Urban Ag is hot stuff these days. Food gardens in the city—what's not to love?

Urban farming in Seattle has for long been supported by Seattle Tilth and Seattle's P-Patch program, among others, while more recently groups such as Alleycat Acres are joining in on the fun (check here for a comprehensive list of urban farming organizations).

But while urban farming offers wonderful social and cultural benefits, how much real impact might it have on the unsustainable global food systems that currently keep us all fed?



It has been proposed that 5,000 square feet of land in Seattle would be sufficient to produce enough food annually for one person. For the 600,000 people that live in Seattle, that translates 108 square miles of land suitable for growing crops. Given that Seattle's total land area is only 84 square miles, it's clear that Seattle could never come anywhere close to being self-sustaining within its own borders.

The other big problem with farming small, scattered plots in a populated urban area is that it's difficult if not impossible to make a living wage doing it, as noted in this recent Grist article, which concludes that:

Any realistic vision of "green cities" sees them as consumption hubs in a larger regional foodshed: dense population centers surrounded not by sprawling suburbs, but rather by diversified farms of a multiplicity of scales.

This idea of a dense central city surrounded by a permanent green belt is not new, and was first formalized just over a century ago by Ebeneezer Howard, who called it a Garden City. We're kind of slow learners. Blame it on a 100-year oil binge.

But this is where Kent comes in.

I was down there for work for a few days recently, and it's totally jaw-dropping to see what was not long ago a productive farming valley so overrun with development, much of it industrial and warehouse. And here is where opportunity lies to help create a sustainable food system for Seattle.

I am not proposing that all those economically valuable industrial uses should be bulldozed tomorrow to make room for farms. But I do think we should start exploring how to integrate farms back into the land use mix. Because even with all the new development, if you drive around the Valley there's still lots of available, underutilized land, as in the photo below (dig the moody camera phone images):



The flat valley floor is crisscrossed with a network of absurdly wide roads, many of which are overkill. How many people could be fed by the land under the pavement of the one expansive intersection shown below?



If the movement to localize our food system is motivated by concerns about peak oil and/or climate change, then those same concerns might also lead one to expect that some of the industries located in the Kent Valley are likely to take a hit.



For example, unless they diversify into products more peak-oil-resilient than airplanes, such as trains or wind turbines, it's hard to imagine how Boeing won't be in for some serious contractions in the coming decades. And what about transportation-intensive retailers like Ikea? Picture the sprawling blue Ikea warehouses and parking structures converted to greenhouses or food distribution centers.

As energy prices inevitably rise, economies are destined to become more local. Fortuitously, the resultant changes that are likely to occur in places like Kent will further expand possibilities for local food production.  As oil-intensive, old-economy businesses wane, land values will drop, space will open up, and farming will become more viable.

If that scenario plays out, the low-rise, pavement-filled built environment in much of the Kent Valley would be relatively easy to convert back to farmland. And it wouldn't require the messy undertaking of displacing residences.

With careful planning, industry and farming could coexist congenially during the transition, and perhaps it would be advantageous to preserve a mix of both over the long term. There would likely be unforeseen opportunities for district-scale synergy, such as capturing rain water off of large warehouse roofs to irrigate nearby farms, or production of methane or bio-fuel from crop waste to power neighboring industrial uses.

As with transportation, the transformation to sustainable food systems is going to take big-picture thinking and integrated planning at the regional scale. That is not say small-scale urban agriculture within dense cities isn't a good thing---every bit helps. But we shouldn't underestimate the scale and scope of challenge we're up against. Have we really not reached the point at which bold action would be justified, such as the establishment of a regional food systems planning authority?

One of the last remaining viable dairy farms in the Kent Valley is Smith Brothers Farms, from which my family gets weekly deliveries of milk---the proverbial milk man! It's the most sustainable food we buy.



P.S. I say we start immediately with the ridiculous swaths of useless irrigated landscaping that lines most of the new roads and parking lots in the Kent Valley, for example as in the photo above.