In cities, small towns and rural areas across the United States, especially hollowed-out cities such as Detroit and St. Louis, food deserts have appeared. Food deserts are areas that have a lack of healthy and fresh food within close proximity to residents. In many impoverished communities food deserts present difficulty in accessing healthy food. Instead, local residents are forced to purchase frozen food, junk food and fast food to sustain themselves.
A proposed solution to this problem is urban farms/community gardens. In a city like St. Louis, which has seen urban decline for decades, there are vacant lots galore. If no one is willing to develop the land into housing or businesses to combat food deserts it might seem plausible to use the land for something like a community garden. There is one problem though: urban farms and community gardens are not good at providing enough food to sustain a large population and waste valuable urban land.
Most estimates say that roughly one acre of land can produce enough food for one person per year. There is not enough land in a densely populated area to grow the food needed to sustain people in the neighborhoods urban farms serve. Modern industrialized agriculture, with its fertilizers, genetically modified organisms and mechanization, is far more effective at producing the large quantities of food people need.
How about vertical farming – growing plants in tall buildings and warehouses?
That still has problems. Although vertical farms can conserve land, they require more energy for artificial lighting, cost more and have a higher overall carbon footprint. The economics of vertical farming do not pan out. Why pay for lighting to grow food when sunlight is free? These setbacks lead to vertical farming as an inferior method of growing crops.
Urban farms are a terrible use of urban land. If we want vacant land to be redeveloped, we should focus on redeveloping it. Building a small community garden is not going to revitalize a city ravaged by suburbanization and deindustrialization. Urban farms are even being built in housing-scarce cities like New York. It is not the best use of land to build a small, unproductive farm.
Cities should focus on providing the goods and services that they produce best – and that is not agriculture. Rural areas should be the ones to grow the food. People and places should focus on what they are best at producing. The specialization of labor is how the modern world is built.
The best solution for solving the food desert crisis is publicly owned grocery stores. Municipally owned grocery stores have the potential to be a successful model when the private sector fails to provide. Some rural towns in Kansas and Florida have seen success in providing healthy food to local communities and fulfilling the need for fresh, high-quality food in food deserts.
Many people in rural communities have to travel for miles to get high-quality groceries. Municipally owned or subsidized stores get around the need for making a profit by making a local grocery store publicly owned. Instead of being used for unproductive farming, this land can be used for a grocery store that gives the community access to a wide variety of food instead of a couple vegetables grown in what is tantamount to a bigger than average garden.
The only role urban farms and community gardens should play is as a hobby or a tool of education for children about plant growth and biology. They should be learning tools to teach children. Their small scale can be easily grasped by an elementary school-aged child and can peak a greater interest in science. Any proposals to use them as a wide-scale adoption are simply not feasible.
