If Urban Farms Can’t Feed Us, What Are They Good For?

Jason Mark is a columnist for Change.org's Sustainable Food cause. He is a co-author of Building the Green Economy: Success Stories from the Grassroots and the editor of Earth Island Journal. When he's not writing, he co-manages San Francisco's Alemany Farm, a four-acre organic fruit and vegetable garden in the city.

To hear the media tell it, urban farming is all the rage. Take, as just one example, the happenings here in the eco-chic San Francisco Bay Area. At the newly created Hayes Valley Farm, the San Francisco Bay Guardian reports that a small staff and a huge crowd of volunteers have created a “freeway food forest” on what used to be a traffic on-ramp. On the other side of town, the New York Times adds that the two-woman team that runs Little City Gardens is breaking ground in reforming San Francisco’s zoning laws around the selling of local produce. In Berkeley, Spiral Gardens recently chalked up an award from the East Bay Express, joining Oakland food programs City Slicker Farms and People’s Grocery as a press darling. And photo editors at the Wall Street Journal and the San Francisco Chronicle can’t resist running (and re-running) bucolic pics of San Francisco’s Alemany Farm, which I help to manage.

All of this is good news, of course. The renaissance in urban food production — which harks back to the World War II-era Victory Gardens while at the same time helps push forward a more sustainable 21st-century economy — is, in fact, a big story. More city dwellers are eager to get involved in their own food production than at any time since the start of the industrial food era. That’s a win for the environment, for public health, and for community resilience — and it deserves to be celebrated.

But lost amid all the hype is this basic fact: Urban farming is never going to feed us. We don’t have the land or, really, the know-how  to be food self-sufficient. We’re not going to be growing wheat in Golden Gate Park or rice on Palo Alto’s Moffett Field anytime soon. Anyway, why should we want to? Cities exist to be centers of art and culture and commerce — not grain fields.

Or as Tom Philipott of Grist recently put in an introduction to that site’s “Feeding the City” series: “No one wants to see cows grazing on Central Park’s Great Lawn. Any realistic vision of ‘green cities’ sees them as consumption hubs within larger regional foodsheds.”

So if we’re not going to feed ourselves with urban gardening plots, what’s the point?

There’s no doubt in my mind that urban farming is important. We should, though, be thoughtful about what we can realistically expect urban food production to achieve. At its best, urban farming is an important avenue for environmental recreation, a way to help protect farmland threatened by sprawl, and a chance to bring together diverse groups of people.

Every weekend, Alemany Farm is besieged by volunteers. They come for many reasons, but one of the most important is to feed a hunger to connect, in some modest way, to nature. The farm fulfills people’s instinctual need to build a relationship with living things beyond themselves, even if that merely means walking on real soil for a few hours and getting a smidgen of dirt underneath the nails. Something as simple as weeding the strawberries or planting the garlic is a chance for people to relocate themselves in the physical world.

Now, those strawberries and garlic won't be enough to stock the pantries of a whole city. But urban farming is still an essential part of the broader sustainable food ecosystem. Because as city dwellers start to produce more of their own food, they take some of the load off farmers in the countryside. If (or when) cities in the U.S. were to produce one-third of all of their own fruits, vegetables, and eggs (a realistic goal, I think) that would allow the small farms surrounding the urban centers to diversify their own crop mix. If urban farming were to relieve some of the pressure of suburban development, farms here in Northern California could back away from the high-value crops like salad mix, wine grapes, and almonds, and strive for a more diverse mix of crops like grains and pasture-raised meats. By growing more of our own food in the city, we can prompt farmers in the countryside to start producing a more complete range of foods.

Urban farming’s most valuable crop, though, is something that’s difficult to measure. It’s the harvest we gain when we come together around the ancient task of sustaining ourselves. Everybody eats — and that means everyone can be involved in the work of growing our own food. At the end of a long-day in the asphalt-surrounded garden, the most important crop we find is community.

Photo credit: Jason Mark