Urban Farming

Learn about the diverse forms of urban farming. Urban farming is any type of agriculture in a city that grows food and distributes it locally. It can include bees, native plants, and livestock, such as chickens. Traditionally, it can happen anywhere there is sunlight and soil, including homes, communities, schools, rooftops, and market gardens, as well as balconies, tiny greenhouses, and pots. In recent years, urban farming has expanded to vacant lots, greenbelts, warehouses, landfills, and parks. Soil is not necessarily required. Hydroponic, aquaponic, and container systems can all produce food year-round and can be stacked vertically. Technological innovations have enabled urban farmers to move beyond traditional urban methods and expand their operations and growing seasons.

Learn why urban farming is important to communities and the planet. Urban farming tends to be small-scale, decentralized, community-focused, highly efficient, and adaptable. Benefits of urban farming include:

• It uses fewer resources, less water, needs less transportation, and generates much fewer greenhouse gas emissions than traditional farms.
• It can produce similar amounts of food as small-scale farming.
• It helps reduce runoff associated with heavy rainfall and can lead to better air quality.
• Supporting local food producers contributes to regional economic development by keeping capital within the local economy.
• Collateral benefits include the recycling of organic matter into compost, shorter transport distances resulting in reduced greenhouse gas emissions, and increased resiliency to interruptions in food procurement and storage.

Grow your own food. Before starting, get a sense of options in your city—who is doing urban farming, what they are growing, and what might work best for you.

• Gardening organizations publish guides on how to find specialized classes on food gardening for beginners, vegetable cultivation, herb gardens, and garden innovations for small spaces.
• Research ways to incorporate diverse foods and heirloom seeds into your garden. Food diversity in urban farming ensures a wide variety of nutrients in city residents’ diets and plays an important role in ensuring the well-being of Indigenous peoples and smallholder farms. See the Plant Diversity Nexus for more information.
• If you have the outdoor space to plant a garden, here are resources for beginners on how to grow specific crops, start a vegetable plot, and maintain a healthy garden. You can also check out more in-depth reading recommendations here.
• If you don’t have access to a patio, you can still plant herbs, tomatoes, or peppers—which don’t require intensive care or large pots—on balconies and windowsills or in hanging baskets.
• Hydroponic and aeroponic systems—which use little to no soil and use far less water than traditional growing methods—allow for indoor gardening. Here are resources with more information and tips on finding small aeroponic farms, seed starters, and grow kits.
• Websites like Skillshare have thousands of courses on topics ranging from houseplant care to building your own garden containers.

Join a community garden. Becoming part of a wider food-growing community creates opportunities to connect with others, share resources and best practices, and provide nutritious, locally-grown produce to your community. Get started by searching for openings in volunteer databases, using community garden locators, or joining gardening meetups.

• Social Farms and Gardens works across the United Kingdom to provide workshops and training on the therapeutic use of farming practices in designing urban gardens for youth, elderly, and disabled residents.
• GreenThumb, the largest urban gardening program in the United States, connects volunteers with community gardens in New York City that require assistance with garden maintenance and services such as carpentry, grant writing, communications, and finance.
• The Chicago Community Gardens Association matches volunteers with community organizations that manage urban farms and gardens throughout the city and sponsors community involvement days.
• In Auckland, Kelmarna Gardens runs a four-month farmhands volunteer and training program for individuals interested in learning regenerative organic food-growing skills.

Buy produce grown by urban farms. Supporting urban farms—especially those owned by women and BIPOC, who are vastly historically excluded among farmers—boosts demand for localized food. Here are a few examples of how to support urban farms in your area:

• In the U.S., connect with urban farms by visiting your local farmers’ market or through urban farm location tools like the Chicago Urban Agriculture Mapping Project or the Dallas County Urban Garden Locator.
• Community-supported agriculture (CSAs) connects eaters directly with growers by buying a share of the farm up front in exchange for regular deliveries of fresh produce. In Hyderabad, Bangalore, and Surat, the mobile platform Farmizen delivers organic produce grown by women farmers on small plots rented to city residents aiming to reconnect with nature. In the U.S., you can search for CSAs near you through the Department of Agriculture’s CSA directory or connect through Harvie Farms, a subscription service that makes customizable deliveries from over 250 local farmers and producers throughout the country.

