Canada: City Farmer – An agro-ecological social movement connecting urbanites to their food

On my tour of the farm I observed too many species to note them all down; bay trees, hop vines, garlic, wasabi, tomatoes, olive trees, magnolias, figs, lettuce and all sorts of herbs surrounded me.

By Ben Good
March 27th, 2025
UBC Sustainable Agriculture [APBI 265]

Executive summary:

In the 22 years that I’ve lived in Greater Vancouver, my greatest contribution to an agricultural process has been with a basil plant that came into my neglectful possession for a mere eight days. On the eighth day, as those at City Farmer would say, the poor plant was toast.

This is a life history similar to those shared by many of my peers as, in an urban setting, it’s all too common for residents to simply pick up food from a supermarket. With only 34% of the BC food supply sourced within the province (Metro Vancouver Regional Planning, 2020), people are unprecedentedly disconnected from their food and reliant on high yield industrial scale agriculture. This is a system linked with soil degradation, water depletion & contamination, the detrimental effects of pesticides on human health, the emission of greenhouse gasses, and the loss of farmer knowledge (Isaac, 2018). Today, more than half of the world lives in cities. By 2050, this number is expected to increase to 70% (UN DESA, 2023); thus, the question of where and how urban dwelling citizens acquire their food is increasingly important.

City Farmer is an urban farm and educational landscape that teaches people how to grow their own food in the city, compost their waste, and take care of their home landscape in an environmentally responsible way. In a single previously vacant lot they provide public access to a climate adaptation garden, green roof, cob shed, organic & water wise food garden, permeable lane, backyard worm composters and more (Levenston, n.d.).

This paper uses the 10 elements of agroecology (Barrios et al. 2020) as an evaluative framework to examine how City Farmer exemplifies a social movement that advances agroecology. I spent a few hours on March 16th 2024, touring City Farmer, noting observations while chatting with Executive Director Michael Levenston, Educator Martine Wakefield, and in-house Worm Composting Expert Justin Lau. Due to the limited scope of this assignment, I will be focusing on the 5 elements of agroecology that I found to be most clearly illustrated during my tour of the farm: human and social values, recycling, efficiency, diversity, and the co-creation & sharing of knowledge.

Link to complete paper below.