Urban farms and food forests can provide communities with bountiful food, carbon storage, and local cooling while boosting equity and sustainability—but they face competition for land from real estate projects that generate more immediate financial returns.
A recent study by the Stanford University-based Natural Capital Project modelled the impacts of converting all underused, publicly-owned land in San Antonio, Texas, to either urban farms or food forests, reports Smart Cities Dive.
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Conversion to food forests—areas heavily seeded with perennial crops like fruit and nut trees—would prove [pdf] especially beneficial, providing more than 192 million pounds of food worth US$995 million annually, enough to feed nearly 314,000 households. And the cooling benefits of all that shady greenery would be considerable, delivering savings of US$3.5 million per year for cooling. Other benefits include flood control and carbon storage in perennial biomass.
Converting land to urban farms would provide more than 926 million pounds annually, enough food to feed 1.27 million households—a bounty worth $1.17 billion. The report authors did caution, however, that this level of productivity would “likely increase nutrient pollution in adjacent areas.”
San Antonio has already begun to reap the benefits of urban agriculture, with some 51 acres/20 hectares of urban farms and large community gardens established, plus about 72 acres/29 hectares of food forests. And the city plans to do more, with several “comprehensive plans” produced by city council to codify this goal.
One significant obstacle to urban agriculture is that it remains less lucrative than business-as-usual uses for city land.
“While there’s a huge, really impressive return on investment for the agricultural products themselves, potentially those are not as much as apartment complexes or strip malls or other faster-return investments,” said report co-author Mitchell Hagney, chair of the Food Policy Council of San Antonio’s Urban Agriculture Committee and CEO of urban agriculture company LocalSprout.
Alert to this reality, San Antonio is working on siting urban agriculture in flood plains that are less likely to be appealing to real estate developers.
But the monetary value of urban agriculture should not be the only factor driving land use decisions, said report co-author Anne Guerry, chief strategy officer and lead scientist at the Natural Capital Project. Planning decisions need community input on what residents want their city to look like.
“What makes this a livable place? What expresses the character of this place?” Guerry asked. “With nature-based solutions, it’s critically important to think about what makes sense ecologically and culturally in ways that we haven’t… with those more engineered solutions.”
Scarcity of skilled labour is another challenge. Hagney said San Antonio lacks the work force needed to cultivate even a quarter of the acreage modelled in the report.
