Amir Chiang Nyen Fook

No Matrix: U2002754

AID2004 URBANIZATION AND THE ENVIRONMENT

The Perspective Of Urban Agriculture

Introduction

Urban agriculture can be described as the growing of plants and the rearing of animals
primarily for food and other domestic use within a city or a town and its environs. It also
involves activities such as the production, processing, marketing, and delivery of farming
products. Urban agriculture consists of a number of production systems. They vary from
domestic production and household level processing to large scale agriculture. This is usually
done within the city peripherals.

Urban agriculture shows great potential in the fulfillment of basic human needs, it not
only provides food but also ensures a sustainable distribution and production system thereby
creating employment opportunities and regular income for individuals. It also helps countries
in the protection of their environment and saving upon their foreign currency and
transportation costs.

Urban farming has been used to replace home gardening hobby, and this activity has
changed its role in relation to the socio-demographic changes and needs. This is due to the
agricultural land issue, urbanization, urban poverty and business opportunities that emerged
from the socioeconomic needs. Urban farming is getting more and more popular in many
regions across the world. New York, London and Tokyo are the leading cities from the
developed countries which emphasize the various practices of urban farming. This is
followed by the developing countries such as Singapore from which urban farming
contributes almost 25% of its food supply.

Types of urban agriculture

There are many types of urban agriculture such as backyard gardens. This is the growing of
food on home property. Its produce is mostly shared among friends, family, and neighbors as
it typically leads to a surplus in the harvest. The food can also be stored and preserved.
Backyard gardens are beneficial to communities as neighbors can share each other’s backyard
and employ different methods of farming leading to better yields.

Greenhouses involves the practice of agriculture in residential, commercial, and

communal urban spaces in greenhouses. They require a substantial size of land to set up
depending on the crops being planted. Greenhouses give farmers the ability to grow a crop all
year round as they provide a controlled environment where the crops can be subjected to
specific conditions required for their growth.
 Other than that, tactical gardens in also among of the urban agriculture that involves
using the limited space available to practice agriculture without having to incur hefty
expenses. For instance, an urban dweller could easily make a keyhole garden to cover a space
that was intended for car parking in the street. This puts to good use land that could have
potentially have gone to waste and instead creates an activity that can be done for leisure or
to make more food.

Street landscaping and forest gardening are grown older within urban settings. This is
the landscaping of streets for different uses such as community gardens, which are tended to
by the people in the neighborhood. They not only make the streets look beautiful but also
purifies the air creating a clean environment. Since they are primarily located along the street,
their added advantage is their capability of reducing urban stormwater runoff. Besides, forest
gardening pertains to the practice of having gardens grown within an urban forest. Forest
gardening is achieved by having different crops, vegetables, and fruits grown within urban
settings. Forests usually create an environment that is favorable for crop development and for
this reason, they help in ensuring that forests are protected and can make deforestation a
nonfactor in the urban settings. Forest gardening can also be part of afforestation efforts,
which encourages the planting of trees as a step towards the fight against global warming in
urban areas.

Since urban areas have limited space, it does not mean agriculture cannot be practice.
This is where rooftop space comes in as they can easily be utilized for cropping vegetables,
fruits, and herbs. The advantage of rooftop gardens is that it can aid in reducing urban heat
island as well as improving the air quality. Aside from these, rooftop gardens can be used to
beautify recreational facilities. The green wall encompasses the growing of vegetation or
food crops on the external or internal space of a wall. It does not use up a lot of space as the
mechanism used helps to supply the food with adequate water and it uses soil present on the
walls. It is a good method for reducing stormwater runoff.

The most pacticing types of Urban agriculture is greenwall. This involves potentially farming
upwards to reduce the agricultural land footprint. Green walls can be used as a method for
vertical farms as it also uses minimal space and is practiced on the sides of vertical walls.
Moreover, Urban beekeeping is a possibility but comes with a lot of restrictions and
regulations from the local government depending on the location and the city. In other words,
the requirements for beekeeping may vary from city to city. If practiced, however, it has lots
of benefits to the local environment. Bees are important to the ecosystem as they not only
produce honey but act as pollinators and promote biodiversity.

