The simple act of planting a garden can shape issues like
economics, health, and politics at the same time because food is an
essential focal point of human activity. As the urban farming movement
grows, here are five ways that it will transform our world.
1. Renewed local economies. Local
neighbor-to-neighbor commerce generally doesn’t happen in our
communities. Residential areas almost never include common spaces where
community exchanges might happen. Likewise, because selling homemade
bread to your neighbors is illegal in most areas, the law discourages
community commerce, and instead encourages you to purchase from the
supermarket chain.
In my own community, the urban farming
movement has reinvigorated local commerce. Instead of buying oranges, I
now trade pumpkin for oranges from my neighbor’s tree. If urban farming
continued to grow, it would cause a massive and positive economic
disruption by introducing local food production that would compete with
the corporate mainstream on price, quality, convenience, and level of
service.
2. Environmental stewardship. Industrial
agriculture is a major source of fossil fuel pollution. Petrochemicals
are used to fertilize, spray, and preserve food. Plastics made from oil
are used to package the food, and gasoline is used to transport food
worldwide. Urban farming unplugs us from oil by minimizing the transport
footprint and using organic cultivation methods.
While
industrial agriculture often maneuvers to avoid paying for environmental
externalities, urban farmers directly bear the ecological costs of
their actions. This makes urban farmers better stewards of their land
because they draw their nutrition from it. Rather than using chemicals
that destroy soil biology, urban farming culture stresses sustainable
organic techniques that enrich the topsoil.
3. A focus on local politics.
Urban farming makes it clearer and easier for people to be involved in
local politics by bringing issues that directly affect neighborhoods to
the fore. Local regulations become far more relevant to the day-to-day
life of a person attempting to cultivate their own food than most issues
normally discussed on CNN. The growth of urban farming has already
resulted in large-scale legal pushes like the California Cottage Food
Act, which will allow people to legally sell certain homemade goods like
jams and breads. Other neighborhood issues such as the raising of
chickens, beekeeping for the production of honey, or the chlorination of
water are already in the sights of urban farmers and environmentalists
alike.
4. A revolution of health and nutrition. Increased
awareness about the negative health effects of food from the industrial
food chain is itself a big reason why urban farmers grow their own
food. When you feed your produce to your family, you’re less likely to
douse it in poisons. Local food has more freshness, flavor, and nutrient retention
because it goes through less transportation and processing. As the
urban farming movement grows, it will mean more accessibility to
nutritious local food and more time spent doing the healthy physical
work of gardening. This could result in less obesity, less chronic
disease, and decreased healthcare spending.
5. A flowering of community interaction. Urban
farming is a lifestyle inherently centered on community. Growing food
is, after all, a cooperative effort. In my own community, I see that the
knowledge of how and what to grow is exchanged, seeds are swapped,
labor is shared, and the harvest is traded. As urban farming grows, a
stronger interdependence within communities is likely to result as local
food systems bring more community interaction into people’s daily
lives.
The most important movement of our time. Although
there are many other notable initiatives today, the influence of urban
farming is uniquely widespread because more people live in cities than
rural areas and food is a central necessity that affects everything at
once. The seeds of change are already being planted in homes like mine
across the world. For these seeds to grow and blossom, we need to demand
more local food so that the market for urban-grown produce expands. We
also need to put pressure on our legal system to allow easier local
trade and more local food production.
Imagine if we grew food
instead of grass. Every community is a local food economy waiting to
come to life. The answer to climate change, the health crisis, and the
recession economy is right outside your door. I’ll meet you at the
garden fence.
