Having got over 80 West Midlands scientists, two thirds Professors, to answer the simple question What are you optimistic about? I published what they said in a book, launched at the British Science Festival held here in Birmingham in September 2010.

And social media allowed news of its publication to get out. As I had a non-existent marketing budget, this was neat. There are now some 3K copies in circulation of The New Optimists: Scientists View Tomorrow’s World & What It Means To Us. That’s a far cry from Harry Potter, but is still respectable.

In early 2011, I pondered how to exploit the intellectual capital in these scientists’ minds to help us meet the huge challenges facing humanity.

I decided to combine that newly-exposed intellectual capital with the social capital that we’d built up over the year since the book was published — and in a context that everyone would have some kind of interest.

Hence the New Optimists Forum. These scientists, and more who’ve joined in, are bending their minds on a year-long scenario planning exercise to generate possible food futures for Birmingham in 2050.(For the rationale behind why this topic, see the blogpost here.)

Our first event was on 2nd November. Planning began over the summer. And then

• We dipped our toes in the public social media world with the idea of the Forum on 16th October 2011, Blog Action Day (BAD11) which, fortuitously for us, was on the topic of food.
  — As you can see here, we provided lists & comments on other blogposts.
  — We commented on other people’s blogposts.
  — We published a couple of blogposts about the upcoming Forum event on BAD11.
  — Twitter told us about lots of people and projects we didn’t know about.
  — Twitter was the main vehicle which got our stuff noticed by others.

• During the Forum events, live reporting proves key, particularly blogposts with careful tagging, our YouTube channel and twitter with or without a specific hashtag.

• Live reporting takes people, social reporters. For a Forum event, we usually have two people writing blogposts, one person interviewing and blogging, plus a cameraman. It also takes fast broadband speed for the uploads.

• For the Forum, we decided against having screen/s with live coverage within sight of the participants. We’ve felt that this would be an unhelpful distraction. For the CASC Conference, however, it was a vital part of proceedings. For that, we had two large screens, one with live blogposts, and the other a twitter stream using with the hashtag #CASC (now being used for other stuff).

• Making a video or podcast interview is disruptive to a face-to-face conversation – and the filming requires different lighting. So this needs a physically separate space close to where the main conversation is happening.

• Each meeting is carefully facilitated. If there are lots of participants, then we bring in a team of facilitators. (For the 2011 CASC Conference, there was a team of three facilitators for close on 100 people in one very large room; for the New Optimists Forum events with a dozen or so participants, we’ve had one facilitator.)
  

• Follow-up stuff is as important as the social reporting during the event. It’s important for several reasons: As well as a really useful record for us, and generating some of vital data for the scenarios, it’s a public record. Hence it (a) keeps interested people informed, (b) draws in new people,  and (c) ups the ante for us to deliver the next bit really well and on time. And (d) it helps keep the website high on the Google rankings.

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An aside for those who’ve never used twitter: Years ago, I went to the Venice Carnival. We arrived from the airport to a stuffy hotel room. I flung open the window, and was immediately hit by an enormous blast of noise, a din I’d never heard before. For a few seconds I had no idea what this loud cacophony was.

It was the sound of thousands of people talking, and thousands of birds doing their particular form of tweeting. And the moment I exclaimed my delight at the buzz of it all, I became a part of that din.

Here’s how I’ve listened into and joined the social media din:

• As with the Venetian din, it takes concentration to eavesdrop on individual conversations, not least ‘cos most of them in a language that’s not your native tongue. At first, it’s only occasionally that you hear a voice you understand.
• I seek and follow a mix of the familiar (people I share face-to-face conversation with) and others, including the stalwarts of the science communication world and the media . . . a few of whom I’ve now met face-to-face.
• I’ve learned to follow hashtags (and thereby whilst on a train in the Scottish lowlands, I knew that Mubarack’s goons had driven their tanks into Tahrir Square within seconds of it happening).
• I’ve edged into conversations, sometimes missing the edge and plunging in crassly. Very often I’ve missed things, or gone unnoticed.
• Most tweets and most blogposts go unnoticed, unacknowledged. Or so you think. Their collective impact is significant.
• Some are noticed, really noticed, and by bigwigs too . . . and in the moment. (see this Podnosh blogpost which drew in Richard Burden MP who then wrote to Sainsbury’s Justin King about food poverty in Birmingham.)

