Sometimes we all could use a reminder about the importance of food security.

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Urban farming has the potential to help us take charge of the foods we eat, green our cities, build community, and increase food security for urban residents.

Everyday, there’s articles about backyard chickens, bee keeping, or urban yard sharing. Clearly urban agriculture is at the top of the trend pile. But is it just a trend, or a part of a sustainable future?

Last week I attended a panel discussion in San Francisco at The Commonwealth Club (presented by INFORUM), about how today’s urban farming movement began and where it’s going. Attendees were treated to a variety of perspectives from four pitchfork-toting farmerpreneur leaders of the urban farming movement in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Panelists included Jason Mark, co-manager of Alemany Farm; editor-in-chief, Earth Island Journal, Novella Carpenter, author of the book Farm City about her farm Ghost Town Farm, Christopher Burley, founder, Hayes Valley Farm, and David Gavrich (aka The Goat Whisperer), founder of City Grazing. The panel was moderated by Sarah Rich, writer; editor; co-founder, The Foodprint Project; and co-author, Worldchanging: A User’s Guide for the 21st Century.

The panel started off with a discussion about the most recent “back to the land” movement and how it differed from today’s urban farming movement.

Back in the 60s and 70s young people migrated back to the countryside to make a go of farming. Novella Carpenter’s parents were part of that movement. But it didn’t last. People found that growing food is very hard and rural life can be extremely isolating. The motives of today’s generation of farmers are different, and more communitarian. They’re not trying to drop out. They’re trying to engage more fully with the world around them.

“We’re realizing that maybe there is a different way. We can stay in the cities and grow food where we live and it can serve as a model for sustainability, said Jason Mark. “There’s not enough room for all of us in Sonoma.”

“We’re all trying to find balance and bring the rural environment into the urban environment. We’re trying to find that niche that we live in. Everyone who plants a seed is sowing a bit of sustainability,” added Chris Burley.

Though the movement is young, things are changing rapidly. According to David Gavrich, the goat whisperer. When his business, City Grazing, put an ad in Craigslist for “goat herder, San Francisco,” they got 200 applications, and half of the applicants actually had goat experience. According to Gavrich, “people are yearning to get away from their desks”.

Urban farming does seem to be helping to revitalize neighborhoods and foster community. For example, Burley, of Hayes Valley Farm, who was featured here in a Q & A a couple of weeks back said that he was amazed to find that 50 people will consistently show up on a Thursday to shovel horse manure for four hours. Sunday work parties regularly attract 100 folks.

Jason Mark says, “community is what distinguishes this from the back to the land movement.” Alemany Farm is completely volunteer run and over the years has built up a core group of volunteers that are friends and together make up a vibrant community.

For Novella Carpenter, the community happened more by accident. Her farm begin as a personal project but has evolved into one in which neighbors are involved in various ways. The involvement started with people picking her produce without permission. Describing herself as “not a do-gooder” but saying that. “If my neighbors are hungry and I know how to grow food how can I not feed them?” she says, “everybody gives what they can.” This includes everything from the wagon proffered by the neighbor who likes her mustard greens to goat butchering lessons from the Yemeni liquor store owner.

What about bureaucratic hurdles to farming in urban areas?

They do exist but each panelist had different experiences. Gavrich has said he’s had no problems in enlightened San Francisco but recommends anticipating problems and getting everything in writing. He has a “goat clause” in his agreement with the railroad line he maintains stating that all landscape is done by natural means.

Mark echoes that San Francisco has been extremely supportive and that the mayor has laid out a food policy proposal that is sweeping and visionary. He does cite “getting the city staff to connect with the mayor’s policies” as a hurdle.

Burley said that the city came to his group to develop Hayes Valley Farm, so they have the full blessing and support from the authorities. He also said that a bottom- up approach to urban farming that utilizes people’s backyards has worked.

Most of the panelist agreed that policy changes that support urban farming are important because (though many of the non-profit farms and farms located in private backyards don’t run into problems) when an urban farm is commercialized, all it takes is one neighbor to complain about commercial activity in a residential area for a farmer to get cited.

