Food and climate change

[jacob]

We're within walking distance of the Chicago subway system. Bus stop, bank, dentist, doctor, pharmacy, funeral home, barber shop, baker, lawyer, plumber, two supermarkets, ... all just a block away. Chicken are not allowed, but some keep them anyway.

All lots here are 25x125' (about 1/12th of an acre)(*). We converted ~40% of the backyard into vegetable production at this point. Starting from a clay-rich and nitrogen-deficient soil that had otherwise been growing lawns for 50 years, we managed to grow 340 pounds of vegetables in 2020. That comes to about 33000 kcal.

(*) There are a few double lots (maybe the adjacent house burned down). Otherwise, you have to move further out and give up walking access to what's mentioned in the first paragraph.

That number of calories feeds one adult for two weeks! We have only been gardening for 6 years at this point and the strategy has not been to produce calories but rather "expensive vegetables". It was nice to have the garden as a supplement during the COVID hoarding.

We have not bought vegetables (beyond potatoes and onions which we didn't grow this year but will next year) since spring. The freezer is full to the brim.

[Alphaville]

I don't think anyone is really talking about growing ALL of their food in their backyard.

no, but the idea that a postage stamp size backyard is bad or that one needs a bigger one might not necessarily be true is what i’m trying to say.

maybe a postage stamp size is all that one needs? with some nice city parks and tree-lined avenues and community gardens, cities can be garden-like. depends on the city ofc.

my experience with suburban backyards is that they tend to become lawns (heavily sprayed ones to boot), often enforced by hoas. lawnmowers spewing fumes all weekend. cars cars cars for everything—even the shape of cul de sac forces a long labyrinthine path home.

rob was re-farming a subtropical sprawl (orlando is sprawl yeah?). but sprawl has been destroying farmland since the postwar. paving farmland for the automobile was the mistake of the last century (together with the atom bomb).

refarming the suburbs would be a nice thing (just saw @jacob’s post when i tried to post this). urban infill is kinder to nature than more sprawl.

[chenda]

funeral home

You're really planning ahead there Jacob

In Warsaw I recall not far from the city centre it was not uncommon for householders to have lots of informal allotments and small scale agricultural. The landscape is pleasingly messy and informal. This was/is quite common in less prosperous parts of southern and eastern Europe, where small scale domestic agriculture was the norm and didn't disappear in the 20th century...

[Hristo Botev]

I just want to draw an important distinction between the streetcar suburb (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetcar_suburb), like where I live and likely like the one where Jacob lives, and automobile suburbs.

Re Orlando, I used to live there, and though it wasn't my favorite place (too hot for me, for starters), my experience (at least with the part that I lived in), is that it actually wouldn't be the worst place to try and live a car-free life living in an affordable home on a small plot of land. Although it's very car-centric (with multi-lane roads crossing in every direction), it is flat, and I was able to get around there on bike pretty easily. Also, most of the "sprawl" suburbs are much (much) further out, with the homes that are closer to downtown (including quite a few lovely in-town type neighborhoods) set up very much like a streetcar suburb layout, with lots and lots of small 2 and 3-br homes packed closely together on plots less than a 1/4 of an acre. And it's got a 12-month growing season.

You could get a 3-br home on .25 acres there that is walking or biking distances from pretty much everything you need (with public buses providing the rest) for a fraction of what you'd spend in other metro areas. And you could grow veggies and fruit all year round. Also, because of the elderly population, the public library DELIVERS (and picks up) books and DVDs to your house for free!!!

Regarding the automobile, you don't have to convince me that it belongs right up there with the atom bomb in terms of 20th century mistakes.

[7Wannabe5]

You can grow enough food for one human on around 1/5 acre closed loop intensively managed.This equals average of 1 lb production per square ft of bed X 3 to account for paths/other facilities and cover crops to provide green manure x 2 to account for growing high protein or fat content crops. Based on average human consuming approximately 3 lbs wet weight food/day.

Since there is still approximately 2 arable acres and at least 1cruddy acre/human, this model is expandable to include space for managed woodlot, shelter, solar panels, community grain mill and/or solar panel manufacture, etc.

