Urban Farming Solutions

When calculating my carbon footprint after the first class a few weeks ago, I was surprised by the amount of space "services," like food shipping and transportation, took up in my pie chart. I never realized, before doing that calculation, how much just purchasing food shipped from far away affected my personal footprint. For this post, I did some research on urban farming and found a great article about how this trend could be an important solution to the massive amounts of carbon emitted during the process of produce shipping. The New York Times article I chose called, "Rooftop Garden Climbs Down a Wall," not only describes an innovative urban farming solution, but one that is coming out of the economic realm.

The article discusses how a Rochester, New York sheet metal manufacturer, Barthelmes Manufacturing Company, and inventor George Irwin have teamed up to create an urban farming product called "edible walls." These "walls" are metal panels that can be filled with soil and seeds and hung vertically on a building's exterior walls. They are not only used as space-saving gardens where families can grow and then eat their own produce, but they also serve to help insulate a building in order to save on both heating and air conditioning costs and energy consumption in general. This solution is a particularly effective action because not only does it have multiple "green" benefits, but "edible walls" can be produced at a very low cost for the manufacturer. This is especially important because it gives businesses in other places an incentive to do the same and invest in urban farming products, making it a very easily replicable solution.

This particular solution does give me hope because many arguments against moving to more environmentally sustainable practices claim that the move would harm productivity and be extra costly. "Edible walls" made up 15% of this company's revenue when this article was published and they are neither expensive for them to produce or for the consumer to buy. This article helps to show that maybe the seemingly permanent producer-consumer relationship and environmental sustainability can somehow be fused together for a significant change in lifestyle.

The link to this article is as follows: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/19/business/energy-environment/19WALLS.html?ref=urbanagriculture