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Food production and resource use of urban farms and gardens: a five-country study
There is a lack of data on resources used and food produced at urban farms. This hampers attempts to quantify the environmental impacts of urban agriculture or craft policies for sustainable food production in cities. To address this gap, we used a citizen science approach to collect data from 72 ur...
Autores principales: | , , , , , , , , , , , , , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
Springer Paris
2023
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9891751/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36748098 http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s13593-022-00859-4 |
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author | Dorr, Erica Hawes, Jason K. Goldstein, Benjamin Fargue-Lelièvre, Agnès Fox-Kämper, Runrid Specht, Kathrin Fedeńczak, Konstancja Caputo, Silvio Cohen, Nevin Poniży, Lidia Schoen, Victoria Górecki, Tomasz Newell, Joshua P. Jean-Soro, Liliane Grard, Baptiste |
author_facet | Dorr, Erica Hawes, Jason K. Goldstein, Benjamin Fargue-Lelièvre, Agnès Fox-Kämper, Runrid Specht, Kathrin Fedeńczak, Konstancja Caputo, Silvio Cohen, Nevin Poniży, Lidia Schoen, Victoria Górecki, Tomasz Newell, Joshua P. Jean-Soro, Liliane Grard, Baptiste |
author_sort | Dorr, Erica |
collection | PubMed |
description | There is a lack of data on resources used and food produced at urban farms. This hampers attempts to quantify the environmental impacts of urban agriculture or craft policies for sustainable food production in cities. To address this gap, we used a citizen science approach to collect data from 72 urban agriculture sites, representing three types of spaces (urban farms, collective gardens, individual gardens), in five countries (France, Germany, Poland, United Kingdom, and United States). We answered three key questions about urban agriculture with this unprecedented dataset: (1) What are its land, water, nutrient, and energy demands? (2) How productive is it relative to conventional agriculture and across types of farms? and (3) What are its contributions to local biodiversity? We found that participant farms used dozens of inputs, most of which were organic (e.g., manure for fertilizers). Farms required on average 71.6 L of irrigation water, 5.5 L of compost, and 0.53 m(2) of land per kilogram of harvested food. Irrigation was lower in individual gardens and higher in sites using drip irrigation. While extremely variable, yields at well-managed urban farms can exceed those of conventional counterparts. Although farm type did not predict yield, our cluster analysis demonstrated that individually managed leisure gardens had lower yields than other farms and gardens. Farms in our sample contributed significantly to local biodiversity, with an average of 20 different crops per farm not including ornamental plants. Aside from clarifying important trends in resource use at urban farms using a robust and open dataset, this study also raises numerous questions about how crop selection and growing practices influence the environmental impacts of growing food in cities. We conclude with a research agenda to tackle these and other pressing questions on resource use at urban farms. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s13593-022-00859-4. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-9891751 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2023 |
publisher | Springer Paris |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-98917512023-02-02 Food production and resource use of urban farms and gardens: a five-country study Dorr, Erica Hawes, Jason K. Goldstein, Benjamin Fargue-Lelièvre, Agnès Fox-Kämper, Runrid Specht, Kathrin Fedeńczak, Konstancja Caputo, Silvio Cohen, Nevin Poniży, Lidia Schoen, Victoria Górecki, Tomasz Newell, Joshua P. Jean-Soro, Liliane Grard, Baptiste Agron Sustain Dev Research Article There is a lack of data on resources used and food produced at urban farms. This hampers attempts to quantify the environmental impacts of urban agriculture or craft policies for sustainable food production in cities. To address this gap, we used a citizen science approach to collect data from 72 urban agriculture sites, representing three types of spaces (urban farms, collective gardens, individual gardens), in five countries (France, Germany, Poland, United Kingdom, and United States). We answered three key questions about urban agriculture with this unprecedented dataset: (1) What are its land, water, nutrient, and energy demands? (2) How productive is it relative to conventional agriculture and across types of farms? and (3) What are its contributions to local biodiversity? We found that participant farms used dozens of inputs, most of which were organic (e.g., manure for fertilizers). Farms required on average 71.6 L of irrigation water, 5.5 L of compost, and 0.53 m(2) of land per kilogram of harvested food. Irrigation was lower in individual gardens and higher in sites using drip irrigation. While extremely variable, yields at well-managed urban farms can exceed those of conventional counterparts. Although farm type did not predict yield, our cluster analysis demonstrated that individually managed leisure gardens had lower yields than other farms and gardens. Farms in our sample contributed significantly to local biodiversity, with an average of 20 different crops per farm not including ornamental plants. Aside from clarifying important trends in resource use at urban farms using a robust and open dataset, this study also raises numerous questions about how crop selection and growing practices influence the environmental impacts of growing food in cities. We conclude with a research agenda to tackle these and other pressing questions on resource use at urban farms. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s13593-022-00859-4. Springer Paris 2023-02-01 2023 /pmc/articles/PMC9891751/ /pubmed/36748098 http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s13593-022-00859-4 Text en © The Author(s) 2023 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Open AccessThis article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) . |
spellingShingle | Research Article Dorr, Erica Hawes, Jason K. Goldstein, Benjamin Fargue-Lelièvre, Agnès Fox-Kämper, Runrid Specht, Kathrin Fedeńczak, Konstancja Caputo, Silvio Cohen, Nevin Poniży, Lidia Schoen, Victoria Górecki, Tomasz Newell, Joshua P. Jean-Soro, Liliane Grard, Baptiste Food production and resource use of urban farms and gardens: a five-country study |
title | Food production and resource use of urban farms and gardens: a five-country study |
title_full | Food production and resource use of urban farms and gardens: a five-country study |
title_fullStr | Food production and resource use of urban farms and gardens: a five-country study |
title_full_unstemmed | Food production and resource use of urban farms and gardens: a five-country study |
title_short | Food production and resource use of urban farms and gardens: a five-country study |
title_sort | food production and resource use of urban farms and gardens: a five-country study |
topic | Research Article |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9891751/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36748098 http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s13593-022-00859-4 |
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