[Alphaville]

I just want to draw an important distinction between the streetcar suburb (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetcar_suburb), like where I live and likely like the one where Jacob lives, and automobile suburbs.

hah, i didn’t know about these places. i thought they were just old towns that got swallowed by expanding city limits.

i used to live in northern virginia, which to me is the mother of all horrors. there was some remblance of sanity around the old town cores, but most of it was hell:



i moved into dc as soon as i could. dc used to be a little bit of a sleepy town with ordinances keeping housing below a certain height. lots of row houses, lots of little backyards, lots of interesting back alleys, plenty parks and public spaces, very walkable/bikable, metro and buses, nature trails in the middle of the city, lots of great free museums and galleries and a fine zoo, the potomac river with canoes and boathouses and more trails, a lively music scene featuring everything from go-go to punk to jazz to opera, a large international contingent from salvadorean refugees to diplomatic armies, a large black middle class, remanents of old villages and towns (and streetcar suburbs, i now realize) as neighborhoods with their own identity... it was a little paradise, even the “dangerous neighborhoods” were thrilling to me. maybe i’m romanticizing the past, but i loved that place, and the apartment buildings were good and decent.

we’d take a greyhound or the amtrak up to new york city for more interesting experiences that the economics of greater urban density allowed, but dc was a fine town to live in, and it was cheap. maybe a little too buttoned up because its main industry is the production of paperwork, but there was room for a little bit of everything back then.

ok probably there still is and it was a mistake for me to leave haahahaaaa. anyway—life goes forward, dante alighieri.

[ertyu]

In Warsaw I recall not far from the city centre it was not uncommon for householders to have lots of informal allotments and small scale agricultural. The landscape is pleasingly messy and informal. This was/is quite common in less prosperous parts of southern and eastern Europe, where small scale domestic agriculture was the norm and didn't disappear in the 20th century...

These "allotments" were indeed common across the former socialist world. They were distributed to families to lessen the burden on the state and provide them with opportunity for subsistence agriculture. Many who were given these plots were first generation city dwellers. Having been born and raised in villages, they had basic subsistence farming skills and valued having their own land. My grandparents worked such an allotment (1/5 decar, unsure what this would be in other units). This is what I assume 2B1S was referring to when he said he and his girlfriend biked to "the orchard" - it was most likely one of these allotments.

Depending on location, these allotments may range between fully off-grid plots to electricity only, electricity + water from the river to water your crops, or fully supplied with electricity, drinking water, and water for the crops (these, of course, tend to be priciest). 1/2 decar was considered sufficient for a family. During the worst years of the transition to market economy, when people didn't get paid for months and months and inflation was through the roof, these allotments were why people could eat. Usually, a bus would take you to the area and you would walk to your allotment (or drive, if you are fancy). My grandparents worked their allotment as long as they were able. My uncle would drive them on the weekend, but after my grandparents retired, they would go to the allotment daily. The city bus was cheap, now it's less so, and now that there's food at the store, it could often be more resource intensive to grow your food at an allotment compared to just shopping. Thus in recent years, many of these allotments have been abandoned, especially those further away or fully/partially off-grid. I briefly considered purchasing such an allotment, but quickly realized I lack the skills and motivation needed to work and maintain one. Time will tell if I made a mistake. But people can and do indeed live in some of those, in small structures either fully or partially off-grid. Unsure how safe it is, however - again depends on location.

This same deal could likely be had close to any mid-size eastern european city. Next to the capital, these have already been absorbed into the city limits as urbanization has progressed.

[Hristo Botev]

Ha! Wouldn't you know @Alphaville, I ALSO used to live in DC--first an apt in Adams Morgan (I could hear the lions from the zoo from my window) and then a row house in Eastern Market I shared with a roommate. And I LOVED living in both neighborhoods. At the time I was working in NOVA (in Crystal City), and man, the difference between Crystal City (with its underground retail, somewhat similar to Atlanta's decrepit Underground) and the neighborhood-centric Adams Morgan and E. Mkt. were night and day. Of course, Crystal City had the added benefit of being built around the metro; so it definitely had that going for it. But yes, as soon as you started going further outside DC, with its car-centric development: no thanks.

