5 ms·

>> Around 60% of Oosterwold is set aside to support "urban agriculture", cutting the climate-change impact of food miles I don't see how this helps. An urban

• martincmartin 5y ago
  It's not cutting the climate-change impact of food. It's cutting the climate-change impact of food miles. As you say, overall it's making things worse, e.g. increasing the climate-change impact of every other delivery but food.
  • nostrebored 5y ago
    But this is fundamentally flaws analysis. Lack of economies of scale mean you have to analyze the production of food bottoms-up. What's the cost of getting the resources needed to each of these individual farms and to support the life of people there? The thing people don't realize is that industrial farming is actually extremely carbon-emission efficient. Even your food coming from a container ship from halfway around the world, transported via freight, and driven last mile in a semi is less carbon intensive than getting a delivery from a local (XX miles away) farm. This seems to be trivially true as well for an entire city of inefficient farms with any expectation of modern amenities.
    • beembeem 5y ago
      Composting and rain water harvesting give you much of what you need. Not much is needed from far away.
      • beebeepka 5y ago
    • eecc 5y ago
      Uh, what? Please substantiate, I don’t buy such statements at face value
  • belligeront 5y ago
    It's people that have the highest impact milage. We can pack food tightly into a truck and they don't mind waiting when the packing takes some time. We can't easily pack humans more densely into trucks, so reducing their miles traveled has a much bigger effect (and if the distances are shorter they can also walk/bike/bus instead of single occupancy vehicle).
    • stouset 5y ago
      Regardless, the relative price of food is usually a reasonable proxy for the amount of energy that went into its production. If the food from the urban farm is more expensive than equivalent food from an industrial farm, it probably took more energy to produce (and consequently probably released more greenhouse gases during its production).
      • fold3 5y ago
        I find your message confusing, when you say price, do you talk about final retail price or production cost? (fruits and vegetable are high margin products in food distribution) When you talk about energy, do you take into account human labour? Natural ressources are considered free in our current economic system, that is why it is cheaper to grow food by damaging the amazonian forest with nasty coal/oil fed machine rather than doing local permaculture with more human beings and passive tools.
        • stouset 5y ago
          Note that I said “equivalent food”. And I also only spoke of energy, not other forms of damage to the environment.
    • beaconstudios 5y ago
      > We can't easily pack humans more densely into trucks We basically can, with decent urban transit and rail services.
      • sandworm101 5y ago
  • sandworm101 5y ago
    Food-miles sound good, but the reality of modern shipping is that it takes far less energy to move food than grow it. The carbon/energy cost of bringing a plant product from a hot country to a cold country is far less than the energy needed to grow that product in a cold country. That's why nobody grows bananas in new york. We could, but the cost/energy to do so is hugely more than the energy to ship bananas from place where they grow easily. If we want to address global climate change, then we need to look into minimizing total energy put into things like food. Often that will mean growing things where they can grow most easily, with the least amount of energy. A banana brought thousands of miles by very efficient transport is more sustainable than grown in an ill-suited climate through the application of energy-expensive heat/light etc. Distance is not everything.
    • uoaei 5y ago
      In-built into this comment is the implicit entitlement of the globalist consumer: that we should have access to anything we want at any time of year. But that doesn't really need to be the case. Reducing food-miles by feeding people locally-first would drop food-miles drastically, possibly more than other proposals thus far. Minimizing total energy is indeed the name of the game. To do that, we have to recognize that we may have over-extended a little bit as a civilization, and to pull back on some of the more hubristic enterprises like bananas in Maine or avocados in Sweden during winter in the Northern hemisphere. We can still have those things, but at a minimum the costs for the consumer should reflect the costs of transportation, including costs normally externalized (excluded) from supply chain analyses.
      • jacquesm 5y ago
        > that we should have access to anything we want at any time of year. But that doesn't really need to be the case. Interesting you should mention that, this was actually the dinner table subject a few days ago when I explained to my kids that what they think is 'normal' has only been the case for a couple of decades at best and that in the not so very distant past winter meant that you were not going to have a whole lot of fresh stuff. They found it quite incredible that you would not be able to buy apples or bananas year round.
