About Us

Center for Urban Agriculture, Asheville (CUAA)

™

The Center for Urban Agriculture, Asheville (CUAA)™ strives to be a liasion for the environment to society, in a rapidly changing world, to better suit the needs of the environment and society through harmonious innovative sciences, urban development, sustainability, and renewable energy. We are a nonprofit thats sole purpose is to serve as a national paradigm by way of providing community awareness & outreach, educational programming, agrotourism, agroforestry, permaculture, reforestation and other newly pioneered knowledge. It is CUAA's core value to protect, preserve, and permeate the environment while maintiaining natural integrity & beauty -- As Mother Nature intended it to be.

"To waste, to destroy our natural resources, to skin

and exhaust the land instead of using it so as to increase

its usefulness, will result in undermining in the days of

our children the very prosperity which we ought by right

to hand down to them amplified and developed. "

- Theodore Roosevelt

What is Urban Agriculture?

Urban agriculture is growing food for urban markets in close proximity to where a community of people live. More rigidly it is growing food in any manner (just use your imagination…) in or sometimes around the perimeter of cities and towns. Even more rigidly it is:

Integrated into the urban economic and ecological system: urban agriculture is embedded in -and interacting with- the urban ecosystem. Such linkages include[:]

The use of urban residents as labourers
Use of typical urban resources (like organic waste as compost and urban wastewater for irrigation)
Direct links with urban consumers
Direct impacts on urban ecology (positive and negative)
Being part of the urban food system
Competing for land with other urban functions
Ceing influenced by urban policies and plans, etc.
Urban agriculture is not a relict of the past that will fade away (urban agriculture increases when the city grows) nor brought to the city by rural immigrants that will loose

Their rural habits over time. It is an integral part of the urban system (RUAF.org).

Wow, that was a mouthful…

Though the potential for urban agriculture is largely untapped and undervalued, it is currently a large industry of many small scale farmers and some large agribusinesses. Intensive urban agriculture can yield several times as much produce per area as rural agriculture. Because inputs such as water, land, and nutrients are limited in cities, city farming uses techniques which require only a fraction of the inputs that rural agriculture use. Also, urban farming can help to absorb some of the urban solid and liquid waste, helping the city to reduce its waste management problems and costs.

Urban agriculture solves food security issues while creating local, nutritious food for all. It is indiscriminate- something that anyone, rich or poor, take advantage of and enjoy. There is no average urban farmer. People of diverse income and cultural backgrounds garden in cities.

For the poorest of the poor, it provides good access to food. For the stable poor, it provides a source of income and god-quality food at low cost. For middle-income families, it offers the possibility of savings and return on their investment in urban property. For small and large scale entrepreneurs, it is a profitable business. (Urban Agriculture: Food, Jobs, and Sustainable Cities, p. 4)

"Has many names: city farming, city gardening, vacant lot gardening,

rooftop gardening, peri-urban agriculture, community gardening,

container vegetable gardening, portable agriculture."

Urban agriculture can be done in a wide variety of places: vacant lots, backyards, rooftops, window containers, city parks, roadsides, steep slopes, river banks,beneath high tension lines, beside railroads, schoolyards, hospitals, at the boundary of cities, even underground or up the sides of buildings.

Large cities are not new-more than a thousand years ago, Baghdad was home to more than one million people and the floating islands of Mexico city fed its population of 200,000. These were the megacities of the past. Archeologists frequently find sites with incredible earth and water works in and around ancient cities.

These days, a megacity is defined as an urban center with a population of at least 10 million. 30 years ago there were 5 megacities in the world, 3 of which were in developing countries. By the end of the next decade there will be 23, 19 of which will be in developing countries.

(Irrigated terrace farms of the ancient Mayan city, Machu Picchu in the mountains of Peru)

Cities in developing nations (the South) are growing much fast than cities in developed nations (the North). In fact, between now and 2030 nearly all population growth will be in the cities of developing countries, where some cities are growing two or three times faster than the country’s overall population. This trend is equivalent to adding a city of one million residents every week (UN-HABITAT 2004).

