How self-sufficient can Birmingham be? Should we even bother trying?
Pam Warhurst of Todmorden’s Incredible Edible was interviewed by Radio 4′s You and Yours yesterday (38.35 minutes in).
She reckons that what they’ve done in Todmorden can be done anywhere. Hundreds of Tod people grow veg and fruit in their front gardens just for other townspeople to pick and eat.
Todmorden is a small place, only some 15K people. Pam doesn’t think they’ll achieve their self-sufficiency target in Tod by 2018, but it didn’t seem too unrealistic for them to set it . . . In contrast, could Brum feed its citizens?
Not possible in the foreseeable future . . .
And here’s the nub of it. According to Wikipedia, Birmingham is 267.77 km2 and there are just over 1M of us, packed in at 3739/ km2.
For the sake of simple arithmetic in this argument, let’s say the average person chomps their way through the produce from a thousand square metres or a tenth of a hectare (that’s assuming, incidentally, damn good soil and pretty intensive farming).
Translated into feeding all of us million Brummies, we need 1000Mm2 (1000km2, so nearly four times an area of the city itself) under the plough to keep all of us going.
(It’s calculations like this that leads me to think that Tod won’t actually ever become self-sufficient as they’ll need 1,500 hectares of fertile highly intensively farmed land to be so, which they don’t have. (Yet?!) Plus, the Pennines might be great for growing lamb, eggs and some veg and fruit, but it ain’t a paradise for, say, bananas, oranges or rice.)
Back to Brum. What could we do in self-sufficiency terms?
Allotments. We have more than any other city. Around 7K of them. Assuming each is 253 square metres, our allotments total 1,771,000 square metres; i.e. 177.1 hectares. Each hectare can feed 10 people, so that’s nearly two thousand of us sorted.
So only another 998,000 to feed . . . From gardens? Foraging? Incredible Edible-style propaganda gardening? Come on!
It’s these kind of rough and ready calculations that tell us feeding a city population just won’t happen through growing-your-own. And even with exciting technologies such as hydroponics, vertical farming and the like, we’ll still need to bring in a lot of what we need.
So why bother at all?
Here are two sets of arguments. The first is the every-little-counts argument. Clare Devereux of Brighton & Hove reckons their allotments and gardens produce 0.14% of what they need.
What if that could be nudged upwards to, say, 1%? Add in vertical farming and nudge local supplies up a tad more to, say, 2% or even 3%?
What impact would that have on their economy? On the tastiness of their food? On society as a whole?
That leads me neatly to the second set of arguments, those to do with our psyche, our conviviality, wellbeing, our sense of rootedness, literal as well as metaphorical.
Planting, nurturing, harvesting are all great activities. And if they don’t take your fancy, then preparing and sharing tasty fresh food is bloody fantastic.
The Todmorden Incredible Edible has blazed a brilliant trail, vividly demonstrating just how wonderfully dramatic an impact a light-touch, help-yourself, kind focus on food can have, and what we can learn from their generosity, enthusiasm and sheer hard work.
(The photo above is of some of the people involved on Aston Villa’s allotment.)
Great article! I was lured in by the contentious headline, too. Nice work!
It seems we can expect a great deal more Todmordens in 2012 as the external pressures which compel action grow greater and more pressing, and the internal pulls to more meaning and fulfilling livelihoods encourage more people to try this route.
Whilst urban agriculture is challenging (scarcity of land, toxins, water supply) it is fortunate that there are so very many quick wins. Water can be captured, unused space can be restored, soils can be nourished / imported / bypassed. It would seem that whilst (by your calculations) the current output of Birmingham could feed 2,000 people, that if we had more GROWERS this output could increase by order(s) or magnitude and fresh fruit, vegetables, eggs (and perhaps a little chicken and pork) could be in good supply.
So perhaps it’s not the technical possibility of urban agriculture which provides the challenge, rather the desire for action and the mechanisms which facilitate it. I fear that’s a point we may need to remember in the coming years as the local agriculture moves from being desirable to necessary.
Like Todmorden, like Brum’s allotments, the sooner we can build up a base of knowledge, collaboration, and resources, the better. More quickly than almost anything else, working together to create what we need leads to a tremendous sense of belonging, confidence, and optimism: all characteristics which will help us navigate the coming changes.
For those who’ve not read it yet, there’s another great (though now somewhat clichéd) article on the process or urban ag here: http://www.cityfarmer.org/cuba.html
self-sufficiency is undo-able but learning to grow really good tasty stuff espec easier stuff like raspberries will (1) be fun; (2) be relatively easy (with some sources of advice (allotment owners maybe) and (3) be atractive to kids as well as us oldies; coz nothing beats going into the garden and picking some fruit/herbs/salad/whatever . . . and it saves a bit of money too.
and further to my previous comment
substitute ‘public land’ for ‘garden’
wouldnt it be great to pick apples in the park? or any other easiy reached space: outside the swimming pool, by the side of the road (prob not good in middle of road); why don’t we have fruit trees instead/as well as other kinds of public space trees?
And . . . there’s a third set of reasons why we should focus on food matters. All to do with how our ever-so-modern but still-small-scale minds can understand and do practical stuff in response to the huge challenges facing humanity in the 21st century, climate change, resource depletion and population pressures.
I wrote a blogpost about all this here: http://newoptimists.com/2011/11/13/build-a-bunker-with-a-vegetable-plot-on-some-high-but-sheltered-ground/
Thanks for this article. Its great (and important) to be thinking and discussing this sort of thing.
