by Adam James

As concerns mount over the accessibility and quality of meals in cities, urban agriculture is becoming a practical solution to give communities more choice — all while helping address greenhouse gas emissions from centralized agriculture.

With over 80 percent of the American population living in metropolitan centers, urban farming has the ability to dramatically enhance economic growth, increase food quality, and build healthier communities.

The Problem: Carbon Intensive Meals

“Would you like some CO2 with that?”

The globalization of food has dramatically increased the amount of carbon emissions in our meals — particularly in America.

For example,  food related emissions in the U.S. account for 21 percent of total emissions, or 6.1 tons of CO2 per year. Additionally, 15 percent of personal transportation emissions, 20 percent of home energy use emissions, and 23 percent of the aggregate remaining activities are food-related as well. Add it all up and you find that our food choices make up a very large portion of our overall footprint.

Consumer activities like traveling to the grocery store, eating at restaurants, and cooking make up 46 percent of total emissions from food.

The other 54 percent of emissions come from the production, distribution, and selling of food. This includes activities like packaging, storage, and transportation. The average meal has traveled 4,200 miles just to get to the table. And at the end of the line, food related emissions account for 28 percent of all U.S. landfill gas emissions.

So what can be done?

The Solution: Urban Farming’s Wide Range of Benefits

There are already plenty of resources on the energy intensity of food and how to calculate the emissions from a given meal. But people — particularly those in cities living in “food deserts” — can’t act on this information if they don’t have the resources.

This is where urban agriculture comes in. Urban agriculture is defined by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations as:

“[A]n industry that produces, processes and markets food and fuel, largely in response to the daily demand of consumers within a town, city, or metropolis, on land and water dispersed throughout the urban and peri-urban area, applying intensive production methods, using and reusing natural resources and urban wastes to yield a diversity of crops and livestock.”

Basically, urban farming allows individuals or groups to establish gardens or mini-farms on small plots, using creative techniques to maximize, output, meet local needs, and help make efficient use of the land. Gardeners are finding all kinds of ways to grow food: On rooftops, in abandoned buildings, and on deteriorating plots of land.

These operations can help consumers lower their food emissions by giving them the choice to eat food grown within their communities, not thousands of miles away.

But that’s not all. In addition to offsetting emissions, there are at least three concrete benefits to urban farming: economic growth; community building; and improved health.

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The Department of Agriculture’s plant hardiness maps are finally reflecting a fact that gardeners have already realized — the United States is changing dramatically with global warming pollution. The USDA released a new plant hardiness zone map to replace the 1990 map, reflecting twenty years of rapid global warming:

The 1990 map was based on temperatures from 1974 to 1986, the new map from 1976 to 2005. The nation’s average temperature from 1976 to 2005 was two-thirds of a degree higher than it was during the old time period, according to the National Climatic Data Center.

The new map is generally one half-zone warmer than the previous map throughout much of the United States. Cities as varied as Boston, Honolulu, St. Louis, Des Moines, Iowa, St. Paul, Minnesota, and Fairbanks, Alaska, are in newer, warmer zones. Almost all of Ohio, Nebraska and Texas are in warmer zones.

The Washington Post quoted several experts who noted the new map, whose changes in hardiness zones are based on rising minimum temperatures across the nation, isn’t news to gardeners.

Boston University biology professor Richard Primack:

People who grow plants are well aware of the fact that temperatures have gotten more mild throughout the year, particularly in the wintertime.

George Ball, chairman and CEO of the seed company W. Atlee Burpee:

Climate change, which has been in the air for a long time, is not big news to gardeners.

Stanford University biology professor Terry Root:

It is great that the federal government is catching up with what the plants themselves have known for years now: The globe is warming and it is greatly influencing plants (and animals).

Vaughn Speer, an 87-year-old master gardener in Ames, Iowa, said he has seen redbud trees, appear ten miles north of their traditional limit in recent years. Our nation’s forests are dying with the changes. Lodgepole pines, aspens, walnut trees, and other dominant species adapted to a climate without greenhouse pollution are already suffering in our hotter planet.

In coming decades, the rate of global warming will increase significantly, a result of the rapid rise in fossil fuel pollution, making it ever more difficult for plants to adapt, and destabilizing all of our nation’s ecosystems.

by Cole Mellino

Proponents of local food production have long argued that you drastically decrease your carbon footprint by eating locally-sourced food.

There have been numerous studies in recent years showing that non-local food, especially imported food, which is making up a larger and larger percentage of Americans’ diets, has a much higher emissions impact than locally produced food. A study from the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC) has the numbers to prove it. Here is some of the data on the staggering impact imported food has in California:

• In 2005, the import of fruits, nuts, and vegetables into California by airplane released more than 70,000 tons of CO2, which is equivalent to more than 12,000 cars on the road. These are all foods that can be grown in California
• Almost 250,000 tons of global warming gases released were attributable to imports of food products—the equivalent amount of pollution produced by more than 40,000 vehicles on the road or nearly two power plants
• More than 6,000 tons of smog-forming nitrogen oxides were released into the air— the equivalent of almost 1.5 million vehicles or 263 power plants
• 300 tons of sooty particulate matter were released into the air—the equivalent of more than 1.2 million cars or 53 power plants
• Approximately 950 cases of asthma, 16,870 missed schools days, 43 hospital admissions, and 37 premature deaths could be attributed to the worsened air quality from food imports, according to freight transport–related projections by the California Air Resources Board.

