Source: Bright Farm Systems

Brightfarms was featured in the Wall Street Journal, in a video piece on the growing urban farming industry. Paul Lightfoot, BrightFarms CEO, savors the taste of locally grown tomatoes at The Science Barge.

While up front capital costs are higher, the Journal reports, rooftop greenhouse farms pay off with lower operating costs, an improved environmental impact and tastier vegetables.  The other enterprises featured in the 5-minute film are Brooklyn Granges and Gotham Greens.

Watch the video on the Brightfarms blog or over on WSJ.

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Image: renatamiyagusku via flickr CC

From “Beyond Food Miles” by Michael Bomford:

NOTE: The following article is concerned strictly with the energy equation of the food system and is intended to stimulate questions about how best to grow, transport, store and prepare (ideally local) foods. There are many reasons to favor local food, including supporting local economies and building local food security.

A locavore is “a person who endeavors to eat only locally produced food.”[1] What better diet could there be for an energy constrained world? After all, feeding Americans accounts for about 15% of US energy use,[2] and the average food item travels more than 5,000 miles from farm to fork.[3] It seems obvious that eating locally will go a long way to reducing food system energy use. Yet cracking the case of America’s energy-intensive food system demands that we look beyond the obvious.

A local diet can reduce energy use somewhat, but there are even more effective ways to tackle the problem. Single-minded pursuit of local food, without consideration of the bigger picture, can actually make things worse from an energy perspective.[4]

If you realize you’re spending too much money, the first thing to do is figure out where it’s going. Cutting back on pizza won’t make much difference if you’re spending most of your money on beer. Similarly, the first step in reducing food system energy use is to figure out where all the energy is going. That’s what a team of economists working for the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) did last year, in a report called “Energy Use in the US Food System“.

The report contains some surprises. Transportation is the smallest piece of the food system energy pie. Even farming isn’t a particularly big contributor. The big energy users turn out to be food processing, packaging, selling, and preparation. Our kitchens command the biggest slice of the pie, using twice as much energy as the farms that grew the food in the first place.

[...]

Read the full article by Michael Bomford at the Post-Carbon Institute for more information and access to the end-notes included above.

“Fair Miles: Recharting the food miles map“ by the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) & Oxfam warns that Western concern over climate change can do more harm than good if it cuts demand for food produced in developing nations. The authors say locally produced food can actually cause greater emissions of greenhouse gases, and that consumers can harm the livelihoods of poor farmers in developing nations if they stop buying their produce.

“Climate change will hit poorer rural people in developing nations first, fastest and hardest,” says James MacGregor of IIED. “High-value trade with such nations is critical to build rural economies that are resilient to climate change. The trade in fresh produce is one part of a global solution to this challenge…When consumers focus on ‘food miles’ they are ignoring the other social and environmental issues embedded in their shopping decisions…More than one million livelihoods in rural Africa are supported in part by UK consumption of imported fresh produce. We urge consumers to avoid knee-jerk reactions and think instead of ‘fair miles’ and recognise that there are also social and ethical aspects to choices about where food comes from.”

The researchers are not saying locally grown food is a poor choice. “Eating local food when it is in season is a critical element of a balanced diet, and is complementary to eating development-friendly foods out-of-season,” says MacGregor. The book argues that as farmers in developing nations contribute so little to climate change, they shouldn’t be penalised because we emit more in the West. It says consumers serious about changing their behaviour in order to reduce their greenhouse-gas emissions should be cycling or walking to their supermarket.

Extract:

The next time you sit down to dinner, really look at what’s on your plate. Where was that chicken raised? Those lentils grown? Which farm produced the green beans, potatoes, broccoli?  As supermarket foragers, people in the industrialised world make fast choices based on a range of criteria, from nutrition to simple craving.  But more and more are digging a bit further to discover where, and how, their plateload was produced.

The answers they unearth have big implications for our environment. The farm-to-fork ‘food chain’ is a source of the greenhouse gas emissions that are driving climate change — the overarching environmental issue of our time.  But we’re not just looking at a plateful of emissions here. Food is a social, political and economic issue too. Today’s ‘balanced’ diet involves a lot more than protein and carbohydrates. It’s about choosing from a diversity of sources — local to long-distance. By eating some imported fruit and vegetables, you could be making a choice that supports the livelihoods of poor farmers half a world away.

In this booklet we look at an overview of the globalised food business and its social and environmental implications; the pathways food takes from plot to plate; and the links between climate change, food choices and poverty in the developing world context. Its goal is to introduce you to the complex world of sustainable development and environmental accounting, and highlight how your selections in supermarket aisles affect people living in poverty — both as small farmers, and as members of climate-vulnerable communities.

We focus on African nations and the UK for reasons we explain below. Lessons learned from the trade between them, and comparisons of environmental and social costs across other countries, could provide a model for change all over the world.

The ultimate hope is that you, the consumer, will ask the right questions and make the right choices.

Download the booklet.

Source: Food Climate Research Network