Small-scale urban agriculture results in high yields but requires judicious management of inputs to achieve sustainability

Title
Small-scale urban agriculture results in high yields but requires judicious management of inputs to achieve sustainability
Publication Date
2019-01-02
Author(s)
McDougall, Robert
Kristiansen, Paul
( author )
OrcID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2116-0663
Email: pkristi2@une.edu.au
UNE Id une-id:pkristi2
Rader, Romina
( author )
OrcID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9056-9118
Email: rrader@une.edu.au
UNE Id une-id:rrader
Type of document
Journal Article
Language
en
Entity Type
Publication
Publisher
National Academy of Sciences
Place of publication
United States of America
DOI
10.1073/pnas.1809707115
UNE publication id
une:1959.11/28533
Abstract
A major challenge of the 21st century is to produce more food for a growing population without increasing humanity’s agricultural footprint. Urban food production may help to solve this challenge; however, little research has examined the productivity of urban farming systems. We investigated inputs and produce yields over a 1-y period in 13 small-scale organic farms and gardens in Sydney, Australia. We found mean yields to be 5.94 kg⋅m⁻², around twice the yield of typical Australian commercial vegetable farms. While these systems used land efficiently, economic and emergy (embodied energy) analyses showed they were relatively inefficient in their use of material and labor resources. Benefit-to-cost ratios demonstrated that, on average, the gardens ran at a financial loss and emergy transformity was one to three orders of magnitude greater than many conventional rural farms. Only 14.66% of all inputs were considered “renewable,” resulting in a moderate mean environmental loading ratio (ELR) of 5.82, a value within the range of many conventional farming systems. However, when all nonrenewable inputs capable of being substituted with local renewable inputs were replaced in a hypothetical scenario, the ELR improved markedly to 1.32. These results show that urban agriculture can be highly productive; however, this productivity comes with many trade-offs, and care must be taken to ensure its sustainability.
Link
Citation
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 116(1), p. 129-134
ISSN
1091-6490
0027-8424
Pubmed ID
30584110
Start page
129
End page
134
Rights
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

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