Urban agriculture | TableDebates

Image: Fort Greene Focus, Rooftop farm, Flickr, Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic

Big data suggests big potential for urban farming

Urban agriculture could provide several percent of global food production, according to the first global estimate of its potential.

Image: Valcenteu, VertiCrop System, Wikimedia Commons, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported

Indoor ag isn’t here to replace traditional farms — it’s about more than that

Indoor and vertical farming might not replace traditional farms, but they bring their own unique benefits.

Urban agriculture growth in US cities in newly launched ‘Nature Sustainability’

This feature in the newly launched journal Nature Sustainability focuses on the growth of urban agriculture in the US due to increased availability of unused land and innovative development of urban farms and community gardens.

Food and Nutrition Security in Southern African Cities

This book, edited by Bruce Frayne, Jonathan Crush and Cameron McCordic, argues that programmes aimed at reducing food poverty in Africa overemphasise small-scale farmers and ignore urban food security.

New toolkit to empower local food advocates in the United States

The Food Law and Policy Clinic at Harvard Law School, partnering with the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future, has released an update to the toolkit Good Laws, Good Food: Putting Local Food Policy to Work for Our Communities. The toolkit is intended as a guide for advocates who seek to influence food law and policy in their local communities in the US.

Photo: Linda N., New crops, Flickr, CC by 2.0

Considerations for reducing food system energy demand while scaling up urban agriculture

Targetting the food-energy-water nexus, this review by FCRN members Eugene Mohareb and Martin Heller and colleagues summarises the energy implications of various types of urban agriculture. The goal of their research is to identify resource efficiency opportunities while increasing urban food production.

Photo: -JvL-, Westland greenhouse, Flickr, CC 2.0

Photo and video report in National Geographic on high-tech farming and innovation in the Netherlands

This journalistic photo and video reportage on the National Geographic website shows some of the most high-tech farming methods in the world, based in the Netherlands.

Photo: Fooding around, Fruit Walla New Delhi, Flickr, Creative Commons License 2.0 generic.

The contribution of city-scale actions to the overall food system’s environmental impacts

This paper by FCRN member Dana Boyer examines how policy interventions at the city scale can affect three environmental outcomes of food production: greenhouse gas emissions, water use and land use. It uses India’s capital city Delhi as a case study. It sets out to assess the magnitude of city-scale food system actions as compared to certain actions which can be taken beyond the city boundary.

Special issue of ‘Future of Food: Journal on Food, Agriculture and Society’

The research papers presented in this issue on urban food policies provide a selection of the articles that were presented at the 7th Aesop Sustainable Food Planning Conference in 2015.