These numbers show the major impact that our food choices have on the environment and human health. This heavy reliance on imports is alarming considering that California is the number one state for agricultural production in the U.S. After examining the top six imports to California (table grapes, navel oranges, wine, garlic, rice, and fresh tomatoes — all grown in the state), NRDC discovered a disturbing trend:

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by Cole Mellino

As the climate talks unfold in Durban, South Africa, farmers all over the world are feeling the impact of extreme weather exacerbated by a warming planet.

Changing weather patterns, especially rainfall, are having disastrous affects on global crops. Last year in the Caribbean, banana and vegetable crops were hit hard by months of drought followed by torrential rains that resulted in flooding. The story is the same in Southern Africa. Droughts and erratic rainfall in the South African desert are destroying the Redbush tea plant, known by its Afrikaner name Rooibos. In other areas of the world, a range of agricultural products like coffee, chocolate, peanuts, and pumpkins are all being harmed by extreme weather.

But farmers in Africa — a continent that would be worst hit by climate change — are not idly sitting by. Protesting outside the Durban climate talks, members of the Southern African Rural Women’s Assembly are expressing their frustration with international inaction on climate:

“We’ve come to join other rural women farmers from the southern African region,” said Thandiure Chidararume, a member of ActionAid, an international organization that helped bring together this meeting of the Southern African Rural Women’s Assembly. “We have come as one voice from Africa, we are saying no to damning deals, Africa is not for sale, we want this air pollution that is causing climate change to stop now.”

The assembly unites women’s farming and agricultural unions and movements from around the world.

Women from all across Africa, some as far north as Kenya, came out to the rally at a Kawaulu-Natal University in Durban, several kilometers from the downtown convention center where the more subdued, official meetings on climate change are taking place.

The protesters, who also have the support of women’s movements in Latin America, do not believe that government negotiators represent their interests.

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Speaking at a South Carolina town hall today, Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich falsely claimed Environmental Protection Agency is trying to regulate agricultural dust. Calling the EPA a collection of “left-wingers trying to use the power of the government to reshape the whole economy on their terms,” Gingrich spun a tale of EPA bureaucrats going after Iowa farmers for the dust kicked up on dirt roads:

You have these people from the EPA saying, “You don’t understand! This is particulate matter! Here it is on page whatever of the Clean Air Act!“

Watch it:

“I can’t make these things up,” Gingrich concluded.

In reality, agricultural dust pollution is no joking matter. The Bush administration issued emissions monitoring guidelines for dust kicked up from poorly maintained rural roads. Industrial agribusiness in California puts up tens of thousands of tons of particulate matter every year. Regulations on particulate matter have been issued under the Reagan, Clinton, and Bush administrations. The “dust” Gingrich jokes about has been found to cause hospital admissions for heart disease, hospital admissions and doctors’ visits for respiratory diseases, increased respiratory symptoms in children, and premature death in people with heart or lung disease.

Despite the health threat from the tons of toxic dust produced by industrial agribusiness, there are no federal regulations protecting agricultural workers. Only two states, California and Arizona, have rules on farm dust. Although “farm dust regulation” is a popular Republican talking point, EPA administrator Lisa Jackson has repeatedly affirmed that her agency has no plans to issue a farm dust rule.

by Cole Mellino

Industrial agriculture is a major part of the global ponzi scheme. By continuing to fool ourselves into thinking we can infinitely produce more fossil-fuel laden food with limited resources, we’re setting ourselves up for a major catastrophe.

And that fooling happens on every level. Take the disturbing ways in which we create flavors for foods.

The “all natural” label applied to food means absolutely nothing by federal standards. And yet, food companies prey on growing consumer demand for wholesome healthy food by slapping the label on anything they can. The Food and Drug Administration, which is charged with protecting and promoting our health through regulation and oversight of the food industry, has not developed a definition for the “all natural” label. However, “the agency has not objected to the use of the term if the food does not contain added color, artificial flavors, or synthetic substances,” according to the FDA’s website.

People have a false perception that our food industry is well regulated, when it simply is not. To shed some light on what is in our food and what concoctions can even be labeled as “all natural,” Bruce Bradley, a former food marketer at companies like General Mills, Pillsbury, and Nabisco, keeps a blog about the food industry. In 2008, he left the corporate world and decided to devote the rest of his life to promoting healthy food and criticizing the Big Food industry.

Because our food has become so highly processed and because by FDA law, food companies can list spices and flavorings as natural or artificial flavors, unbelievably strange and disgusting things are being added to our food:

• Beaver anal glands, known as castoreum (I guess anal glands was a hard sell), are typically used in vanilla and raspberry flavoring and can legally be labeled natural flavoring
• L-cysteine or cystine is used a dough conditioner. It’s sometimes made from human hair, but more and more from duck feathers and can be found in breads and baked goods.
• A red food coloring additive that goes by many names (Carmine, Crimson Lake, Cochineal, or Natural Red #4) is made from insects like the cochineal beetle.

This is just one more example of how distorted our food system is. To see a longer list of the strange food additives that can be grouped under “natural flavors,” go to Bruce Bradley’s blog.

— Cole Mellino is an intern with the energy team at the Center for American Progress