Last but not least, aquaponic is urban agriculture type that entails the practice of
rearing aquatic animals like fish in urban areas. It involves the use of a system that captures
stormwater from within the city and then creating a self- sustaining a recirculating system in
tanks or artificial fish ponds. It is an efficient way of rearing crops and a protein alternative.

Benefits of urban agriculture

Urban agriculture leads to the establishment of new businesses, which not only creates
income for its owners and employment opportunities for people in the community. This
provides an avenue for the employees to earn a living and ultimately help the business to
grow and sustain their operations. It helps the local government to raise revenue which helps
them in running their operations, the land set aside for urban agriculture also increases in
value as it is put to good use. This reduces the cost the government has to incur to maintain
the land and thwarts efforts made by people to illegally dump materials in the land or
vandalize the property.

Urban agriculture has plenty of benefits on the environment. It reduces stormwater

runoff through aquaponics and street landscaping. Furthermore, it supports biodiversity,
improves air quality, and can mitigate urban heat island impacts. Urban agriculture requires
less use of industrial chemicals, which limits the use of herbicides, artificial fertilizers, and
pesticides; especially when practicing organic farming. The benefits vary in impact and they
are dependent on the type of agriculture practiced, and the methods used in maintaining them.
Urban agriculture creates homes for pollinators to increase the chances of preserving
indigenous crops, which may not fare well under other conditions. It also leads to the
breading of new crops by sharing seeds.

Urban agriculture grows food mostly in the geographical location where it is also
consumed. This helps in reducing the carbon footprint made by the farms, especially
emissions from transportation mediums. The green plantations also go a long way in acting as
carbon sinks, particularly through the practice of urban forestry.

Urban agriculture creates opportunities for local communities to participate in related

activities. Urban agriculture helps communities put to good use public properties that have
been underused for agricultural purposes such as animal husbandry and urban forestry.
Improves unity among members – the communities get the most benefits as neighbors get
involved and also achieve a certain level of commitment. This helps in the organization,
advocacy, and making decisions that consider the interests of the community and
environmental protection. Maintaining of cultures to cultural practices are also shared.
Continued interactions through urban agricultural activities create intergeneration bonds and
people from different age brackets get to share significant information about certain food
crops, vegetation, indigenous herbs, and domesticated animals such as poultry.

Training and development projects initiated by urban agriculture have initiatives that
are aimed at skill improvement and training opportunities for jobs and opportunities that arise
from the activities. Active participation in activities around urban agriculture such as
beekeeping and poultry farming helps individuals develop important life skills that can help
them create job opportunities or create their own source of livelihood. Creativity and
innovation urban agriculture also gives access to the vast knowledge in food systems, how to
sustain them, the different areas in which they are used, and other essential agricultural
products as well as a healthy diet. The knowledge acquired helps individuals to come up with
new ways of practicing urban agriculture or improving already existing systems.

urban agriculture is a community-based enterprise. It, therefore, has a big chance

of boosting the local demand for food such as vegetables and fruits. Urban agriculture
ensures fresh food is available and affordable and helps producers find alternatives to buying
food thus reducing the cost of living. Donating surplus food to food banks by community
farms also ensures a steady food supply, which reduces the expenses incurred by people and
families with low income. Urban agriculture promises fresh food availability. With the
availability of fresh foods, it reduces the dependence on processed foods thereby translating
into a healthy society and reduced risk of lifestyle diseases such as cancer and obesity.

urban agriculture ensures that products delivered in the market to consumers are
handled by fewer intermediaries, which reduces nutrient deterioration and food damage
during transportation. Furthermore, farms in urban agriculture use strategies that eliminate
the use of chemicals in pest management, which reduce the risk and exposure of toxic matter
to people who consume the food and the supply of water.