Advocate for urban farming in your community. Raise awareness and promote investments in urban agriculture infrastructure by writing letters to your local paper, attending community meetings, and joining online forums. Here are examples of op-eds written for newspapers and advocacy websites, vertical farming and gardening forums, and resources to prepare for town halls.

Seek out training and educational resources. Many urban farms, such as the Urban Growers Collective and the Urban Farming Institute, offer hands-on training to beginner urban farmers. Many universities also offer their own certificates and training programs both online and in person.

• Here is an overview with links to toolkits to get started.
• An example of a city-specific step-by-step process.
• Here are resources on how to start your own hydroponic or rooftop farm.

Leverage government urban agriculture policies. Guidelines on starting a commercial farm are available on many national and city government websites. Here are examples from the U.S., Singapore, and Mexico City.

Consider collaborative farming approaches. Small farmers can benefit from the collaborative approaches employed by cooperative models where farms, customers, and owners combine resources and expertise, meet shared needs, and oversee operations. See Lufa Farms and Urban Growers Collective in the Key Players section for more information.

• Learn more about forming your own commercial CSA here.
• Here is a brief intro and a full guide to forming an agricultural cooperative.

Explore innovations in urban farming. Startups contribute to research and development that enables farms to scale up to feed a greater share of densely populated urban areas, decrease emissions, and minimize waste production and water use. Below is a small sample of farms pioneering emerging technologies (see Key Players section for more):

• Bowery Farms (New Jersey) is experimenting with the use of artificial intelligence, high-powered cameras, and robotic arms to identify and harvest fruits at peak ripeness, with a focus on fragile crops threatened by climate change.
• Ÿnsect (France) raises mealworms and other insects to be made into ingredients used to fertilize crops and feed pets, fish, and people.

Implement urban agriculture in your school’s curriculum. Becoming directly involved in growing food is a hands-on way to teach students about the impacts of their food choices and the benefits of environmental stewardship.

• Bites is a mobile app that connects teachers with affordable, interactive classroom lunches with chefs to increase food literacy in schools and establish school food gardens.
• In New York City, City Growers offers free and discounted urban agriculture–focused after-school programs, summer camps, and job training programs at their Brooklyn Grange Rooftop Farm.

Retrofit existing buildings to accommodate urban farms. High land prices can make acquiring land for urban farming difficult, especially in densely populated cities. When structures like vacant lots, rooftops, and parking garages are converted into urban farms, it not only decreases the effects of the urban heat-island effect but also creates community spaces.

• Rooftop Republic has partnered with businesses in Hong Kong to plant more than seven million square meters of rooftop gardens since 2015, with the aim of repairing the city’s relationship with food after decades of outsourcing to China, which currently produces 90 percent of Hong Kong’s food.
• In Melbourne, Australia, nature-protection group Odonata joined forces with urban food-system designer Biofilta to use a grant from the Melbourne City Council’s Urban Forest Fund to create the Melbourne Skyfarm—an urban farm and orchard built on a converted parking garage rooftop.

Prioritize urban agriculture infrastructure. New buildings can be constructed with urban farms incorporated into the design from the start, integrating water, agricultural, and energy systems more effectively (see Nature of Cities Nexus).

• Thammasat University’s organic farm contains a built-in floodwater management system that slows rainwater runoff and prevents Bangkok’s sewage system from flooding.
• Nature Urbaine, the world’s largest organic farm, uses a closed circuit that recycles water, requires no soil, and minimizes electricity usage.

Reduce resource consumption in your day-to-day operations. By choosing energy-saving architectural designs, implementing systems that minimize water and food waste, powering crop growth through renewable energy, and abstaining from pesticide use, urban farms can minimize their carbon footprint (and often simultaneously reduce their operating costs in the long run).