And as Burley said, “We need to advocate for farms in residential areas because 60 percent of land is in people’s yards.”

Can urban farming help us rebuild our food systems and increase food security?

Urban farming can certainly increase access to fresh fruits and vegetables to city dwellers but we need to look at how the food is distributed and find creative ways to get the food to the people who most need it. The most sustainable way of all to provide food is to teach people how to grow their own.

For example, Alemany Farm is right next to public housing. The farm runs youth programs and provides plots to nearby residents where they can grow their own food. The farm once held a farmers market where nearby residents could purchase produce on a sliding scale. The farm is no longer allowed to sell the food, which means they have to give it away. Yet all the panelists agree that a charity model is too top-down and not sustainable.

Things are shifting as policy makers realize that urban farming can be both a green solution to city ills and perhaps even a green jobs solution. Novella Carpenter is working on a project in San Lorenzo that is part of the city’s green job training program and is funded by the sheriff’s department.

All panelists agreed that the movement needs to network, share information and resources and build the system from the ground up.

According to Chris Burley, an urban agriculture alliance is forming. And indeed for urban agriculture to ever become more than isolated individuals working on scattered city plots, we need concerted organization efforts that can both demand and work with government backing.

Panelists were asked what role education plays in the movement

Chris Burley says it’s crucial. In fact Hayes Valley Farm’s mission is not even so much to produce food, but to serve as an urban agriculture resource that provides education and advocates behavioral changes. “We can’t change what we don’t know. We need to become more aware of our impact. Food is the gateway drug to a more sustainable lifestyle. Through learning about food, little by little, we’ll become more connected and thrive as a community,” said Burley.

Novella and her co-worker/owners run an urban farming store at Biofuel Oasis in Berkeley. All day they educate people on beekeeping, chicken coops and more. They teach classes on bee and goat keeping, preserving, and other topics as well. With a trend like urban farming, it is necessary to make sure people know what they are getting into or the movement will not develop in a sustainable way.

I wonder if the Internet existed during the 60s and 70s, giving people access to information and ready support from fellow travelers, if the back-to-the-land movement might have survived.

In conclusion: here are the panelist’s best 60-second ideas to change the world.

David Gavrich – “Get leadership and political people to think holistically. Think about the impact beyond what we see. Look at externalities. If we do that, it will be clear that we’ll be better off farming in our communities.”

Chris Burley – “Crop mob. Get together and transform a backyard. Have a potluck.”

Novella Carpenter – “Every city should have a demo farm. It could be a cool tourist thing with a person managing it and showing people how to raise chickens and bees and how to can and process vegetables. There should be an “˜office of urban farming.'”

Jason Mark – “Find a little bit of land and a little water, find a friend and find someone to help. Connect with you neighbors doing the same thing. Personal actions alone don’t do it. Progress happens collectively.”

This is the latest installment in Vanessa Barrington’s weekly column, The Green Plate, on the environmental, social, and political issues related to what and how we eat.

Image: Jessica Reeder

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Cities across the nation suffer from some of the same ills regarding poor quality food and inequitable distribution of healthy, fresh produce and other unprocessed foods. But New York City has a bold plan that could very well serve as a model for the rest of us.

Communities in every urban area include pockets or neighborhoods that have higher rates of diet related diseases than neighboring communities, little or no physical access to healthy, fresh foods, or lack of money to buy the fresh food that is available. Our broken food system contributes to our national health problems, but it’s also a huge contributor to climate change and other environmental problems. Additionally, employment in the food sector – whether you are a farmer, farmworker, or service industry worker – often means scraping by on less than a living wage and living without health care.

How do we fix our food system and reform it into something that actually serves us?

If we want to build a decentralized food distribution system that serves the people equally, the best way is to start at home with a clear vision and concrete policy recommendations. NYC’s model for a better food system, if adopted, could be replicated in other cities across the nation, creating jobs and providing better food for more people.

