The urban farming challenge — why New York can’t be all that green

March 1, 2010 · Posted by in food 

There are plenty of reasons why I love urban culture. For one, I can close my eyes and do the same thing that urban planners do — imagine a really wonderfully efficient world in which I live, work and play within about a two- or three-mile radius. In fact, this is mostly accurate in my own life right now, but I’m guilty of things (like occasional travel by air) that negate the heck out of that.

There’s also the idea of urban farming. I love green roofs. I love the perseverance of people doing things like cultivating potatoes on their porches or bees in Brooklyn. I love it.

But I have a hard time when someone goes out of their way to write a whole book and make the claim that the greenest place you can live is a city like New York.

Like, say, David Owen. Here’s a quick excerpt from a Washington Post review of his book, Green Metropolis:

A former resident of Manhattan who has lived for many years in a rather remote Connecticut town, Owen finds in New York City, Manhattan in particular, a model that the rest of the country could profitably emulate. A city of “extreme compactness,” New York “is the greenest community in the United States.” The “average Manhattanite consumes gasoline at a rate that the country as a whole hasn’t matched since the mid-1920s,” and “eighty-two percent of employed Manhattan residents travel to work by public transit, by bicycle, or on foot,” which is “ten times the rate for Americans in general, and eight times the rate for workers in Los Angeles County.” It all derives from being a very crowded place.

Cute. But here’s just one of the many flaws in such an argument: Manhattan could never grow its own food. It would need 150 times the land space of Manhattan. Via GOOD and WorldChanging:

YouTube Preview Image

In fact, Boulder couldn’t even grow all of its own food if it tried. Nope. Turns out we need the ol’ breadbasket of America.

I’m all about compactness and bikes and public transportation. I love that. And, for the record, I loved living in New York. I’m just saying that waving a magic wand and turning the country into a bunch of Manhattans (to borrow a phrase from the review) would actually be a terrible idea.

(I know I’m late to the party on this one — other folks have addressed the book plenty of times. The video just made me think back to it.)

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One Response to “The urban farming challenge — why New York can’t be all that green”

  1. Stacey Murphy (BK Farmyards) on March 12th, 2010 2:33 pm

    Hi Dave,
    As a big proponent of decentralized urban farming, I wanted to offer some counterpoints. While I agree, NYC cannot feed itself, we can go a LONG way.

    First, that graphic study assumes a couple of very unsuitable ideas: 1. that we would grow grain for animals in the city (why we grow grain for animals at all is a complete mystery to me…doing it in the city is beyond ridiculous) 2. that we would grow our cereal grains in the city. not a great idea…definitely need some growing outside the city. 3. It is really, really expensive to talk vertical tower growing…not at all a very sustainable idea.

    However, here’s the good news:
    There are 10,000 unused acres in NYC. If we grew on half of this land, we could produce fresh vegetables for 700,000 people.
    There are 52,000 acres of private yards in NYC. If only 10% of those were farmed, we could produce fresh vegetables for 700,000 people.
    We just fed a quarter of the population of NYC their fresh produce…I would say that is a pretty good start.

    There are plenty of websites out there that talk about food as a distribution problem not a production problem. I think you agree that you would like your food grown as close as possible…the question is always what kind of growing makes the most sense for urban areas.

    Check out what we do:
    http://www.bkfarmyards.com
    Stacey