[Communications] {AUA} Urban Farming Is not a Climate Villain, Despite Recent Headlines | Civil Eats

[Liz Moran Stelk]

Thought folks would appreciate this news coverage today about
the response to a study that made headlines suggesting that urbag ag has a
detrimental climate impact.



*Despite Recent Headlines, Urban Farming Is Not a Climate Villain
<https://civileats.com/2024/04/03/despite-recent-headlines-urban-farming-is-not-a-climate-villain/?utm_source=ActiveCampaign&utm_medium=email&utm_content=Urban%20Farming%20Is%20not%20a%20Climate%20Villain%2C%20Despite%20Recent%20Headlines&utm_campaign=Weekly%20Newsletter%2020240403>*
Civil Eats
BY LISA HELD
APRIL 3, 2024

At the end of January, multiple publications including Modern Farmer and
Bloomberg ran eye-catching stories on the results of a research study
published in Nature. Forbes declared that, “Urban Farming Has a Shockingly
High Climate Cost,” a headline that was outright wrong in terms of the
study’s findings. Earth.com led with a single, out-of-context data point:
“Urban agriculture’s carbon footprint is 6x greater than normal farms.”

On Instagram, urban farmers and gardeners began to express anger and
frustration. Some commented on media company posts; others posted their own
critiques. In February, students at the University of Michigan, where the
study was conducted, organized a letter to the researchers pointing out
issues with the study.

The issue most cited across critiques was simple: When urban farms were
separated from community gardens in the study, the higher rate of
greenhouse gas emissions reported essentially disappeared.

Now, two months later, national advocates for the multi-faceted benefits of
growing food and green spaces in cities are working to counter what they
see as harmful narratives created by a study they say had design flaws to
begin with and was then poorly communicated to the public. Of special
concern is funding for the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA)
fledgling Office of Urban Agriculture and Innovative Production, which
Congress has been shorting since it was established. A coalition of groups
have been pushing to change that in the upcoming farm bill.

“We hope the damage isn’t already done, but we fear that publicity around
this paper will minimize the advocacy of urban farmers and partners over
the past many years and possibly undermine the continued and necessary
investment in urban agricultural communities,” reads a letter sent to the
study authors by Michigan Food and Farming Systems, the Organic Farming
Research Foundation, PASA Sustainable Agriculture, and the Ohio Ecological
Food and Farm Association.

“We hope the damage isn’t already done, but we fear that publicity around
this paper will minimize the advocacy of urban farmers and partners over
the past many years…”

Their overall critiques of the study start with the sample set of “urban
farms.”

In a conversation with Civil Eats, lead author Jason Hawes, a Ph.D. student
at the University of Michigan, said this his team compiled “the largest
data set that we know of” on urban farming. It included 73 urban farms,
community gardens, and individual garden sites in Europe and the United
States. At each of those sites, the research team worked with farmers and
gardeners to collect data on the infrastructure, daily supplies used,
irrigation, harvest amounts, and social goods.

That data was then used to calculate the carbon emissions embodied in the
production of food at each site and those emissions were compared to carbon
emissions of the same foods produced at “conventional” farms. Overall, they
found greenhouse gas emissions were six times higher at the urban sites—and
that’s the conclusion the study led with.

But not only is 73 a tiny number compared to the data that exists on
conventional production agriculture, said Omanjana Gaswami, an
interdisciplinary scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), but
lumping community gardens in with urban farms set up for commercial
production and then comparing that to a rural system that has been highly
tuned and financed for commercial production for centuries doesn’t make
sense.

“It’s almost like comparing apples to oranges,” she said. “The community
garden is not set up to maximize production.”

In fact, the sample set was heavily tilted toward community and individual
gardens and away from urban farms. In New York City, for example, the only
U.S. city represented, seven community gardens run by AmeriCorps were
included. Brooklyn Grange’s massive rooftop farms—which on a few acres
produce more than 100,000 pounds of produce for markets, wholesale buyers,
CSAs, and the city’s largest convention center each year—were not.

And what the study found was that when the small group of urban farms were
disaggregated from the gardens, those farms were “statistically
indistinguishable from conventional farms” on emissions. Aside from one
high-emission outlier, the urban farms were carbon-competitive.