I was certainly spoiled that my first post-college living arrangements were all walkable--from the Balkans when I was in the Peace Corps to several years in DC neighborhoods. It was those experiences that taught me walkable towns are preferable to non-walkable towns, well before I discovered ERE.

[Hristo Botev]

If you want to see something truly depressing, as it concerns the automobile eviscerating otherwise robust walkable neighborhoods, see what the downtown connector did to Atlanta: https://tigerprints.clemson.edu/cgi/vie ... all_theses. If you're going to want to ensure that your quaint, pre-automobile, walkable in-town neighborhood survives the automobile, it probably helps to be both rich and white.

[Loner]

Are cities really more (energy) efficient? With all the cement and asphalt, they warm up considerably in the summer, so much so that you need to AC the hell of out apartment buildings unless you enjoy cooking in your juices at 40c (100f). In the country side, you can get by the whole summer without even as much as turning on a switch if you want.

As for transports, getting around a lot by car is not a fatality. About 30 years ago, here, there was a good network of public busses going around the countryside towns. (It still is the case in many « third world » countries.) It got defunded. On top of that, one doesn’t *need* to go out regularly (to bars, dentists, doctors, barber shops, pharmacies, and wherever else urban folks apparently enjoy spending a lot of time). Countryside living doesn’t have to be energy intensive.

We hear often that urbanisation is the way of the future but I just can’t see that. Sounds like another ploy to increase "progress". Many people enjoy cities, for sure, but for many of us, the quality of life in cities is just too abysmal. I’ve been living in a suburb/city for years now, after growing up in the country side, and I can’t wait to move back into the sticks. The people, the noise, the ever bright lights, the cars, the token trees to make us forget the absence of nature, it’s just too much.

Small scale gardening of high-value items combined with buying staples (rice, beans, etc.) sounds like workable, low energy-intensive choice that could be part of the solution.

[tonyedgecombe]

Like for like cities are more efficient. However the reality is 50% of the worlds population live in cities but they consume 70% of the worlds resources. The reason is people in cities tend to be wealthier and so consume more.

[ertyu]

Small scale gardening of high-value items combined with buying staples (rice, beans, etc.) sounds like workable, low energy-intensive choice that could be part of the solution.

Other than herbs, what would be other examples of such high-value items? I'm immediately thinking mushrooms. Anything else that's better to grow than purchase? The question becomes v interesting to me when applied to urban gardening because I have a large west-facing balcony but at the same time, space is still at a premium.

[sky]

Back when I was teaching an urban planning course on cities and sustainability, we theorized a small ecovillage concept that would replace the municipal services that are currently required to keep a city habitable. With a goal of sustainability, our design would reduce inputs into the system and look for ways to reuse waste by treating waste as a resource. One of the key components for creating a sustainable ecovillage without modern city services is dealing with human waste. Managing the waste of humans has been a problem for all cities from the Sumerian civilization until today. Currently, municipal practice is to use bacteria in aerated ponds to treat large volumes of waste, some from humans, but mixed with various chemical runoff such as soaps or solvents as are dumped into the sewage system. The resulting partly treated slurry is drained into rivers, where it creates a large nutrient load and damages the natural ecosystem.

In order to solve the urban ecovillage design challenge, we had to come up with a way to manage human waste while treating it as a resource. Composting is one solution, but it takes time and space, due to the need to eliminate pathogens and parasites, which are a real threat. We came up with the following system: Start with marine macerator toilets, which would create a waste slurry. The slurry is pumped into a heat treatment tank: a black pipe with a solar convex mirror system and controls to monitor sanitizing heat levels before opening a valve to the next system component. The heat treatment would essentially pasteurize the waste to kill parasites and pathogens. Once an appropriate heat and time treatment goal was reached, the controls would dump the waste into a biogas generator tank, which based on our research should provide enough biogas for the residents to cook food with. The resulting liquid overflow from the biogas generator is a highly effective, safe liquid fertilizer which can be applied to local food gardens. Mixed with water, it can be used as regular irrigation to create highly productive food gardens. The reason we considered such a complicated system was in part to preserve public health, but also to develop a system that would be able to receive regulatory approval for new development in the real world.