For me regardless of whether the figures don’t add up for Brum to be able to feed itself, it’s about at least having a good go at it – using everything at our disposal and enjoying the many benefits that becoming more connected with our food supply brings.
There are so many tools (in the form of ideas, knowledge, movements, people’s ingenuity and creativity) we can use. Be it permaculture, bio-intensive agriculture, green-roofs, agroecology, agroforestry, as well those Kate mentions and many many more. Unfortunately The scale at which these ideas are implemented can be limited by the will of those in control to put into practice. For something to happen on the scale of a large city we need good support for relevant infrastructure. Cuba survived peak oil and maintained its food security thanks to the government handing over land to communities and by supporting research on organic agriculture and permaculture. In Havana for example they grew food everywhere – even by turning over paving slabs.
In a city we can be creative in how we use space. Brum has a large amount of park space which as Jim Parle said can be used to grow fruit trees. You could also create green edible spaces on roofs. I was reading yesterday of actual farms in the US created on top of tower blocks and warehouses. Heat created from kitchens and ovens in the buildings was then channelled up to greenhouses in the roofs which can then be heated and creating food all year round. As the famous permaculture saying goes: “yield is only limited by the imagination”
It may be that all this may still not be enough to feed the 1 million of us. Let’s give it a good go anyway (if not there’s always takeaway!)
There are a wealth of new tools which are helping incubate and support this new infrastructure, too. From the likes of http://www.buckybox.com and food-nation.co.uk for vegbox schemes, and a wealth of food mapping tools.
If we’re putting in effort it makes sense to push at the most effective points we can – the points in the system which generate the greatest change for the least effort. Since most food already goes via businesses (50% of all food used is in catering) then the more we can do to help businesses trade locally, the better.
[Starting an unashamed pitch, since there's no time to waste]
Services like ours at http://www.sustaination.co make it easier for local businesses to trade locally, which means local and sustainable start to become the default for menus and shelves everywhere.
We also actively seek to build resilience into the supply chain by highlighting opportunities for local distribution and aggregation hubs by doing automatic analysis of the local food web.
Find our more at http://www.sustaination.co, please sign up for our newsletter, follow us on http://www.twitter.com/sustaination, register your business (www.sustaination.co/register), and spread the word.
There’s a necessary and desirable change coming our way fast, and we’re doing all we can to make it a change for good. Please help.
Hi Felipe — I’ve just tweeted (@newoptimists) your comment; a great beginning to 2012. Thank you!
Thanks Kate.
Thanks also sustaination. Im actually involved in the South Birmingham Food Co-operative, and we’re soon going to be opening a shop. Making links with local producers is exactly what we want to be doing. I’ll be approaching you in the next few months to get you’re help with this.
Felipe, I agree with you entirely…it’s the ‘having a go’ that’s important, it’s the ‘having a go’ that helps to change people’s mind-set..be inventive…one of the reasons that Todmorden works, is that we utilise what space we have… In the early days we were cheeky… we planted where we could… even in the pre-days of Incredible Edible Todmorden – when we were realising that it was ok to be doing what we were doing – we were doing such things as buying fruit trees from local supermarkets, then secretly planting them in thier grounds … we utilised the space that we had already … take a look at our website to see what else we’ve been up to … we are experimenting with land on the tops (it’s hilly moorland round here) to see what crops grow … we are looking into local history to see what was grown here in the past. We have land lent to us on which we are establishing a ‘growing ‘training centre in Walsden’ – all our schools are growing – not for any main crops, but to teach the children what it means to grow your own food … so our children grow up knowing how its done. We utilised patches of grass and planted community herb gardens, we spoke to our health centre and got permission to change all the ‘prickly shrub’ planting with edible trees, fruit bushes and herbs..any public building with grounds could be done like this … we built raised beds in the grounds of the police station and grow veg in them, we did the same at our community college and our train station … it is amazing what space you can find if you break the mind set of needing neat large rectangular flat fields! most importantly – when we started we did it with no money apart from us paying for packets of seeds..we held plant and seed swaps…as momentum picked up, we applied for grants or awards like B&Q’s one planet awards..they gave us a prize of £5000-worth of B&Q goods..we spent the whole lot on huge planks of wood – which we then used to build all the raised beds around town … we have two paid ‘Food Inspirers – funded by ‘leader’ money … absolutely everyone else involved is a volunteer…some full-time, others part-time…if we can do what we do, then any town can do what we do…but it needs to come from grassroots level…that’s what’s worked fro us…and a huge amount of commitment and belief from those involved..
I’m simply thrilled to bits, Helena, that you’ve commented on this blogpost. I checked your email address, thinking is it really from you. Yay! It was! And such helpful, useful stuff too. Thank you!
[...] Roughly speaking – and very roughly speaking — about 10 people can live off a hectare of land. But that depends on the hectare being highly fertile and intensively farmed. It also depends on the diet people eat too. Hence it’s a very crude figure. It’s bandied about a bit on the internet along with the caveats given here. If you want some data/stats on sustainability and food, I strongly recommend David MacKay’s Sustainable Energy — without the hot air. Chapter 13 is onFood and Farming. If you don’t want to buy it, you can download it a hefty pdf version here. All this is not to say that food growing in a city or town isn’t valuable. It is. But not as a source of food for the population as a whole. Hence these ideas in this blogpost. [...]
[...] town isn’t valuable. It is. But not as a source of food for the population as a whole. Hence these ideas in this blogpost. allotments, Birmingham, data, feeding a city, [...]