Do urban farms make a difference when it comes to feeding city dwellers?

We lack the data to answer the question. But urban gardens and farms have educational and cultural value.

By Christine Burns Rudalevige
Central Maine
June 1, 2024

Excerpt:

Capital Growth is a nonprofit organization that offers in-kind support to more than 2,000 Londoners who grow their own food at home or in allotments on sites like Spitalfields City Farm. In 2013, Capital Growth launched a Harvest-O-Meter tool to quantify how much food its membership grows. That year, 189 members reported growing 18,500 kg (about 40,000 pounds) of produce worth about 288,000 British pounds sterling ($366,495).

Ten years later, Capital Growth’s membership has ballooned to 2,000, but only 10 percent of growers use the reporting tool, coordinator Rachel Dring said. That small fraction reported growing 3900 kg (about 8,600 pounds) of produce in 2023. Given the varying size of the gardens, allotments and farms, it’s difficult to extrapolate from that data the size of the total harvest, and it would be fruitless to compare the most recent harvest to the 2013 numbers.

Data on urban agriculture production in the United States is equally spotty, said Ramon Borges-Mendez, a professor of urban planning and community development at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. Borges-Mendez is involved in the Feeding New England project, which has a goal of the region producing 30% of the food it consumes.

Small-scale surveys have been done in American cities like Detroit, New York, Philadelphia and Pasadena, he said, places where urban agriculture thrives. But he knows of no study that measures how much food that urban agriculture contributes to the national system. “It’s just too small of a contribution at this point,” Borges-Mendez said. (On the positive side, plenty of room for growth.)

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