• kkfx 5y ago
  I'm curious about your measuring/reasoning: so far the most efficient cultivation I know is the classic elderly vegetable garden. It can produce FAR more than large mono-cultures fields per hectare with far less resources. For farming, surely we need space, poultry and rabbits are the least needing animals but still demand space to produce their own food, however again there is NOTHING more efficient than a classic country home with some animals around: it do not need third party fertilizers, the balance between animals manure and cultivated ground means manure suffice, the resulting pollution is very low, water usage sparse enough to be a non-issue in most cases. Surely it can nourish a limited number of humans PER FARM, but it's absolutely sustainable and effective. Urbs are not, we never ever have a sustainable city, we have just some needs who justify them. But the rest you mention is needed only for mass distribution, not for nourishing humans but for nourishing business, in money, not in food, and we have enough proof that that's totally unsustainable. Surely we are too much for such classic approach, but we can handle that with a SLOW de-growth pushing toward de-urbanization as much as we can leaving just enough for certain kind of manufacturing and other specific needs. The sparse small-scale industry is actually ECONOMICALLY inefficient but far more sustainable, self-sufficient on scale, at the human size. It's like a small countryside restaurant, it's economically far less efficient than a modern fast food, but suffice for their owner and satisfy their customers, only managers and the companies behind them are unhappy.
  • sandworm101 5y ago
    Space-efficient, energy-efficient, and labor-efficient are three different things. A tiny "elderly" farm might create lots of food per square-foot, but only through increased labor. Too much labor and the farm simply cannot produce enough to feed the workers working it.
    • eherot 5y ago
      Additionally, if this urban farm plot exists to the exclusion of several stories of apartments, and those apartments must instead be located further away from where people want to be, the net carbon emissions (not to mention the effect on housing prices) are definitely higher than that of a regular rural industrial farm.
• bryans 5y ago
  The USDA has a very different definition for "urban agriculture" than your claim of simply "fields between condos." "Urban agriculture includes the cultivation, processing and distribution of agricultural products in urban and suburban areas. Community gardens, rooftop farms, hydroponic, aeroponic, and aquaponic facilities, and vertical production are all examples of urban agriculture." https://www.usda.gov/topics/urban https://www.usda.gov/topics/urban
• uoaei 5y ago
  Where has processing and transportation been included in your informal analysis? You seem to be quite confident but have not addressed these factors.
• akamaka 5y ago
  Maybe urban agriculture doesn’t work in theory, but in practice the Netherlands already has many regions where productive farms mingle with urban areas. For an example, have a look at a satellite view of the Westland region, directly southwest of The Hague.
  • Swizec 5y ago
    Where I'm from (Slovenia) it's a 20min walk from downtown of the capital city to farms with cows. The trick is to not have suburbia. Go straight from urban to rural.
  • mrsuprawsm 5y ago
    I'd add to your comment by emphasising that Westland is a super intensive agricultural area with tons of dense greenhouses, trying to eke out as much production out of a small area as possible (and doing pretty well at it).
    • jacquesm 5y ago
      Doing so well in fact that they manage to export quite a bit of what they grow.
• patall 5y ago
  I do not think anybody is thinking of corn fields here. But replacing spruce, plaintaint and ornamental chestnut with cherry trees, walnuts and edible chestnut. Instead of having fireball, rhododendron or snowball hedges planting black berries, currants and maybe elderberries. And finally giving families a small allotment garden where they can grow some vegetable. Besides that, it's easily possible (as in: I have done that) to harvest enough chili & pepper from June to December to supply one person via one 1m wide office window. Cities will never be food independent but can definitely reduce their food import by 15-20 %
  • tuatoru 5y ago
    > But replacing spruce, plaintaint and ornamental chestnut with cherry trees, walnuts and edible chestnut. Instead of having fireball, rhododendron or snowball hedges planting black berries, currants and maybe elderberries. Sounds great to the uncritical hearer, but it's a recipe for a rodent and/or bird plague and lots of disease outbreaks. Unless someone is employed to deal with all of the rejected part of the crop. And that's not easy with tree and bush crops.
    • fransje26 5y ago
      Yup, better get ahead of the problem, and get rid of them animals then. You know, in the name of sustainability and all.. Wait what?
• _Algernon_ 5y ago
  Most importantly, transportation is generally a tiny amount of CO2 emissions of food production, iirc, and that is the only thing cut by urban agriculture. It may have other benefits, such as greater degree of self-sufficiency but it does approximately nothing for the climate.
