Developing a tool to evaluate the sustainability of intra-urban farms

Thème 5 : Sustainable agrifood systems, value chains and power structuresAn increasing urbanisation is now followed by a developing growth of urban agriculture supported by political frameworks in France. Urban agriculture projects have an exponential development with very diversified technical and business models from low to high tech, purely productive to multifunctional. This type of agriculture aims at sensitizing citizens to agriculture, link city-dwellers to the countryside and claims to participate to the sustainable development of cities. However, the current models established to evaluate farm sustainability are not adapted to the intra-urban context. Our goal is to build a tool to evaluate the sustainability of intra-urban farms, with two purposes: 1/ to provide a tool for project leaders allowing them to assess the strengths and weaknesses of their project; 2/ to produce a tool destined to enable surface providers to compare answers to their call for projects. A participatory approach was chosen to build this tool. A first panel meeting determined the objectives of this tool and a list of criteria for the agro-environmental, socio-territorial and economic dimensions. These objectives and criteria were then submitted to the approval of urban farmers and surface provider via an online survey. In parallel, an adaptation of existing environmental indicators is under way as well as a search for adapted sociological and economic indicators. Some indicators have been identified in the literature and shall be submitted to a large panel of urban farmers and surface provider to evaluate their pertinence and feasibility

Evaluating the sustainability of urban agriculture projects

Evaluating the sustainability of urban agriculture projects. 5. International Symposium for Farming Systems Design (AGRO2015

Science et vin : entre mondialisation et terroir. Journée de terrain du 02/04/ 2015 : Cheverny et Cour-Cheverny (Loir et Cher).

Le vignoble des appellations d'origine contrôlée « Cour-Cheverny » et « Cheverny » sont situés dans la région viticole de la vallée de la Loire. Située en rive gauche de la Loire. Ils s’étendent entre les bords du fleuve au nord, et les communes de Cheverny et Cour-Cheverny au sud. Ailleurs ils sont limités par les grandes forêts : la forêt domaniale de Russy au nord-ouest et par les forêts de Sologne l'est et au sud (en particulier les boisements continus du parc de Chambord et de la forêt de Cheverny). La forêt est très importante au sein de la zone géographique, et lorsqu'il n'est pas à proximité de la Loire, le vignoble est au coeur de clairières, entre les nombreux massifs boisés de plus ou moins grande taille

"We have been part of the response": The Effects of COVID-19 on Community and Allotment Gardens in the Global North

© 2021 Schoen, Blythe, Caputo, Fox-Kämper, Specht, Fargue-Lelièvre, Cohen, Ponizy and Fedenczak. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Throughout history, urban agriculture practitioners have adapted to various challenges by continuing to provide food and social benefits. Urban gardens and farms have also responded to sudden political, economic, ecological, and social crises: wartime food shortages; urban disinvestment and property abandonment; earthquakes and floods; climate-change induced weather events; and global economic disruptions. This paper examines the effects on, and responses by, urban farms and gardens to the COVID-19 pandemic. The paper is based on data collected in the summer of 2020 at the onset of the pandemic when cities were struggling with appropriate responses to curb its spread. It builds on an international research project (FEW-meter) that developed a methodology to measure material and social benefits of urban agriculture (UA) in five countries (France, Germany, Poland, UK and USA) over two growing seasons, from a Food-Energy-Water nexus perspective. We surveyed project partners to ascertain the effects of COVID-19 on those gardens and farms and we interviewed policy stakeholders in each country to investigate the wider impacts of the pandemic on UA. We report the results with respect to five key areas: (1) garden accessibility and service provision during the pandemic; (2) adjustments to operational arrangements; (3) effects on production; (4) support for urban farms and gardens through the pandemic; and (5) thoughts about the future of urban agriculture in the recovery period and beyond. The paper shows that the pandemic resulted in multiple challenges to gardens and farms including the loss of ability to provide support services, lost income, and reductions in output because of reduced labor supply. But COVID-19 also created several opportunities: new markets to sell food locally; more time available to gardeners to work in their allotments; and increased community cohesion as neighboring gardeners looked out for one another. By illustrating the range of challenges faced by the pandemic, and strategies to address challenges used by different farms and gardens, the paper illustrates how gardens in this pandemic have adapted to become more resilient and suggests lessons for pandemic recovery and longer-term planning to enable UA to respond to future public health and other crises.Peer reviewe

The Socio-Cultural Benefits of Urban Agriculture: A Review of the Literature

© 2022 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).Despite extensive literature on the socio-cultural services of urban open spaces, the role of food-producing spaces has not received sufficient attention. This hampers advocacy for preserving and growing urban agricultural activities, often dismissed on justifications that their contributions to overall food supply are negligible. To understand how the social benefits of urban agriculture have been measured, we conducted a systematic review of 272 peer-reviewed publications, which drew on insights from urban agriculture sites in 57 different countries. Through content analysis, we investigated socio-cultural benefits in four spheres: engaged and cohesive communities, health and well-being, economic opportunities, and education. The analysis revealed growth in research on the social impacts of gardens and farms, with most studies measuring the effects on community cohesion and engagement, followed by increased availability and consumption of fruits and vegetables associated with reduced food insecurity and better health. Fewer studies assessed the impact of urban farming on educational and economic outcomes. Quantifying the multiple ways in which urban agriculture provides benefits to people will empower planners and the private sector to justify future investments. These findings are also informative for research theorizing cities as socio-ecological systems and broader efforts to measure the benefits of urban agriculture, in its many forms.Peer reviewedFinal Published versio

