Gardeners are fuming about a study that found produce from urban farms has a high carbon footprint

Rushdan also argued that urban farms are a much more sustainable use of land than commercial or industrial development.

By Catherine Boudreau
Business Insider
Feb 29, 2024

Excerpts:

The backlash was swift. University of Michigan students organized a rebuttal letter, arguing that narrowly focusing on carbon emissions overlooked the broader environmental harms of industrial-scale farming such as biodiversity loss and water pollution. Some angry homesteaders on TikTok and YouTube circulated conspiracy theories about the government not wanting people to be self-sufficient.

The research landed as cities including Detroit, Philadelphia, and Washington, DC, increasingly invest in urban agriculture to promote sustainability and become more resilient to the climate crisis. The researchers told Business Insider that while the many social benefits of urban farming were well understood — such as improving access to fresh food in disadvantaged communities — some climate claims warranted more scrutiny.

The headlines offended advocates of urban agriculture, according to interviews with a Detroit city official and other academics, as well as the letter circulated by University of Michigan students and shared with BI.

These advocates questioned whether comparing the per-serving carbon footprint of produce from urban and conventional agriculture was appropriate, given the vastly different scale of these systems and the roles they serve in society.

Mainly, they worried the study would let conventional agriculture — which globally accounts for about one-third of greenhouse-gas emissions — off the hook and undermine a burgeoning movement to expand urban green spaces and promote food sovereignty, especially in communities of color burdened by pollution.

“I thought the study took a lot of the onus off of conventional agriculture, which we are in the process of recreating,” Tepfirah Rushdan, who last year became Detroit’s first director of urban agriculture, told BI. “The reason for the shift is because industrial agriculture is a strain on our planet.”

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