• yummypaint 5y ago
  Urban agriculture doesn't have to be monoculture. It's better for the soil to have some diversity anyway. A healthy mix of plants requires more human labor to maintain than an industrial farm of the same area, but for people in cities getting contact time with plants is beneficial in itself.
• aaron695 5y ago
• maxerickson 5y ago
  The water in the photo at the top of the link is fresh (all of it, even the large lake in the background). They can probably find a way to not use treated water for irrigation. The lakes are shallow, but they are pretty big.
• bmitc 5y ago
  > An urban farm is not nearly as efficient as a true industrial farm. They're also not as efficient at destroying the environment.
  • adrianN 5y ago
    In farming, being less efficient has an almost 1:1 correspondence to being worse for the environment. Less efficient farms need more space and more energy input to produce the same amount of calories. (Some exceptions to this simplification of course apply)
• rdevsrex 5y ago
  It's not all about efficiency. More greenspace is healthier, and more people taking part in community gardens is also a good thing.
• lIIIllllIIII 5y ago
  I'm not super knowledgeable about this however NL is a powerhouse of agricultural technology, they're a tiny country that's the 2nd largest food exporter in the world. There is a lot of really really interesting technology implemented there that will possibly make them a superpower once food crises become more frequent with climate change.
  • ragebol 5y ago
    Being Dutch, seeing this perspective is quite interesting. See, we have a nitrogen crisis in NL: there is too much being deposited in the soil, ruining the local environment. Farming a is a big source of that nitrogen. Can't build many new houses, because building those will also emit too much nitrogen. Speed limit has been reduced for the same reason (with a very small effect). A popular view in NL is that the Dutch farmers mostly work for export and that we shouldn't do that anymore. There's also a counter-movement of farmers and their supporters stating they're proud of the farmers, for providing our food, and reducing resource usage per unit food significantly over the years. The suggestion by a politician to half the amount of livestock caused riots with tractors. I'm kinda torn: importing more food is bad for the environment as a (global) whole as our farms are very efficient. But should we sacrifice our local environment for it?
  • fransje26 5y ago
    There is a lot of technology yes. The real question is: should it really be used to for that purpose. Does it make sense that the Netherlands is the second biggest exporter of tomatoes in the world? The easy answer to that is: no. The more complicated one is: also no. To actually produces these vegetables in -let's be generous- less than ideal climate, they have huge gas-heated greenhouses, with 24/7 lighting. That is anything but sustainable. Of course they are highly-efficient greenhouses, combining heating with electricity production, allowing to minimize the use of chemical inputs etc, etc, etc. But in the end, the gas prices they got were so cheap, that they would simply burn gas to produce and resell electricity, and vent the heat in the atmosphere.. Oh well.. What about them pigs? Does it make sense to have about as many pigs as inhabitants in such a densely populated country? etc.
• fold3 5y ago
  Permaculture is an example of farming on a small scale that is extremely complex but efficient and sustainable. The Netherlands soil is of very low quality in terms of nutrients (soil depletion). There is an ecological debt because of intensive farming: if we would take that into account in the final price, it would lose it's appeal.
• caymanjim 5y ago
  It helps by being exactly the kind of nonsense that attracts votes and money from well-meaning but ignorant people. Virtue signaling is always more powerful than actual virtue.
  • rolandog 5y ago
    Well-meaning ignorant person here, but always willing to learn. I'll take your comment in good faith. Some of my ignorance may be because the knowledge has been abstracted away, deprived of its nuance, and physically kept at a distance from where I have lived and worked. My view is that most people are not fully opposed to industrialized farming. But rather I don't want there to be farms (or companies for that matter) that exploit workers, pollute the environment, bribe politicians (in essence, rigging the once free market) [1]. That's my main gripe. We live in a society, and profits should not justify treating others like they were less than equal to ourselves. In my opinion, some of those companies are too large to properly behave like well-run businesses (not too large to fail), and they have accrued a critical size and mass that they bully away competition, and no longer have the interests of the customer in mind. To paraphrase Douglas Adams: If it maintains high prices like a cartel, and restricts competition like a cartel, we have at least to consider the possibility that we have a large association of nefarious manufacturers or suppliers on our hands.
• 97s 5y ago
  It drastically helps. Each little unit producing food is less food required to be made by a commercial farm. 1000 little farms might not be as efficient as one commercial farm, but it is still less impact and less run off environmentally.
• SergeAx 5y ago
  Why use potable water on a farm that literally sits on a canal?