Are Urban Farms WORSE for the Environment? Episode 88

A recent study suggests that food grown in cities produces more CO2 than conventional farming. Is this really true? Is carbon the whole story? What would it mean for sustainable cities?

Sources:
David R. Montgomery, Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations. University of California Press (Berkeley and Los Angeles: 2007). Page 159.

Written and narrated by Kev Polk. Selected images courtesy Pexels and the White House.

[shawnmurphy]

Clickbait worked. Was ready to be angry, but was pleasantly surprised with the thoughtful content. We run a small, market garden using only hand tools. Our neighbor is a conventional farmer with no less than 15 large tractors that mostly sit idle in view of our thriving garden beds. Our customers see the difference, clear as day.

[syntacc]

It's not rural or urban or industrial, it is conventional vs agroforestry. If we set up city design gardens with cyclical nutrient and energy cycling you reduce carbon footprint, increase produce quality, and decrease pesticide and fertilizer needs

[abuttandahalf]

Small farms in fact currently produce most of the food consumed in the world. Industrialized farming produces only a minority of it.

[bandhuji]

very well done exposition on the incompleteness of the study. From your report, it seems like there are quite a few additional things left out. One is, alternative uses for the land. (ie growing trees on those megafarms while focusing on local urban ag). Another element left out from what I saw was the impact of perennials in urban gardens. As you said, planting with stacked functions is a major game changer. Similarly, designing over time & not just space has major impacts as well. I like to tell people permaculture is advanced farming, whereas conventional farming is actually very novice.

[kylenmaple]

I’m only 3 minutes in. I can already tell that this study it utterly lacking in scientific rigor. Just looking at soil disturbance alone, the amount of stable carbon and stable nitrogen that is lost from soils due to large-scale disturbance from conventional agriculture is DRAMATIC. There’s almost no way that a small-scale farm could create this intense level of disturbance, even if they use heavy machinery and classical management (ie. Tilling, fertilizers, etc.). The nature of large-scale mono-cropping requires heavy disturbance, relative sterilization of topsoil, and usage of fertilizers derived from fossil fuel intensive processes. At a small scale, these types of management practices are not financially sustainable, meaning that small-scale management is intrinsically less damaging on the soil. I doubt this “study” even considered the impacts on soil and instead focused entirely on “above ground” impacts.

EDIT: LMFAO 😂 The fact they focused so heavily on infrastructure shows just how propagandized this entire “study” is from top to bottom. Sorry but a couple raised beds with woodchip paths is not even remotely comparable to large-scale grain/corn processing plants, the storage/refueling zones for heavy machinery, giant silos for storing and treating your produce… not to mention the ridiculous amount of fuel used to move produce across the country, or the vast amounts of essentially barren land created from mono-cropping. Do roads count as agricultural infrastructure? Guess not… Don’t even get me started on fallowed land. Having a 1000 acre corn field that technically doesn’t have infrastructure is not somehow better than raised beds. That is an insane claim. The utter destruction of habitat and soil generated in mono-cropped conventional agriculture is astronomically worse than any amount of infrastructure dedicated to small-scale ag. Conventional agriculture is quite literally creating deserts, which is fine I guess, so long as they don’t build raised beds 😂😂😂 What a joke.

Great video!!!

Source: Am a soil scientist. Worked on regenerative farms for years.

[JeremyVanderwall]

You missed on major point.

Alternative Uses/combined uses

If my garden wasn't a garden, it wouldn't simply not exist. It would be lawn. I would still mow that, so mowing my garden is LESS mow time than if the garden wasn't there, not MORE. All the decorations and decor that are in the garden are not part of the carbon of the GARDEN. I would have a path there regardless. So the pavers, that's beautification of my yard not carbon from the garden. I would be watering the lawn, so no real change in water use. The study really seems to ignore the fact that if my garden wasn't a garden, it would be my lawn.

The comparison is to some idealized "natural state" that does not exist in urban environments. If you strip out all the infrastructure carbon costs for infrastructure that would exist regardless of if there is a garden there or not, most home gardens would be dramatically lower than corporate farms. Is the shed I store my tools in part of the "garden" or is it part of the other 4/5 of my property that still needs maintained?

[rajpoot]

Institutionalized Agri 'research' is universally 'altruistic' and has our best interests at heart. Thanks to it we have saved biodiversity, soil and gut health. Along to state obvious hunger is a thing of past. All is well and healthy in spray till and urea agriculture

[anonperson]

It depends on how many resources you buy in. When we set up our home veg garden we used a lot of recycled wood, we made our own compost using garden waste from the neighbours, we made our own fertiliser through vermicomposting etc. Definitely lower impact than industrial agriculture

[Iban-Underground]

Thank you for being level headed and not jumping to conspiracies like most people do nowadays. Most regular gardeners comments sections are filled with conspiracy posters and irrational actors. It's refreshing to not see that here.

[suburbanhomestead]

Thank you for being a voice of reason amongst a sea of outrage.

