Building Green Economies with Integrated Farming

Building Green Economies With Integrated Farming

Building green economies with integrative agriculture involves an integrated approach to managing landscapes. This approach boosts productivity, enhances resilience, and reduces greenhouse gas emissions. Integrated farming systems embrace a comprehensive and interconnected approach to agriculture, incorporating various components such as crops, livestock, trees, aquaculture, and the generation of renewable energy. These systems are designed to enhance productivity, profitability, and employment generation for small/marginal farmers, ensuring their food and nutrition security.

The recent pandemic and new geo-political assets leading to wars and energetic crisis, are highlighting the vulnerability of the urban systems of the United States, European countries and beyond, presenting us with various scenarios for anti-utopian futures. Indeed, cities are strongly dependent on outside resources, resulting in a limited resilience capacity. As more than half of world population lives in cities, this aspect acquires particular importance, especially for what concerns food purchase. Moreover, due to the constant urbanization, current food systems will have to adjust to satisfy the rising food demand for an increasing urban population. Cities depend on huge and complex international supply networks, relying on distant elsewhere for food, energy, and consumer goods. Accordingly, the complex food chains that bring food into urban settlements are subject to multiple systemic risks where economic, social or political shocks in one region of the World could influence food distribution and production globally. 

Furthermore, industrial agriculture is creating vast, mono-cultural surfaces, where large amounts of synthetic herbicides and pesticides are often applied, causing the desertification of agricultural soils, the depletion and pollution of important water resources and the loss of biodiversity. The environmental effects of these practices are devastating, and it is possible to see their impact in the four ecological pillars of the food system: soil, water, biodiversity, and climate. The depletion of soils together with the scarcity of land and a reduced capacity of fresh water reservoirs mark the necessity for a transition towards more sustainable and fair production systems. In this scenario, even if it is generally acknowledged that the modern agro-business will be able to produce enough food for a growing population in the future, it is also recognized that this will not occur in an inclusive and sustainable manner. Several solutions have emerged, promoting a shift towards more sustainable food production practices, often complementary to each other. A strategy that is catching on a growing interest is the possibility to implement food production systems within cities and large urban environments, with the objective of promoting local and fresh food for the urban population. The recent fortune of this practice, known as Urban Agriculture (UA), is connected to its capacity to target both urban and agricultural issues, proposing solutions that promote a sustainable transition of urban food systems as well as new healthy urban lifestyles in future cities. The confluence of users, business, and resources like land, labor, energy, and water together with a ready-made market for all kinds of food produce, make cities the ideal hubs for a renovated local food production. Here, citizens are not only the final users but could also be the co-producers of new UA based food systems.

In this context, making cities partially autonomous as regards the production of vegetal crops and energy is crucial to create more resilient urban systems, capable of absorbing possible shocks in the food supply chain at the global scale. In this sense, the technological development of new soilless production technologies (e.g. hydroponics, aeroponics, and aquaponics) theoretically allows today to integrate intensive food production in urban areas in and on mixed use buildings and districts. Cities, in fact, abound in vacant or under-used spaces like horizontal and vertical surfaces, such as rooftops, façades, squares, and interior spaces, that can actively host a diffuse, large-scale urban food production, with the advantage of taking off pressure from agricultural land. The practice of integrating soilless farming systems in the built environment is today named Building-Integrated Agriculture (BIA), which is characterized by the non-use of farmland or open space, thereby differentiating building-related forms of UA from those in parks, gardens, and urban wastelands. BIA can be considered as a practice complementary to ground-based UA (Fig. 1), that, in advance, offers opportunities to exploit the resource-efficiency synergies between buildings and farming. In this sense, BIA should not be considered just as a food-related practice, but also a tool for planners and practitioners to boost future cities sustainable development and green buildings design, representing a clear opportunity for planners, architects, and engineers to use soilless food production systems to create a new urban metabolism. Thus, BIA closed-loop systems may recycle and reuse nearly every element from the building to the farming process, including energy, water, nutrients and even CO2. However, the future implementation of BIA models within the urban environment requires new regulation frameworks as well as an advanced technical knowledge of the production systems, which, so far, may have limited the expansion of these types of UA compared to ground-based practices. In this context, understanding the strengths and weaknesses of BIA is crucial to develop precise guidelines for its expansion in cities.