• In Montreal, Lufa Farms runs the largest commercial rooftop greenhouse in the world and has committed to “responsible agriculture”—including recapturing and recirculating irrigation water and rainfall, installing energy-saving glass rooftop panels and insulation curtains, capturing residual heat, using predatory insects instead of synthetic pesticides, converting waste into compost, and expanding a fleet of electric delivery vehicles to meet the increasing demand for produce deliver.
• In Argentina, Rosario’s Urban Agriculture Program has reduced the city’s agriculture-related GHG emissions by 95 percent annually by localizing food production and establishing markets within walking distance of residents. The program has also secured over eight hundred acres of peri-urban land for permanent agricultural use, which lowers air temperatures, increases the absorbency of the soil, and ultimately helps prevent future landslides and floods.

Offer opportunities to community members to participate. Urban farms offer a unique space to increase people’s understanding of food and how it relates to human and planetary health. Here are a few farms that have made forging relationships with community residents an integral aspect of their mission:

• In Baltimore, Plantation Park Heights Urban Farm is building the city’s first “AgriHood”—a community-shared agriculture training and resource institute within the surrounding predominantly Black and Caribbean neighborhoods.
• Urban Growers Collective is a Black and women-led nonprofit urban farm based primarily on Chicago’s South Side that provides job training for young adults, beginner BIPOC farmers, and men at risk for gun violence.
• In Rio de Janeiro, Horta de Manguinhos designates job opportunities for residents previously involved in the local drug and crime enterprises and supplies training, equipment, and enough food to feed their families weekly.
• In Mexico City, Huerta Tlatelolco, an edible forest and seed bank, teaches residents how to connect with food, care for the land, and build more green spaces throughout the city.
• In Jersey City, AeroFarms is partnering with the Jersey City Housing Authority to pilot Healthy Greens JC, which aims to address food insecurity by combining farming technology, nutrition education programs, and opportunities for members to participate in the growing process.

Build partnerships with local restaurants. Supplying produce to restaurants in your city inspires an interest in sourcing food locally, boosts freshness and quality, and reduces transportation emissions.

• In Singapore, Edible Garden City provides daily deliveries of fifty varieties of organic microgreens, edible flowers, and herbs to over two hundred dining establishments throughout the city.

Motown to Growtown: Detroit’s Urban Farming Revolution | REWIND by Al Jazeera English (25 mins.)

A Guerrilla Gardener in South Central LA by Ron Finley / TED (11 mins.)

Growing Up: How Vertical Farming Works by B1M (6 mins.)

How an Indoor Farm Uses Technology to Grow 80,000 Pounds of Produce per Week - Dan Does by Eater (12 mins.)

Next Gen Farming Without Soil and 90% Less Water by USA Today 11 mins.)

Plant This Movie Documentary (85 mins.)

Kiss the Ground Documentary (84 mins.)

What Is Aquaculture? by National Ocean Service / NOAA (1 min.)

Aquaculture and Aquaponics: An Overview for Urban Agriculture by Illinois Extension Local Foods and Small Farms (63 mins.)

“The Real Value of Urban Farming. (Hint: It’s Not Always About the Food.)” by Brad Plumer / Vox

“Urban farms Won’t Feed Us, but They Might Just Teach Us" by Nathanael Johnson / Grist

“Urban Farming’s International Past, Present, and Future” by Regina Cole / Forbes

“A Map of Where Your Food Originated May Surprise You" by Jeremy Cherfas / NPR

Farming While Black: Soul Fire Farm’s Practical Guide to Liberation on the Land by Lean Penniman / Chelsea Green Publishing

“Urban Cultivation and its Contributions to Sustainability: Nibbles of Food but Oodles of Social Capital” by George Martin, Roland Clift, and Ian Christie / Sustainability

“Urban Agriculture: A necessary pathway towards urban resilience and global sustainability?” by Langemeyer et al. / Landscape and Urban Planning

We Are Each Other’s Harvest: Celebrating African American Farmers, Land, and Legacy by Natalie Baszile / Amistad Press

The Means of Consumption with Malik Yakini by America Dissected Podcast (43 mins.)

Talking Urban Agriculture & Food Policy by Talk Policy to Me Podcast (21 mins.)

Mike Biltonen on Regenerative Orcharding with Climate Change by The Urban Farm Podcast (38 mins.)

From ‘Milkshake’ to Veggies, Kelis and Ron Finley Share Their Farm Journeys by NPR Music (15 mins.)

The Vertical Farming Podcast

Urban Agriculture with Lori Hoagland by Farming the Future Podcast (16 mins.)