Urban farms could be incredibly efficient—but aren’t yet

While many of the details are unclear, the overall conclusion seems solid: while urban farms aren’t yet there in terms of sustainability and energy use, the potential for them to outpace their larger rural cousins is definitely there.

By John Timmer
Arstechnica
12/27/2018

Excerpt:

The researchers—Robert McDougalla, Paul Kristiansena, and Romina Rader—defined urban agriculture as taking place within a kilometer of a densely built environment. Working in the Sydney area, they were able to find 13 urban farmers who were willing to keep detailed logs of their activity for an entire year. Labor and materials costs were tracked, as was the value of the produce it helped create. The energetic costs of the materials and labor were also calculated in order to assess the sustainability of urban farming.

The plots cultivated by these farmers were quite small, with the median only a bit over 10 square meters. Yet they were extremely productive, with a mean of just under six kilograms of produce for each of those square meters. That’s about twice as productive as a typical Australian vegetable farm, although the output range of the urban farms was huge—everything from slightly below large farm productivity to five times as productive.

Read the complete article here.