Social reporting has enabled us to let anyone and everyone eavesdrop and comment on a series of meetings among scientists. And because these “outside’ comments are live, they filter ‘inside’, becoming an integral part of ‘our’ conversations whilst also seeping into others.

Sticky ideas and concepts reiterate. This speeds up the generation of ideas among participants — which means you can get through a hefty, complex agenda with some rapidity. It also means that participants and those outside the room have a different and often richer understanding of matters.

An added point: The impact on the scientists themselves has been unexpectedly beneficial. They know what they say is being heard. They can see in the video, blogpost, podcast, evidence that they’ve made a contribution — and this evidence stays online long after the event. They thereby feel as though they’ve been heard, that their voice matters.

As it does.

They’re hugely enjoying all this. I am too. And it might make our world a better place.

And so a few weeks ago, the city parks boss Darren Share, Jim Parle and I met to talk about what we could do to celebrate the great stuff that’s already going on, and encourage much, much more. 

Out of that conversation was born GrowingBirmingham.org only last week.

We’ve been delighted by the response so far, and are busily finding people who can make it all happen. If you’re one of them, please get in touch via here.

The centre will be at Winterbourne Gardens at Birmingham University, opening in September.

As someone who has challenged Sarah-Jane Watkinson to enable me, a known mint killer, to make my balcony a cost-beneficial living larder (of which more later), the news couldn’t have better timing. And for the city, it is simply wonderful.

But let’s not get too carried away by notions of growing our own food. Sure, it’s great for individuals and family. Sure, horticulture is a great career for youngsters, offering bags of opportunities at all levels. Sure, it’s great for our physical and mental well-being, plus civic and social benefits too.

But it ain’t going to feed a city.

What will? Deciding that rough-and-ready numbers are better than nowt, I’ve extrapolated figures from the info on the side of a baked bean tin in my cupboard.

Assuming there are one million of us here in Birmingham, here’s what the Heinz info says it’ll take to feed us per day, and per year:

Exciting times afoot! And this week . . .

World-renown Carrot City is in Birmingham this month, running a series of events hosted by the ever-wonderful MADE and BCU — with an exhibition at Millennium Point until 6th April, and a day-seminar at BCU this Thursday.

It’s a US-based  travelling exhibition, showcasing projects from all over the world, about how urban design at all scales can enable the production of food in a city.

Andre Viljoen from Brighton University will be kicking off the BCU seminar at 1100 (Room 381), the architect who’s designed community projects, including urban agriculture ones. Then lunch and plenty of time to see the exhibition, followed by Anne Cranston, Director of Groundwork West Midlands, asking the highly pertinent question From Mushrooms to Orchids: Do Community Growing Projects Really Work? rounding off with Jayne Bradley on her fledgling Edible Eastside project.

Book your free place by emailing carrotcity@bcu.ac.uk

See you there! (And if you want some background reading on the matter, take a quick scamper through our stuff to date on agroecology and urban agriculture here.)

We’ve completed the first, divergent phase of the scenarios we’ve generating about food futures for Birmingham 2050; i.e. what we’ll be eating in here in forty-odd years’ time.

As part of the next convergent phase, we’re running three more Forum events in the next couple of months:

• 11th June in collaboration with the EU Smart-AgriFood project: The semantic web: How it might radically change the food supply chain.
• May-June (date tbd) with the generous support Cofely GDF Suez and the law firm Freeth Cartwright: The impact of distributed energy generation (i.e. the potential impact EBRI technologies)
• 23rd May: We’re also leading a seminar hosted by the Warwick Crop Centre with plant scientists and social scientists on feeding large conurbations/megacities.

• “Growing Birmingham” took a big step forward this week. Medic, allotment holder, foodie Professor Jim Parle and I met with Darren Share, the Parks boss in the city. Darren, representing the biggest landowner in the city and a wealth of horticultural wisdom, as keen as anyone to do his bit to support local food growing, which is brilliant news.

• We submitted a New Optimists response to Places for the Future, a planning document for the city.

• There’s work-in-progress to host a large scale national event, funding permitting, in early 2013 in the city. Working title: Feeding Birmingham: The challenge facing megacities. We’re planning on involving as many youngsters in the city as we can through the talent and energy within the Birmingham Leadership Foundation.

