Bad ideas: community farms

There is a growing movement arguing for the repurposing of urban spaces for food production. Several benefits are suggested:

-          Local produce is more sustainable because it doesn’t require extensive transport networks

-          Community farms ensure people have a more realistic idea of where their food comes from, the effort involved in making food and the value of food and food waste

-          Community farms bring people together

-          Community farms are aesthetically attractive

-          Community farming in first world countries reduces the demand for developing world           agricultural produce, improving food security there.

Aside from the second point, those all seem like very weak arguments to me. The last point is one of the most anti-development policy ideas I have come across.

Local produce is more sustainable, but it is also more expensive. It is unclear to me that the sustainability gains from community farming could not more efficiently be made elsewhere in the food supply chain. For example, for from mega farms has to be driven quite a long way to reach family plates, but hectares can be cultivated, sown and harvested on one tank of petrol in a combine harvester, whereas a community farm requires hours of effort and lots of commuting on the part of locals to get nowhere near that kind of output. Fossil fuel use is perhaps lower, but other resources are used with greater intensity, which suggests a net loss overall.

Let’s expand on this point. The way we currently farm is extremely efficient. In the absence of subsidies, we farm where the weather is ideal on large plots that benefit from economies of scale. What’s more, we employ farmers to do it—specialist food growers. By contrast, community farms are small scale, which prevents the use of things like combine harvesters, tractors and irrigation systems. They are installed in places where the comparative advantage of the land is for commerce—dense populations, extensive transport and financial infrastructure etc. And the staffs are almost exclusively amateur.

Specialisation is important. A doctor spends 5-10 years getting qualified to do their job. Once society has invested that much in an individual, we want them to focus on being a doctor. With all that training, their medical productivity is likely to be much higher than their farming productivity. So we don’t want them wasting limited time farming. Now if they enjoy gardening and want to spend some of their leisure time farming, that’s fine, but let’s not pretend these community farms are in any way ‘efficient’ in terms of allocating scarce resources.   

 

What they are good at is reducing transport associated with food. At present, we grow food all over the world and move it to where it is consumed. I ate an apple in Hong Kong farmed in New Zealand. This is environmentally costly. Transport uses a lot of fossil fuels and those are dirty. If instead of buying an apple at the supermarket you walk to the garden at the end of your block and pick up some apples you have contributed zero emissions.

But what are the gains here? The boat that brought those apples brought hundreds of thousands. How much carbon is actually embedded in a single apple I buy from the supermarket? How much are we gaining by sourcing super-locally? Is the retail level the best place to be making sustainability gains? Keep in mind that the supermarket stocks everything, so if I go to the supermarket once I get everything I need. If I go to the community garden I only get the fresh produce I need. I still need to buy meat, toilet paper, toothpaste etc. I’m going to be driving to the supermarket after all. I’ve just added another trip to my week. A trip I could have spent relaxing, or working as a doctor.

There are better ways to improve sustainability—more efficient ways. We could improve the quality of petrol used in transport ships. Lay more tracks so we can use trains to freight food rather than trucks. Source produce from within our nation or continent rather than overseas (and accept that some foods just don’t belong here, like rice). All of these would result in big gains at little cost. Unlike community farms, which result in massive hours invested for very little output.

Let’s look at some of the other arguments in favour.

Community farms are aesthetically attractive to some people. I am partial to them being on my block, but I imagine a raging right wing bankers who likes to live in a posh tower might not. I should also say that while I like the look of farms, I don’t like the look of the sanctimonious middle class hippies who make up the bulk of the staff. If people want to put in a farm, power to them, but I think I’d prefer a park.

Community farms bring people together. So do sports clubs and they use the same kinds of space. I’m all for a mix, but let’s take a vote on who wants what before we pass up an opportunity to put in a bowls club to instead install a farm. Let’s also make sure there are enough people willing to put time into a community farm. Gardening takes work. Who is going to do that work? How will volunteers be organised? How do you determine who is entitled to what produce from the garden? These issues could be surmounted without much trouble, but they are worth mentioning nonetheless.

First world community farms improve food security by reducing third world exports. This is one of the craziest things I’ve ever come across. It was in a piece at TheConversation some time ago. What this argument fails to realise is that developing world countries have an excess of food produce. It is often the only thing they can export and they need exports to get access to foreign currency with which to purchase imports of equipment with which to further their development. If demand for these imports declines in first world countries because of community farms it will be catastrophic for development. Third world populations will be locked into low value-added farming forever. Food security concerns in developing world circumstances almost always relate to the robustness and variability of harvests, not to output. The threat here is climate change, so community farming has some contribution to make, but not through the channel of demand for exports. To suggest that community farms in the first world will help the third world is to fail to understand the most basic issues in development studies.

A related point, with reference to a recent report on 4 corners: some people worry about the supply chains in global food, in particular their exploitation of the world’s vulnerable workers. If you spend 5 second working in development policy you realise pretty quickly that these sorts of things are almost unavoidable, and they certainly cannot be avoided by only buying locally. Not purchasing goods made in the developing world leads to the problem outlined above – a collapse of domestic industries in developing countries, lower employment levels (which leads to starvation—the opposite of food security), no export revenue and therefore no imports of capital goods for industrial upscaling, and protracted underdevelopment. Action on this front has to come through other channels like the ILO and labour law reform, but there is a strong race to the bottom in international supply chains which means action has to take place at a multilateral level. Individual consumers are the exact opposite of that.

That leaves us with: community farms give people, especially children, a better understanding of where food comes from, how much effort is embedded in it and the value of food waste. I think this is a valid reason to put in a community farm here and there, especially in schools. That’s not saying much. A few more farms in schools and the occasional community farm in existing parks would be good, I think, but not a game changer or anything. I certainly don’t think community farms are a critical feature of a futuristic society or anything, especially as compared to simple parks. It should also be noted that community farms give children a misleading image of farming viz. modern farming techniques i.e. how much effort goes into farming. I don’t know how much money we should be investing here, but I don’t think it’s much.

I’ve come across one other novel argument for urban farms: increasing the price of real estate. This comes from Detroit, where the collapse of the local manufacturing industry has seen the city shrink dramatically, leaving hundreds of vacant lots, falling asset prices and dangerous urban deserts where villains can hide. Several residents, including the mayor and local businesspeople, have suggested turning many of the vacant lots into farms. This takes land off the market, increasing the value of lots with existing buildings. Falling asset prices are thereby checked, with flow on effects for stabilising prices across other markets in the city. The farms would provide some jobs and potentially access to food for homeless and the like without upsetting the national farm industry because the scale is so small. They would also beautify areas at a cheaper cost than installing and maintaining gardens. This seems a sensible policy to me, but the circumstances are very unusual.

Let’s return to sustainability for a moment: it seems to me that the real issue is an absence of carbon pricing globally. That might seem a tangent, but wait: the unsustainable aspect of global food trading is the carbon cost of transport. If you could include that cost in produce then locally sourced food would inevitably become cheaper than long distance food. You could then get the reduction in carbon without catastrophically reducing the efficiency with which we produce food. Let’s work on that instead of encouraging people to start community farms.

Mark Fabian is a doctoral candidate in economics at the Australian National University