This type of system is important because it closes the loop of one of the waste streams caused by urban human habitation, and uses the waste as a resource to eliminate the need to bring in compost and fertilizer for gardening. The inputs needed to grow food are sunlight, rainwater and land area, with human expertise to manage the agriculture to reduce losses to pests and climate issues. The system would likely work best on small scale ecovillages, but could be replicated over larger areas to create an urban area out of many independent ecovillages. We estimated that the ecovillage system would work at current suburban population density levels, and perhaps with optimization, could approach much higher population density levels.

[sky]

Other than herbs, what would be other examples of such high-value items? I'm immediately thinking mushrooms. Anything else that's better to grow than purchase? The question becomes v interesting to me when applied to urban gardening because I have a large west-facing balcony but at the same time, space is still at a premium.

Microgreens are a good choice. In particular, broccoli microgreens are easy to grow and have extremely high nutrient levels. You can eat them as part of smoothies, as a "lettuce" on sandwiches or in salads, or as an addition to cooked foods.

[chenda]

Cities exist for good reasons, we need to make them work optimally rather than regarding them as problems, as sometimes happens. Though it may be we see a shift towards small to medium size cities in post-industrial economies, which may bring most of the benefits of urban living and fewer of the costs.

[Loner]

@Ertyu - I know next to nothing about gardening, but I was thinking $ value/acre: tomatoes, herbs, microgreens, etc.

Wrt making cities work, yes, for some people that may be possible. I'm doing myself by trying (unsuccessfully) to get my city to become more bike-friendly. And I certainly don’t imagine all of humanity living in a dispersed countryside. For sure many people would not enjoy such an arrangement. OTOH I can’t imagine that all of humanity can be happy living in Asian-style megalopolis and visiting some Disneyworldized nature once in a year, which is, if we are to believe futurists and other media commentators, what is coming and what we should aspire to. Makes me shudder.

[Hristo Botev]

Honestly, for the reasons @Loner mentions, in my perfect world of rainbows and lollipop trees, I'd have a small "town" home in the city, AND a country farm (perhaps shared with others) about 2 hours away, which provides all of our food and perhaps turns a profit or at least breaks mostly even. Think John Adams and his Peacefield farm. It's a bit aristocratic of me, I know (living in the city during the "social season," and to see to my professional affairs!), and I don't know how sustainable it would be; but it's certainly appealing.

[UK-with-kids]

A small plot of land next to somebody's home can produce a lot more than the equivalent area on an industrial farm. For example, a climbing bean plant will crop for several months if the beans are picked every day, whereas beans grown on a farm will only be harvested once. It's an error to assume that farms will always produce more per acre than urban gardens just because they are a commercial enterprise - the priority is to maximise profit rather than food production. Once you take carbon emissions into account the small scale garden is the clear winner.

Crops grown in suburban gardens will also benefit from other factors such as the additional heat and shelter of city areas, better watering, and more pollinators as there are urban beehives and ponds as well as lower pesticide use. Vertical gardening and a green roof are further possibilities. The main problems are tiny gardens and the lack of direct sunlight in overcrowded suburbs - I don't think people who live in the US or even most of Europe can always appreciate just how small the housing plots are in the UK.

British allotments are traditionally one eighth of an acre, which is meant to be enough land to feed a family of four, although I imagine this means only in fruits and vegetables with the assumption that chicken and pork would supplement this. There are still laws requiring local government to provide "adequate provision" of allotments and they are still being created on new housing estates. In the past these would have been a way for the poor to afford to eat well, but after going out of fashion for a while it seems many plots are now taken up by wealthier professional people with an interest in sustainable living. They tend to get divided into smaller plots these days as it's a lot of work - I had to give mine up once I had a family as I just couldn't fit everything into my week, although that's partly a reflection of changing lifestyles I guess.

[Hristo Botev]

I don't think people who live in the US or even most of Europe can always appreciate just how small the housing plots are in the UK.

No doubt. But Kingsnorth got his acre in rural Ireland, no?

[jacob]

Paul Kingsnorth lives close to Mark Boyle who is probably a better example of someone who lives almost completely independent of the [food] economy.