In February, Manhattan Borough President Scott M. Stringer released “FoodNYC: A Blueprint for a Sustainable Food System,” calling it “the most comprehensive effort to date to unify and reform New York City’s policies regarding the production, distribution, consumption, and disposal of food.” (The report was produced as a result of the New York City Food and Climate Summit held in December (09) in partnership with the non-profit Just Food.)

Of all the ideas presented, the blueprint chose to outline 10 bold ideas for the future. Cities everywhere take notice!

1. Urban Agriculture: Urban agriculture can reduce rainwater runoff and pollution, reduce the heat-island effect in cities, and absorb and sequester carbon. New York’s blueprint calls on the city to create a citywide urban Ag program that will identify land that is available for urban agriculture, such as vacant lots owned by the city, foster community gardens by giving them park status, and ease regulations and provide incentives to pave the way for green rooftops and other innovative urban farming programs.

2. Regional Food Production: Small regional farmers struggle to survive and compete with cheap overseas produce and heavily subsidized produce from industrial farms. When this happens, farmland dwindles and the farming population shrinks while urban consumers remain hungry for local foods. One task of the plan is to assess the capacity of a regional foodshed, facilitate connections among upstate farms and downstate consumers, and develop a long-term strategy towards preserving current farmland.

3. Food Processing and Distribution: When local food has to be shipped off somewhere else to be processed, it’s not really local food anymore. Relocalizing processing can create jobs along with a greener, more equitable food system. The plan recommends increasing distribution capacity of fresh, regional foods by expanding the existing Hunts Point Wholesale Produce Market and building other smaller wholesale produce markets in different areas of the city. Another recommendation is to invest public funds in local food processing plants.

4. New Markets: It’s all about access. Neighborhoods that have access to healthy, fresh foods suffer lower incidences of diet related diseases. The plan recommends fostering the development of non-traditional food outlets such as farmers’ markets by investing in increasing their capacity, offering long-term leases for public markets, and taking other actions that lower the barriers to increasing the number and type of alternative (non-grocery store) food venues in every neighborhood.

5. Procurement of Regionally grown Foods: Municipalities have huge buying power and can really move the needle toward change. By investing public money in community-based food, governments are creating jobs and bettering the health of local citizens. The recommendations focus on requiring publicly-funded schools, hospitals, senior centers, homeless shelters, and jails to mandate the purchase of regionally produced food.

6. Education: Kids don’t necessarily learn how to eat well at home, any more than they might learn algebra there. The blueprint recommends fostering lifelong good eating habits through requiring food curriculum in schools, exposing children to farms and gardens, and instituting meatless Mondays in New York City schools.

7. Food Waste: Rotting food creates methane, a powerful greenhouse gas. The plan recommends that the city lower food waste by decreasing the amount of food that goes uneaten through better procurement practices and by investing in municipal and individual composting programs.

8. Plastic Water Bottles: We live in a country with safe tap water, yet plastic bottles remain ubiquitous and have terrible environmental consequences. In New York, only 10% of plastic water bottles are recycled. The blueprint recommends banning sales of bottled water on city property and encouraging the use of water canteens.

9. Food Economy: Food fares well even during a recession. Focus the city’s economic development strategy on food businesses, creating good jobs and better food at the same time, through zoning, kitchen incubators and other programs. The plan also calls on New York State to protect the rights of farmworkers.

10. Government Oversight: Everybody eats and we already know that food has huge environmental and personal health impacts. Why not give food its due and treat it like transportation, education, and sanitation by creating a Department of Food and Markets to oversee and lead the reform of the city’s food system? That’s what the panel recommends.

When faced with gigantic problems like creating a food system that works for everyone, it’s helpful to break down the issues into smaller parts and offer concrete recommendations that build a new vision, like this blueprint does. You can read the entire report here and then get involved in a food policy council near you. They have been springing up everywhere. This handy map provides a list of all food policy councils in your state.

This is the latest installment in Vanessa Barrington’s weekly column, The Green Plate, on the environmental, social, and political issues related to what and how we eat.

Image: wwarby

The post NYC’s Bold Blueprint for Building a Better, Greener Food System appeared first on EcoSalon.