“They call out the fact that that tiny sample of seven urban farms that are
actually production-focused, competitive with conventional agriculture, but
that one line just got buried,” said Hannah Quigley, a policy specialist at
the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition (NSAC). This aspect was
especially frustrating to urban farming advocates because, as the groups
who sent the letter point out, one of their biggest challenges in working
with policymakers in D.C. is to get them to “regard urban farming as
farming.”

Hawes said he found the critiques around lumping community gardens and
urban farms together “reasonable” but that he stood by the method. He
hadn’t considered including backyard gardens in rural areas in the sample,
he said, even though city gardens were. “We were not necessarily attempting
to compare urban and rural food production,” he said. “In fact, we chose to
use the word conventional specifically because it pointed to the sort of
‘conventional food supply chain,’ which is often what urban agriculture
producers are attempting to intervene in.”

Not only did taking the community gardens out of the picture change the
emissions results, the researchers also found that 63 percent of carbon
emissions at all of the sites came not from daily inputs or lack of crop
efficiency but from infrastructure, such as building raised beds and
trucking in soil. But using recycled materials for infrastructure cut those
emissions so much, that if all the sites had done so, that would have been
enough for them to close the gap and be competitive with conventional
agriculture on greenhouse gas emissions.

“That problem can of course be solved by upfront funding,” said Gaswami.
“Then, bingo, according to the authors, you have systems with very
comparable climate metrics.”

Overall, Hawes said he did regret some of the ways media coverage framed
the study’s results but that he didn’t feel the framing of the study itself
was problematic. “In my opinion, the most important sustainability
challenge of our time is climate change, and if we’re gonna talk about
sustainability in the context of urban agriculture, we have to talk about
carbon emissions,” he said.

“The most important sustainability challenge of our time is climate change,
and if we’re gonna talk about sustainability in the context of urban
agriculture, we have to talk about carbon emissions.”

However, while climate scientists and sustainable agriculture advocates
agree that addressing the food system’s 22 percent contribution to global
greenhouse emissions is critical to meeting climate goals, whether carrots
are grown in gardens in Detroit and Atlanta or only on huge commercial
farms in the Salinas Valley (or both) won’t likely be a deciding factor.

At an event to kick off a new focus on food and agriculture last week,
Project Drawdown launched a new series that will focus on food system
solutions to climate change. There, Executive Director Jonathan Foley
pointed out that the vast majority of food system emissions come from a few
big sources: meat and dairy production, deforestation and other land use
change (a large portion of which is linked to animal agriculture), and food
waste.

As Gaswami at UCS noted, that broader context is essential. “The authors .
. . don’t at all zoom out to compare this to agriculture’s broader
footprint,” Gaswami said, so even if there weren’t clear climate benefits
to urban farming—which many say the study didn’t clearly
conclude—prioritizing other benefits of growing things in cities might
still make more sense. Especially given the climate resilience built into
decentralizing and diversifying the food system.

Land use is particularly interesting, Quigley at NSAC said, because city
farmers and gardeners often reclaim spaces that might otherwise be paved
over and developed, adding carbon-holding trees and plants. “Folks who are
maintaining community gardens and green spaces in cities to help with water
run-off and urban heat island effect providing safe places for community
gatherings . . . these are probably people that would be very concerned
with their climate impact,” she said. “Can you imagine if they’re gonna be
like, ‘Oh my god, should I not be gardening?’”

While NSAC did not sign on to the initial letter sent by the coalition of
groups, Quigley is working with those farm groups and the members have
since talked to Hawes. Disagreements on the study framing still abound, but
they’re now working together on policy briefs that will be available to
lawmakers if the farm bill process ever picks up again and conversations
around funding urban farms are once again on the (picnic) table.

“Ultimately, one of the motivations behind this study was the fact that
urban agriculture is largely discussed as a really useful sustainability
intervention, and this study does not take away from that conclusion,”
Hawes said. “I also think that to the degree that this starts conversations
about the availability of resources for urban agriculture and the support
that is available to urban farmers and gardeners for creating low-carbon
solutions—I’m happy with that.”

-- 
For more urban agriculture news, information and opportunities, visit AUA at http://auachicago.org/
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