[marcelwindbrake]

My biggest problem with urban farming is, that it could help urban sprawl.
Every space you use in the city, makes the infrastructur of the city bigger. You need longer roads, more pipes, more cables, more parking, more car

In the Netherlands, you have much more compact citys. You can do nearly everything by walking and biking. And that is a big part of the reason, why the Adipositas problem in the netherland is shrinking. It wouldn't be possible with big gardens, like in the US.

[Anon-ui]

Great job putting this together. The idea that a community garden, run by volunteers and kids is going to be as productive as a farm, isn't that likely. We just need to look at Cuba for how to make low emissions efficient urban farms.

[diskordant]

Personally not a fan of the AI art used in background, but I liked the content of the vid. It's an interesting question and a good nuanced take. I think biodiversity is a huge thing to not include in the impacts of the different farming designs. Always important to keep in mind that all of this about how we grow out crops is small beans compared to WHAT we grow for. SOOOO much of the food we grow goes to supporting animal agriculture and if we reduced out consumption of animal products we would cut impacts down to a very small fraction of what we have now.

[melstark]

Great video! I personally mill my own grain, which is so much healthier and I grow 75% of my yearly food in my home garden. Learning to preserve foods was a game changer. I control what is in my food.

[OwlMoovement]

I'm glad you did this. You're spreading some of the thoughtful, investigative critique I haven't seen the media perform and I know most readers don't have the time for.

When I saw the article's title and the copy/paste "journalism" propagating it, I had a pretty good idea of the outrage around it. I looked into the original article as well and found nothing methodologically disingenuous - perhaps hazy and brief on the methods - but the writing is so misleading about how conclusive or comprehensive their data can be. Having done broad-scale research in spatial ecology and fused data from different sources with mismatching methods, I can attest that you have to be so careful about the assumptions you make, the blindspots your data embodies, and the limits of what you can know from a broad-yet-shallow study like this. I completely respect the feat the research they did was; I think it was well-intentioned and no small task despite its limits. But the published article, in title and content, is WAY too conclusive in its language for what they had to work with. Also, when did research papers start placing the results and conclusion sections before the methods? I always thought you go through your methods - including the disclaimers I mentioned - in a formal write-up before the results.

Originally, I thought it was the journalists cherry-picking that awful title and was genuinely surprised to see that the researchers went with that name. Part of me wonders if someone else at the University or review board of the article compelled the researchers to go with that title; the cute video they posted around it demonstrates that their disposition to urban ag is positive, and the tendrils of Big Ag propaganda are so active these days. I would not be surprised if this was editorial spin by someone with ties to industry groups.

Again, thank you for this. From another Permie, an urbanist, researcher, and farmer.

[VictoriousGardenosaurus]

I like to think my garden is less carbon intensive than traditional ag.
All my mulch is gathered from neighborhood lawn waste, picked up on my commute to and from work.
Beds, trellises, and glass hot houses are 90% built from recycled construction waste i picked up at the end of a work day, and simply hauled home during my normal commute.
My garden is mainly in ground, about 3000ft² bed space. Only hand tools are used.
Some outside fertilizers are used sparingly. I start my seeds under grow lights inside.
Im able to grow about 10 months of the year, and this is only my fourth year gardening.
I put in about 12 to 20 hours a week.

[yes]

I have mixed feelings about this study, but in fact there's too much alchemy in urban farming. People don't need those greenhouses, raised beds, paved paths and other high tech stuff. What's more they can use green mulch and grow permaculture, because they're better than machines at harvesting such crops. And the last, but not the least important - seeds grow better if you just toss them into the soil and not use a dozen of pots for the purpose. Imo there should be more zero waste publications on gardening.
But if you compare a gardener planting low-maintenance fruit trees and other edible plants in their garden, which results in no need to transport it from a producer, it's harvested by hand and packaging is 100% recycled, then it's quite obvious who has a lower carbon footprint. Also the more the plants, the less need for watering and a proper food forest will have a negative carbon footprint

[splashpit]

If we have learned anything over the last three years is it’s that scientists will prove whatever the people paying the money says is true

[TimeBrutus]

Take Jason Hawes PhD away. I do LCA’s and this was slipshod job. As an urban gardener, neve use cute buildings of pesticide/herbicies. Great video!

[lilolmecj]

I live in a fairly affluent small city. A family donated land for a series of park uses. One aspect is a community garden. I believe it has been in place for roughly 15 years. It is fully utilized, in fact over the winter months it was expanded to what looks like double its previous size. Every spring an army of men, women, and children descend upon it, and the variety of things that are grown bring joy to my heart. The community that results is likely more impactful than the food produced. I myself have my own garden, I hope to share it with a little girl who will turn four this summer. She might need another year. Last year I gifted her with a small French pumpkin, and various weird shaped tomatoes that I glued google eyes to. She had so much fun with them. One reason that people react strongly to this sort of stud and its conclusions is past experience with government overreach, based on equally faulty studies. 💕