Indeed, they do.

One of the wonderfully cheering outcomes of the New Optimists Forum has been the outpouring of news of all sorts of community fruit’n'veg growing, and its impact.

Here’s a collation of blogposts and links about it all in this single document: Agroecology & urban farming.

This contains a brief blurb about who we are, and the scenario planning the Forum is doing — plus a list of the brilliant scientists and others who’ve been deliberating things. Then there’s a one-pager list of quotations, not just from the scientist participants, also some from commentators on the blogpost.

After that is the bulk of the Report, all the blogposts (plus some comments) that inform us about agroecology and urban farming — from a plum tree in an allotment through the semantic web, vertical farming, Brum’s lively allotments to the All Party Parliamentary Group for Agroecology (that last sounds a bit stuffy, but it wasn’t. It couldn’t have been, what with Todmorden’s Mary Clear telling it as it is . . . )

note: This Report is in draft form, to be completed when we’ve had the analyses from the 1st March Forum events . . . and your comments, suggestions, amendments too please!

So we wrote one and this is it: NewOptimists_Response_Places4TheFuture_SPDDoc. (By we, I mean the wonderfully insightful Matthew Green @policyworks wrote most of it, and yours truly tagged along.)

Today’s city leaders in the UK have never had to think about food supplies in the way their forebears did, and in the way their successors must — and that might mean feel-good activities such as wildflower meadows on housing estates, artichokes and brassicas in Summerfield Park, guerilla spud-growing becoming mainstream, our allotments seen by everyone on the Council as a valuable resource not an obligation . . .

And ensuring infrastructures to allow the efficient logistics of a supply chain delivering a couple of million or so calories into our bellies every day  . . .

And supporting emerging technologies such as the semantic web, vertical farming and a zillion other things we can’t begin to imagine . . .

Meanwhile, these are the recommendations we made — please add or comment upon them; the Council guys will take note!

• We make better use of the green infrastructure that exists within our city.
• We establish an expectation that green infrastructure should be productive and not passive.
• The planting of fruit bearing hedges and trees should be encouraged as part of the city’s green infrastructure management strategy.
• We use communal agriculture and growing as an active policy to build community cohesion, to improve health and wellbeing and to spur community economic development.
• We explore opportunities to transfer unwanted publicly owned land into community land trusts with covenants to guarantee its use as productive green infrastructure.
• We map Birmingham’s food flows so that we have an informed understanding of the food that comes into the city each day, and how it is distributed and consumed across the city.
• We identify, access and share data on local food supply chains to open up distribution networks so that locally produced food can make it into existing mainstream food supply chain, and enable Birmingham citizens to take advantage of any radical changes in food supply systems when emerging or nascent technologies, such as the semantic web, create new opportunities for growers, distributors and consumers.

In addition:

• There is a compelling case — both productive and economic — to replacing annuals and hybrids in public planting with perennial edibles like artichokes, asparagus, rhubarb, brassicas and onions. Similarly replacing rye grass with ornamental pollinators and wild flowers offers a double dividend of reduced maintenance costs and a more productive ecosystem.
• There is scope to capitalise on the urban heat island effect by cultivating delicate high value crops such as herbs which at present are generally airfreighted into the UK and transported to Birmingham by road.

We add another point:

All of the ideas we have described are possible within our current techno-economic paradigm.  Over the life of the SPD though, and certainly over the duration of the period up to 2050 that the New Optimists Forum are considering, new technologies will develop.

Some of them will be “game changers” as far as food production and localised food production are concerned.  One such game-changer already on the horizon is bioenergy reactors such as the new £16.5m European Bioenergy Research Institute at Aston University.

The promise of this technology is a distributed carbon-negative energy generation system using biowaste to produce electricity and heat, with two useful by-products: hydrogen (for fuel cells) and biochar (a nitrogen and phosphate ‘fixer’ in some local soils).

Access to such a plentiful and clean source of energy would make food production systems which are currently prohibitively costly in energy terms, systems such greenhouse cultivation and intensive hydroponic and aquaponic “vertical farming”, viable.

The viability of this type of energy generation at a small scale would also present significant opportunities for individuals, communities and businesses to become shareholders in their own power supply system.

The current draft SPD, whilst discussing future renewables in some detail, does not make any link between these renewables and the food production possibilities they offer.

