The Importance of Urban Farming
What is urban farming? Producing food closer to home is increasingly essential with climate change and concerns around carbon footprint reduction. This localization of production includes cultivating our crops, animal products, and other food types in built-up areas, including vertical farming. The practice also isn’t new. The ancient Mesopotamians grew crops in cities in 3,500 BC1. Allotments in the UK and elsewhere in Europe have been widespread since at least the late 1500s2.
Types of Urban Farming
There are four types of town and city agriculture. These include commercial, usually focused on high-efficiency techniques such as soilless and hydroponic, and space upcycling such as backyard, forest, tactical and roof gardens, green walls, and vertical growing. Initiatives include volunteer community gardens, community farms, and institutional gardens and farms. The last is initiated and maintained through schools, hospitals, prisons, and churches.
Why Cultivate Food in the Urban Environment?
Urban farming offers countless benefits. These advantages include greater per square-foot production and redevelopment of unused spaces, including inside empty structures, on rooftops, and as part of active living, working, and shopping areas.
It promotes a healthy lifestyle and the benefits of biophilia – the uplifting effect of being close to and connecting with nature. Gardens also facilitate education and learning, helping to build and sustain community ties and attracting economic growth in lower-income areas and downtown and industrial districts.
The approach is sustainable, better for the environment, helps fight food insecurity, and contributes to more affordable produce for local populations. Green roofs also help reduce the “heat island” effect in built-up areas and improve building stormwater management.
Urban Agriculture Success Stories
Inspirational examples of imaginative urban cultivation include a farming project within a shopping mall – Cleveland’s Galleria at Erieview Mall’s Gardens Under Glass. This innovative approach follows a long history of greenhouse production in the area, with Cleveland known as the “Greenhouse Capital of America. The city also has the country’s most extensive urban hydroponic greenhouse.
Another out-of-the-box city agriculture idea is Hayes Valley Farm – a San Francisco freeway on-ramp now cultivated and functioning as an education center and volunteer community space. The initiative provides training in permaculture, composting, and garden design.
Other farming-friendly cities are Denver and Seattle. Denver Urban Gardens boasts a quarter of a century of nearly 100 community planting projects. Simultaneously, Seattle has supported 73 commercial gardens for more than 37 years through its P-Patch program, serving 2056 households3. One of these efforts is the Magic Bean Farm, where seven homeowners have offered their gardens for farming. These growers employ regenerative agriculture and hand cultivation, avoiding chemical pesticides.
In Kansas, New Roots for Refugees supports women in producing and selling vegetables, “putting down new roots,” and starting farm-to-table businesses.
Help Consumers Enjoy the Fruits of Farm-to-Table Eating
Beyond being a responsible choice, locally grown and harvested ingredients are full of natural aroma, flavor, and nutrients. Relying on city-farmed produce makes a wide-ranging difference to producers and consumers. Manufacturing your products using the freshest and most sustainable seasonal fruits, vegetables, herbs, and seeds helps protect the planet’s resources, promotes healthier and more nutritional eating habits, and supports local city farmers and communities.
Using farm-to-table produce also encourages confidence in transparency, including fewer, purer ingredients, cleaner labels, and greener production and supply chain credentials. This more natural outcome appeals to the increasing demand for healthier, less contaminated options with open traceability.
When enhancing flavors and aromas in your urban farm-based creations, ensure you choose equally pure taste and odor molecules from Advanced Biotech. You can rely on our plant-based, EU-certified, and often organic ingredients as 100% natural and sustainably produced.
Advanced Biotech Helps Bring Better Taste and Health Closer to Home
Keep your farm-to-table dishes and products fresh and flavorful with our exceptional taste and aroma ingredients, including distillates, pyrazines, thiazoles, aromatics, and other responsibly sourced extracts. Contact us today to place your order.
1 https://dirt.asla.org/2012/05/09/urban-agriculture-isnt-new/
2 https://www.allotment-garden.org/allotment-information/allotment-history/
3 https://indianapublicmedia.org/eartheats/inspirational-success-stories-urban-agriculture.php