Urban agriculture challenge

Urban populations are growing rapidly, and so is the popularity of urban agriculture with city
dwellers, chefs, and policymakers. As more people place larger demands on what was
originally a grassroots movement, we look at some of the hurdles and how some companies
and individuals are addressing them.

Scaling up is the challenge for urban agriculture. According to vertical farming

advocate and author Dick Despommier, 80 percent of the world will live in urban areas by
2050. These types of numbers have whetted the appetites of many entrepreneurs, who see the
looming mega-metropolis as an opportunity to develop larger scale urban farming projects
that stress-test urban farming’s industrial and economic capacity. Since scaling up by simply
planting more acres isn’t an option in most urban environments, urban farming companies are
addressing space constraints the way urban developers have addressed space constraints for
centuries: going up instead of out.

Though this method comes with its own costs, including an enormous amount of
energy consumption and loads of expensive equipment, it’s a model that presents itself as one
answer to the question of what urban farming would have to look like in order to feed a
substantial percentage of a city, producing three to four million pounds of leafy greens and
herbs in less than one acre of growing space.

For those who can’t afford the price tag of running a vertical farm or those who
don’t buy the hype, there’s the soil. For urban farmers, saying “there’s the soil” often
involves pointing at the truck hauling it into their site from somewhere outside the city.
Urban composting operations are attempting to address this issue by converting organic waste
into more readily available biomass and fertility. Farmers working land native to the city may
face a host of challenges with contamination and soil quality, both of which may be able to be
addressed by growing mushrooms to absorb or neutralize contaminants while building soil
life.

Trying to provide a constantly accessible, clean water supply for millions of

people is hard enough. Trying to provide clean water for a growing city plus a growing
number of farms within that city is even more challenging. To this end, many urban growers
employ drip or underground irrigation systems, which allow growers to trickle measured
amounts of water to plants directly at the roots where they need it instead of spraying a hose
that waters the air more than the crops and uses much more water to do it.

For other farms, simply connecting to any water supply at all may be a challenge,
since opportunistic growers desperate for growing space may not always choose a site with
its own water line or meter. In this case, growers may be attracted to hydroponic growing
systems, a soil-less method of growing that some researchers say uses 90 percent less water
than field farming and also eliminates the challenges with soil discussed above.

While urban agriculture may be riding a wave of interest and innovation, that
energy doesn’t change the economics of farming. It has always been and likely will be for
some time, very difficult for the majority of farmers to make a living by raising and selling
vegetables. Like their country counterparts, urban farmers face difficulties with paying
themselves and their helpers and affording access to vital resources. In a particular crunch are
the many urban growers who began farming because they felt compelled to or just thought
it’d be fun, and now find themselves part of a competitive market demanding increasingly
aggressive business savvy that may not have been part of the farm’s original intention.

In fact, research suggests two thirds of urban farmers don’t draw a living from
their urban farms, in part because they view yields like self-sufficiency and strong
community as more of a focus than profit. For those who in the business of urban farming,
high concentrations of skilled chefs and overall customers offer opportunities to do strong
business by specializing in niche crops. High-value, quick-turnaround crops well-suited to
urban space constraints like salad greens have proven effective for many companies, as have
unusual heirloom vegetables, cut flowers, and value-added products.

Conclusion

To minimize the carbon footprint of mass production and distribution, urban farming is a sure
shot solution. It also seeks to make nutritious food affordable and accessible to everyone
around. Every Malaysian can do their part to help the country become more food resilient.
Urban farms will encourage people to buy more local produce at affordable prices while
reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions at the same time.

The importance of the practice starts in educating groups and individuals of understanding
how the food system works. By having a good grasp of the process, one can have more input
into how food is grown, harvested and transported from one place to another.

Apart from education, the discipline matters in its approach to utilize spaces in highly
populated urban areas as alternatives to improve how the local food system and its products
are grown and produced. When an urban community is informed and educated, people turn
out to be better informed urban consumers. This in turn supports the essential idea of the
practice as an effort to improve the local food system’s quality and the lives of its people.
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