a given region, is necessarily conducive to a high density of trade.

Conversely, a small number of large entities tends to produce a lower density of trading relationships in a region: fewer producers, thus fewer participants in the web of trade. This can become a breeding ground for disaffected groups, which in turn can become sources of crime.

It should be understood that the word "consumer" is an inadequate descriptor for the role of an individual in an economy. We are as well producers, and this must be recognized and reinforced by way of encouraging the kinds of initiative that are needed in the times ahead.

[roamer]

I attended one of his courses a few years back. What I recalled from it was his use of city food waste streams to quickly generate soil material. I also thought his aquaponic/tilopia system was an effective way to generate protein.

One of the things I see missing in most garden/self sufficiency schemes is the lack of means to produce adequate amounts of protein.

[NietzschesGhost]

"How capital intensive would such an urban farming platform be?"

I can't speak to the rest of the operation, but the aquaponics system is highly scalable. Startups can be undertaken with as little as $50 worth of polypropolene tubing, some gravel and some fish food. Increasing capacity is as simple as buying/scavenging more containers to use as fish tanks/grow beds.

The following website deals specifically with aquaponics systems. Be sure to check out the forums, they have pictures of systems as small as 20 litres and the largest one I saw weighed in at 10,000 litres (though they are really only limited by your available space and manpower).

http://www.backyardaquaponics.com/

The real questions here are "How much space is available?" and "How elaborate do you want to get?"

[walflour]

Community resiliance from a century ago?

http://alexismadrigal.wordpress.com/2008/12/20/250000-tiny-greenhouses-each-containing-one-head-of-lettuce/

This French intensive gardening method (AKA Marias System) seemed like a developed platform in that equipment was made to an industry standard, crops were grown on a known schedule, and an established method of inter-cropping was devised.

Here's another reference:

http://books.google.com/books?id=YQnRrUvFPoIC&pg=PA10&lpg=PA10&dq=Marais+system&source=bl&ots=ADEtqGAirX&sig=OdiK7fln42kYjigs-G1xlavR8jY&hl=en&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=1&ct=result#PPA12,M1

[Aaron Black]

Here's a design from the New Alchemy "Living Machines" guy:

http://www.oceanarks.org/Ecological_Food_Production.php
http://www.oceanarks.org/img/intervale_diagram_lg.jpg

These examples can go on forever. Where will a more useful conception be found? Something that distills it's "platform" essence is needed I assume. Some new hip neologism or something.

[Aaron Black]

Just as another example that this design stuff can go on forever, and this speaks to _roamer's reference to protein:

http://ecosyn.us/ecocity/Ecosyn/IBS_Math.html
http://ecosyn.us/ecocity/Ecosyn/Flowchart.html
via http://www.ecosyn.us/Interesting/