Comparing the carbon footprints of urban and conventional agriculture

Urban agriculture (UA) is a widely proposed strategy to make cities and urban food systems more sustainable. Until now, we have lacked a comprehensive assessment of the environmental performance of UA relative to conventional agriculture, and results from earlier studies have been mixed. This is the first large-scale study to resolve this uncertainty across cities and types of UA, employing citizen science at 73 UA sites in Europe and the United States to compare UA products to food from conventional farms. Results reveal that the carbon footprint of food from UA is six times greater than conventional agriculture (420 gCO2e versus 70 gCO2e per serving). However, some UA crops (for example, tomatoes) and sites (for example, 25% of individually managed gardens) outperform conventional agriculture. These exceptions suggest that UA practitioners can reduce their climate impacts by cultivating crops that are typically greenhouse-grown or air-freighted, maintaining UA sites for many years, and leveraging circularity (waste as inputs)

Food production and resource use of urban farms and gardens: a five-country study

There is a lack of data on resources used and food produced at urban farms. This hampers attempts to quantify the environmental impacts of urban agriculture or craft policies for sustainable food production in cities. To address this gap, we used a citizen science approach to collect data from 72 urban agriculture sites, representing three types of spaces (urban farms, collective gardens, individual gardens), in five countries (France, Germany, Poland, United Kingdom, and United States). We answered three key questions about urban agriculture with this unprecedented dataset: (1) What are its land, water, nutrient, and energy demands? (2) How productive is it relative to conventional agriculture and across types of farms? and (3) What are its contributions to local biodiversity? We found that participant farms used dozens of inputs, most of which were organic (e.g., manure for fertilizers). Farms required on average 71.6 L of irrigation water, 5.5 L of compost, and 0.53 m2 of land per kilogram of harvested food. Irrigation was lower in individual gardens and higher in sites using drip irrigation. While extremely variable, yields at well-managed urban farms can exceed those of conventional counterparts. Although farm type did not predict yield, our cluster analysis demonstrated that individually managed leisure gardens had lower yields than other farms and gardens. Farms in our sample contributed significantly to local biodiversity, with an average of 20 different crops per farm not including ornamental plants. Aside from clarifying important trends in resource use at urban farms using a robust and open dataset, this study also raises numerous questions about how crop selection and growing practices influence the environmental impacts of growing food in cities. We conclude with a research agenda to tackle these and other pressing questions on resource use at urban farms

Formalizing Objectives and Criteria for Urban Agriculture Sustainability with a Participatory Approach

The last few years have seen an exponential development of urban agriculture projects within global North countries, especially professional intra-urban farms which are professional forms of agriculture located within densely settled areas of city. Such projects aim to cope with the challenge of sustainable urban development and today the sustainability of the projects is questioned. To date, no set of criteria has been designed to specifically assess the environmental, social and economic sustainability of these farms at the farm scale. Our study aims to identify sustainability objectives and criteria applicable to professional intra-urban farms. It relies on a participatory approach involving various stakeholders of the French urban agriculture sector comprising an initial focus group, online surveys and interviews. We obtained a set of six objectives related to environmental impacts, link to the city, economic and ethical meaning, food and environmental education, consumer/producer connection and socio-territorial services. In addition, 21 criteria split between agro-environmental, socio-territorial and economic dimensions were identified to reach these objectives. Overall, agro-environmental and socio-territorial criteria were assessed as more important than economic criteria, whereas food production was not mentioned. Differences were identified between urban farmers and decision makers, highlighting that decision makers were more focused on projects’ external sustainability. They also pay attention to the urban farmer agricultural background, suggesting that they rely on urban farmers to ensure the internal sustainability of the farm. Based on our results, indicators could be designed to measure the sustainability criteria identified, and to allow the sustainability assessment of intra-urban farms

Developing a tool to evaluate the sustainability of intra-urban farms

An increasing urbanisation is now followed by a developing growth of urban agriculture supported by political frameworks in France. Urban agriculture projects have an exponential development with very diversified technical and business models from low to high tech, purely productive to multifunctional. This type of agriculture aims at sensitizing citizens to agriculture, link city-dwellers to the countryside and claims to participate to the sustainable development of cities. However, the current models established to evaluate farm sustainability are not adapted to the intra-urban context. Our goal is to build a tool to evaluate the sustainability of intra-urban farms, with two purposes: 1/ to provide a tool for project leaders allowing them to assess the strengths and weaknesses of their project; 2/ to produce a tool destined to enable surface providers to compare answers to their call for projects. A participatory approach was chosen to build this tool. A first panel meeting determined the objectives of this tool and a list of criteria for the agro-environmental, socio-territorial and economic dimensions. These objectives and criteria were then submitted to the approval of urban farmers and surface provider via an online survey. In parallel, an adaptation of existing environmental indicators is under way as well as a search for adapted sociological and economic indicators. Some indicators have been identified in the literature and shall be submitted to a large panel of urban farmers and surface provider to evaluate their pertinence and feasibility