Going Bananas Over Urban Agriculture
This essay was submitted by James Schwinn.
The recent debate at city council over the merits and demerits of a municipal food policy raises some interesting questions, particularly as concerns about our municipal fiscal condition come centre stage.
I don’t want to focus too much on the policy side of the debate. Rather, I want to share a few thoughts about the economic sensibility of urban agriculture.
First, consider the economic productivity of lawn grass. Those of us who have it don’t derive a positive monetary return from it. It’s a cost, pure and simple. Now, pick a crop. Beans. Lettuce. Lentils. Strawberries. Crops have revenue as well as cost reduction potential. You can sell the lentils you grow, or you can consume them and reduce your expenditures at the grocery store.
In addition, urban agriculture contributes to reductions in transport costs and carbon emissions throughout the food production and delivery supply chain. Sounds good so far, but it gets even better because there is a potential fiscal benefit for the municipality.
Through the introduction of agriculture, the total economic value of land increases. In most places, increased land value means a higher assessed value for property tax purposes. Did someone say, “taxes”? (That can’t be good.) Here’s the good part…
As with the addition of a swimming pool, a garage or a set of rooms, it is the property owner – not the municipality – who decides if it makes sense to take action to increase the economic value of the property and risk a higher assessed value. Nothing new.
Might the introduction of agriculture on an intensive scale make economic sense under certain circumstances?
While the capital costs of intensive greenhouse agriculture vary, annualized returns of 10% or more are not uncommon. One can argue, on the basis of these numbers, that the introduction of intensive agriculture into the land use mix of residential property developments – as a substitute for select, under-utilized green space areas or as a substitute for building additional housing units in cases where demand shows signs of flagging – would add or recapture economic value to the project, reduce municipal cost recovery risk and accelerate the return of capital to investors.
The introduction of intensive agriculture into new community development is not a financially far-fetched idea. The necessary capital costs could be organized using variations of well-established private sector investment structures that have been applied to the finance of district energy and wastewater management utilities by companies like the Corix Group.
If you still have doubts about the merits and practicalities of urban and near urban agriculture, I would invite you to fly into Schiphol Airport on the outskirts of Amsterdam between dusk and dawn to see what lights up the ground below on your approach. What you will see are kilometers of greenhouses located in the heart of one of Europe’s most densely populated regions.
With only 1.6% of the cultivated land surface of Europe, the Netherlands accounts for about 8% of the total European agricultural production. This statistic on its own suggests it is sensible economic strategy to increase agricultural intensification in and near major urban population centres as land and energy costs increase.
The first energy-producing greenhouses were delivered in the Netherlands in 2006. Greenhouse-Village is a new design concept for greenhouse-powered neighborhoods with decentralized water and wastewater facilities. Two-hectare greenhouses that use this design concept can heat and provide facilities for 200 houses with cost effectiveness achieved at this scale.
Which takes me to the recent quip made by Alderman Connelly at council, “There’s a good reason they don’t grow bananas in Airdrie.” If there is, I would like to know what it is because it seems to me that urban agriculture makes economic sense no matter how you peel it.
This writer notes that the latitude of Airdrie is 51 degrees 16 minutes north, and the latitude of Amsterdam is 52 degrees 20 minutes north.
CivicCamp note: An action group on Land-Food Connection is meeting this week to discuss the value of urban agriculture and other land-food related issues. For more information, email us at civiccamp at gmail dot com.
Socially it
* Helps bring families and communities together by working toward a common goal that will be beneficial for all
* Gives direct links to food production
* Creates better living environment by greening up the city and making it more productive
* Makes people stronger by putting their food security into their own hands, making them more independent and empowered
* Teaches people life skills such as how to be more self sufficient
* Creates jobs, income, and food
* Helps combat hunger
* Educate people, who have been increasingly removed from food production, to participate in, and respect, its generation (Hamm 1999)
Environmentally it
* Greens up the city
* Can help to clean air and rain water
* Helps to stop erosion and topsoil removal
* increases the amount of food grown and bought locally, decreasing carbon footprint
* Facilitates reuse of wastes for food production
* Has direct impacts on urban ecology
Economically it
* Creates jobs and income from otherwise completely unproductive space
* Can be beneficial to people of any income
* Creates a better local economy that does not rely on food from far away
* Makes use of valuable resources, such as compost, that would otherwise go to waste in a city
first of all their climate. the netherlands (in europe) are located near the moderating sea. this prevents early killing frosts, dry periods & hailstorms which farmers and gardeners encounter here in s. alberta.
secondly their culture. vegetable gardening is encouraged there, where we spend leisure time in less practical activities sports watching & playing , media watching & playing.
thirdly the economy. europeans spend 40% of their earnings on food (albeit better quality) we spend 20 % .are we prepared to spend more ?
Albert, the expenditures on food are worse than you think in Calgary, http://www40.statcan.gc.ca/l01/cst01/famil10f-eng.htm We are only spending just over 8% of our income on food and a whopping 14% on transportation (2007).
Ironically, because I garden and get a lot of food for practically free, I spent more on transportation this summer than I did on groceries. I don’t think that is happening with the average household though.
I would rather ride my bike to a local shop to buy imports that I can’t grown such as chocolate, coffee and olive oil.
While latitude comparisons give some indication of potential to grow plants, it is true that Netherlands is greatly moderated by the ocean, and has a much longer growing season with trees blooming there while ours here in Alberta have not yet begun to leaf out. However, living north of 55 lat, I have noticed in my greenhouse lately, that temperatures in the greenhouse have been as much as 20 degrees C higher compared to outside, even at 8am. -34C outside, -14C inside. (without any heat, and no plants in it right now either). I doubt it ever gets to -34C in the Netherlands.
I do agree that our potential here is much higher than what we do presently.
Big problem, Ursula. when we say that spending only 8% of our income on food is worse than spending 20%, what does that mean? In many poor countries, people spend over 50% of their income on food – that’s why they are poor, or that is because they are poor. But I would guess that even here, not much of that 8% spent on food goes to the farmer; most of it goes to retail stores, transportation, wholesalers, packagers, etc. In a loaf of bread, the value of farmer grown wheat is often less than 10 cents; the rest is the flour mill, the bakery, the trucks, the advertising, and the stores.