6 minute read
Climate emergency and local food production
Claire Thirlwall
Claire Thirlwall is director of Oxfordshire based landscape practice Thirlwall Associates. Her book “From Idea to Site: a project guide to creating better landscapes” for RIBA Books was published in January 2020.
For many UK residents, empty supermarket shelves in spring 2020 was their first experience of food scarcity.
Despite appearances, there was no lack of food, but rather our fragile supply chains were unable to adjust to the sudden surge in demand. It was an important reminder of the consequences of the just-in-time system. Reliant on short lead times and low stock levels, even small fluctuations in demand can affect food availability.
It isn’t clear if the subsequent surge in interest in vegetable growing was a response to the perceived scarcity, or just those with more time at home looking for a rewarding hobby. Google Trends shows a surge in worldwide searches for the term “growing vegetable” increasing fivefold in late March 2020, with other terms such as “easiest vegetables to grow” showing a 300% increase.
I was one of those suddenly growing vegetables at home for the first time in many years. I tried cucumber, watermelon and rare heritage tomatoes. It was a rewarding and welcome distraction, but despite the hours of time spent, it only counted for a tiny fraction of the food we needed, especially with all of our meals being made and eaten at home.
As ethnobotanist James Wong wrote in an April 2020 article “Why we’re all growing vegetables”, “it would be irresponsible of me not to clarify one thing: the claims that growing your own is cheap and easy are simply not based on facts.” He acknowledges that growing our own food is rewarding and benefits our physical and mental health, but concludes that “the idea that growing your own will guarantee the average person significant cost savings, let alone any semblance of self-sufficiency, is best left to 70s sitcoms.”
If conventional food growing at a domestic scale can be viewed as supplemental at most, what other options could be considered to build resilience into the supply of food in the city?
The shift towards home working, the greater focus on our immediate environment, and the increased interest in vegetable growing along with spells of perceived food insecurity, all combine to create an opportunity for the landscape profession to explore urban agriculture. Self-sufficiency may be an unrealistic aim for most, but by using case studies – such as Food4Familes and the Cambridge co-farming projects above [page 19] – we can design areas to provide clients and communities with ways to grow and access fresh, local produce.
Food4Families
Produce grown in community gardens
© Food for Families
Food4Families is an educational and development project that works with residents, helping them manage land in their local neighbourhood to grow food for their own consumption. Taking areas of unused land in Reading, Berkshire, residents work with professional horticulturalists to:
• Equip participants with the skills to grow food crops in a sustainable way
• Help participants reconnect food consumption with the process of food production
• Encourage healthier eating and lifestyle habits
• Facilitate learning about sustainable food production and resource use
• Develop participants’ understanding of the broader cultural, environmental, and economic dimensions of growing food crops
• Build a local network of communitybased food growing projects, and a broader community interest in healthy and sustainable food production and consumption
Regular sessions are held in the community gardens, and produce harvested is shared out amongst those who have helped that day.
The core team are supported by volunteers, including students from the local horticultural college. During the pandemic, Food4Familes has created the Veg4Reading (3) project to provide fresh fruit and vegetables from community allotments and private gardens across the town to supplement food parcels. Volunteers have worked within the COVID restrictions to safely grow, collect and distribute produce.
This model of community growing helps even out many of the challenges of growing in private gardens – gluts are balanced as crops are shared, the larger scale allows for more diversity, the shared maintenance reduces the time needed per person, and there is professional expertise on hand.
Forest Gardens
My first experience of a forest garden was at the offices of the Reading International Solidarity Centre (RISC), the charity which runs Food4Families. On the roof of their building, in just 30cm of soil and two floors above a busy Reading street, there is a tranquil garden that provides fruit, vegetables, flowers and herbs.
Erleigh Road Community Garden
© Claire Thirlwall
Created in 2001, the 200m² garden is home to over 185 species, including lemon, fig, liquorice and mulberry.
Forest gardens use a layered system, with groundcover, shrubs, small and large trees, root crops and climbers. The system is based on the structure of young woodland, and is a designed ecosystem.
Many of the plants used are perennials, with multiple uses such as medicine, fuel, dye and scent, as well as food. In a forest garden system, soil is rarely left uncovered, with nitrogen fixing plants used to reduce the need for fertilisers. There are no blocks of one species, reducing the impact of disease or predators, and the diversity of species helps attract pollinators.
RISC roof garden, Reading, June 2017
© Claire Thirlwall
Living Building Challenge – Urban Agriculture
A 2018 report by the Social Market Foundation and Kellogg’s found that access to fresh produce is an issue for more than 10 million people in the UK (6) . In areas of deprivation and districts poorly served by food stores, “food deserts” can develop, meaning those with no access to a car or poor mobility are dependent on small convenience stores can often find it difficult to buy healthy, affordable food.
The Living Building Challenge, discussed in the Autumn 2019 issue (7) , tries to address this challenge by including an element of local food production. This construction standard requires that projects “integrate opportunities for connecting the community to locally grown fresh food.”
International Living Future Institute
© ILFL
The requirements vary depending on the location of the project – for a rural location, 20% of the project area would need to be dedicated to growing food, whereas a dense urban site would only require 2%. If this level of provision isn’t achievable, sites must provide weekly community access to healthy local food, such as a farmers’ market. Urban agriculture can include livestock, aquaculture, hydroponics, orchards or apiaries, but the produce must be for human consumption.
All non-domestic building projects require a resilience strategy, meaning that a minimum of 3 days of food needs to be kept on site to cover 75% of the building’s full-time occupancy. Using public and private buildings to build food resilience into communities, by using them as a store, provides potential places of refuge during natural disasters or other emergencies.
Food shortages on supermarket shelves
© istockphoto
References
1 J Wong, ‘Why we’re all growing vegetables | James Wong’, in The Guardian, 12 April 2020, section Life and style, https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/ 2020/apr/12/james-wong-on-gardens-grow-your-ownvegetables-for-fun [accessed 11 November 2020].
2 ‘About food4families’, https://www.food4families.org. uk/AboutF4f.cfm [accessed 11 November 2020].
3 ‘Veg4Reading: Growing and Distributing Fresh Produce in Reading’, p.4, https://www.food4families.org.uk/ Veg4Reading.cfm [accessed 13 November 2020].
4 M Crawford, Creating a forest garden: working with nature to grow edible crops, Reprinted with minor amendments; Hier auch später erschienene, unveränderte Nachdrucke, Totnes, Devon, Green Books, 2012.
5 ‘Living Building Challenge 4.0’, International Living Future Institute, 2019, p. 31, https://living-future.org/ lbc/.
6 ‘What are the barriers to eating healthily in the UK?’, in Social Market Foundation, https://www.smf.co.uk/ publications/barriers-eating-healthily-uk/ [accessed 20 November 2020].
7 ‘Landscape Journal – Autumn 2019: The Climate Emergency Edition | Landscape Institute’, https:// www.landscapeinstitute.org/journal/landscapejournal-autumn-2019-climate-emergency-edition/ [accessed 13 November 2020].