What is Sustainable Agriculture?

Sustainable agriculture is one that produces abundant food without depleting the earth’s resources or polluting its environment. It is agriculture that follows the principles of nature to develop systems for raising crops and livestock that are, like nature, self-sustaining. Sustainable agriculture is also the agriculture of social values, one whose success is indistinguishable from vibrant rural communities, rich lives for families on the farms, and wholesome food for everyone. But in the first decade of the 21st Century, sustainable agriculture, as a set of commonly accepted practices or a model farm economy, is still in its infancy—more than an idea, but only just.
Although sustainability in agriculture is tied to broader issues of the global economy, declining petroleum reserves, and domestic food security, its midwives were not government policy makers but small farmers, environmentalists, and a persistent cadre of agricultural scientists. These people saw the devastation that late 20th-Century farming was causing to the very means of agricultural production—the water and soil—and so began a search for better ways to farm, an exploration that continues to this day.

Conventional 20th-Century agriculture took industrial production as its model, and vertically integrated agri-business was the result. The industrial approach, coupled with substantial government subsidies, made food abundant and cheap in the United States. But farms are biological systems, not mechanical ones, and they exist in a social context in ways that manufacturing plants do not. Through its emphasis on high production, the industrial model has degraded soil and water, reduced the biodiversity that is a key element to food security, increased our dependence on imported oil, and driven more and more acres into the hands of fewer and fewer “farmers,” crippling rural communities.

In recent decades, sustainable farmers and researchers around the world have responded to the extractive industrial model with ecology-based approaches, variously called natural, organic, low-input, alternative, regenerative, holistic, Biodynamic, bio-intensive, and biological farming systems. All of them, representing thousands of farms, have contributed to our understanding of what sustainable systems are, and each of them shares a vision of “farming with nature,” an agro-ecology that promotes biodiversity, recycles plant nutrients, protects soil from erosion, conserves and protects water, uses minimum tillage, and integrates crop and livestock enterprises on the farm.

But no matter how elegant the system or how accomplished the farmer, no agriculture is sustainable if it’s not also profitable, able to provide a healthy family income and a good quality of life. Sustainable practices lend themselves to smaller, family-scale farms. These farms, in turn, tend to find their best niches in local markets, within local food systems, often selling directly to consumers. As alternatives to industrial agriculture evolve, so must their markets and the farmers who serve them. Creating and serving new markets remains one of the key challenges for sustainable agriculture.

How Do We Achieve Sustainability?

Farmers and other agricultural thinkers have established a strong set of guiding principles for sustainability, based on stewardship and economic justice. Producers and researchers are annually increasing the pace of improvements in agro-ecology systems, making them more efficient and profitable. More Cooperative Extension offices and colleges of agricul¬ture are endorsing sustainable practices. And every year more farmers are seeing the wisdom and rewards—both economic and personal—in these systems. (Organic products are the fastest growing grocery segment in the United States.) Little by little—one crop, one field, one family at a time—sustainable farming is taking root.

Off the farm, consumers and grassroots activists are working to create local markets and farm policies that support sustainable practices. They are working to raise consumers’ awareness about how their food is grown and processed—how plants, animals, the soil, and the water are treated. And they are working to forge stronger bonds between producers and consumers that will, in time, cement the foundations of locally and regionally self-sufficient food systems. In contrast to mono-cropped industrial mega farms that ship throughout the world, the vision of sustainable agriculture’s futurists is small to mid-size diversified farms supplying the majority of their region’s food.

Sustainable Agriculture: An Introduction
By Richard Earles; revised by Paul Williams,
NCAT Program Specialist
©NCAT 2005
Paul Williams, Editor
Robyn Metzger, Production
This publication is available on the Web at:
www.attra.ncat.org/attra-pub/sustagintro.html
or
www.attra.ncat.org/attra-pub/PDF/sustagintro.pdf
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