URBAN FARMING: WHAT DOES IT MEAN?

Urban farming entails the practice of cultivating, processing, and distributing food in urban areas. It encompasses a range of activities like backyard, rooftop, and balcony gardening, community gardens in vacant lots, city beehives, indoor vertical farms, and even larger commercial urban farms and greenhouses. The modern concept of urban farming developed over the last few decades as interest grew around localized food production and improving food security, nutrition, community education, and accessibility within cities.

Practicing agriculture in an urban setting presents unique opportunities and challenges. Urban farms can repurpose abandoned properties and derelict land to generate social, economic, and environmental benefits for communities. Urban settings allow producing food closer to consumers, providing fresher crops and reduced transportation miles and costs. Growing spaces and related facilities can also facilitate community building through shared public spaces, education programs, and volunteering.

That said, urban farms compete for space with development pressures from continuing urbanization and densification. They require access to full sunlight, irrigation water, fertile soil or hydroponic growth mediums, crop protection, and pollination, which can be hard to ensure in built urban environments. Urban farmers also must control for pollution from vehicle emissions, industry byproducts, pesticides, cleaning chemicals, and even lead in soils. Limited available land area limits production volumes compared to rural farming. Higher operations costs from rent, labor, utilities, and supplies combined with lower yields can make profitable urban farming challenging.

Still, innovative urban farming models continue emerging and gaining support through government incentives. Advances in green buildings, renewable energy, IoT sensors, LED lighting, vertical growing, hydroponics, aquaculture, and environmental technologies integrate well with and enable successful urban farms. When designed holistically, urban agriculture can provide nutritious affordable local food options, green spaces, hands-on STEM education, job training opportunities, and new urban economic activity simultaneously. With cities continuing to expand globally, urban farming promises to be one approach to help feed urban populations in a sustainable manner moving into the future.