It would seem to us to be very important to consider this from a planning perspective. Modifications to the planning policies will almost certainly be needed in order to permit such developments within the city boundaries.

And, of course, we responded to specific questions presented in this draft SPD; for those, download our response from this blogpost, or from the New Optimists publications page here.

Chris Brewster spoke about the semantic web (see video clip) at the 1st March New Optimists Forum event. Before I watched it, I’d hardly heard of the “semantic web” and had no idea of its potential impact on what we will be eating.

Intrigued by what he’d said, I had another conversation with him yesterday.  I want his take on  how the semantic web might enable small-scale producers enter the current supply chain.

That ain’t the half if it!

The semantic web might well radically change, even destroy the current supply chain — potentially generate as big a change as that we’ve seen in the book and music industries.

How might, for example, the semantic web change these two following situations?

The first: Last summer was a brilliant year for mirabelles. If you’ve never eaten one of these cherry-sized, yellow plums, you’ve missed one of the most delicious, more-ish fruits on the planet.

This summer, Harborne’s M&S had a few 250gm packs at nearly a fiver a pop, the first time ever I’d seen them for sale in the UK.

I didn’t buy any as a friend, a local allotment-holder, had a tree full of ‘em, hundreds, perhaps a few thousand kilograms of ‘em. He was frantically giving them away.

What if he could have done the equivalent an Amazon or an e-bay, and put this harvest for sale on-line, along with automated generation of metadata about all sorts of info about it from GPS to a photo? Who’d be interested in accessing that data via their own IT systems? M&S?

The second: For a fee, Urban Harvest (www.urbanharvestbham.org) will take the produce of  your apple tree and turn it into apple juice, delicious stuff that tastes like nothing I’ve ever tasted before. You get n-bottles in exchange, and he sells the surplus to make their currently hand-to-mouth business exist.

At the moment, they depend on people with laden apple trees giving them a ring. And they depend word-of-mouth and on going round restaurants to sell the surplus they have. All very labour intensive, all very small-scale — and very few people get to even taste the sublime nectar they make.

What if someone with a laden apple tree in their garden could put this info, along with the relevant data on-line? What would be the impact on the Urban Harvest business if they could access this kind of data from everyone with a fruiting tree?

And a third idea from the consumer end of things: What if thee and me could buy local food produce — the mirabelle plum, the Urban Harvest apple juice (a valued-added part of the neighbour’s apple tree), a couple of trout from the acquaponics system run by the local secondary school along with other supplies — as easily as we can now do all our grocery shopping on-line?

What kind of organisations would flourish? What new players would come in? How would the current big players react?

Ellie Richards had the brief to categorise what the guys said and, where possible, draw out causal links.

She’s created two broad-brush possibilities, Pathways to Famine, and Pathways to Feast.

Both are written in the same format with the issues, trends and drivers listed in diagrammatic form, and each uses the same colour-coding.

This makes for a very interesting comparison of what-ifs when, for example, food sourcing changes. It also highlights the importance of local food supplies — which for us in Birmingham means changing our relationship with our hinterlands as well as looking to urban food growing.

As I write this, Mike Whitby is on BBC Radio 4 Today being interviewed by Evan Davis. He has just said that Birmingham owns 40% of the land in the city — and that conversation is all about economic development, inward investment, pension funds, HS2, the mix of opportunity . . .

It’d be interesting to hear the city leadership in 2030 being interviewed about what Birmingham has done with its considerable land bank which is, let’s face it, mostly unsuitable for the growing of food  . . .

Because it was a new idea to some of the participant scientists there, I reckon it might also be new for lots of others too. Hence this blogpost.

Take satellite imaging, information technology and farmers able to locate their precise position using GPS or equivalent, and they can distribute water and fertiliser very precisely — within a square metre or so, rather than spray a whole field.

It also means particular crops can be traced precisely. In addition, farmers — or, indeed, small-scale local food producers — can build up useful data records of their soil and its productivity, and its response to agricultural or horticultural practice as well as weather or other climate conditions.

It means, too, that there will be a wealth of data on the impact of agricultural practices on the environment. No surprise then that precision agriculture is now seen as an important technology for sustainable food production.

For a useful fact sheet on precision farming, see Farming Futures Fact Sheet 24: Focus on Precision Technology.