URBAN AGRICULTURE: Part 2 - Challenges

URBAN AGRICULTURE: Part 2 - Challenges

Urbanagricultureisnotnew!Humanshavebeengrowingcropsandraisinganimalsinandaroundcitiessincewebeganorganizingourselvesintolongtermsettlementsoverfivethousandyearsago.Formanycenturies,therehasbeenanaturalintegrationofurbanizationandfoodproductionasthefarmingactivitiesthathavemadetheveryexisitenceofcitiespossiblespilledoverintocitiesthemselves.

It has only been in recent decades (since the post World War II era), and particularly in most North American cities, that the division between urban and rural has been more sharply defined and upheld. Urban planning and regulatory practices of the last half century in North America have attempted to sever the natural ties between cities and food production, urban and rural, metropolis and farm. This tendency has grown out of a particular cultural bias viewing cities as “progress” and farming as “backward” and a misguided notion of public health viewing food production and the raising of animals as potentially dangerous, dirty, and infectious. Land use patterns, real estate speculation, and the emergence of the “global food system” have also contributed to the marginalization of urban agriculture in the past sixty years.

But this is changing once again as a global renaissance of urban agriculture is well underway. The United Nations Development Program reveals that in 1993, just 15% of food consumed in cities worldwide was grown in cities. However, by 2005, that number increased to 30%. In other words, urban food production has doubled in just over 15 years! What is driving this trend? There are several key factors that can be identified:

1. Urbanization – More and more of the planet’s human population continues to migrate to urban areas. In fact, in 2010 we crossed the threshold to where over half (50%) of the world’d people now live in cities. This marks a dramatic shift in a pattern which began slowly several hundreds of years ago but which now shows no sign of slowing down. As most of our species live in cities, it follows that we will have an increasing need for food produced within or near to these citie
2. Need – Urban migration patterns, particularly in Africa, Asia and Latina America, have also resulted in larger numbers of poor and desperately poor city dwellers. Many of these people have no choice but to try and grow some of their own food to meet their needs where they live. It is a matter of survival.
3. Food Security – The global food system is showing many indications of strain and fragility at a time when demand continues to rise sharply. Food security is increasingly on the agenda for municipalities and communities world-wide. How will we feed the millions that live within our urban boundaries if the global food chain is interrupted by spikes in fossil fuel prices (not to mention other agricultural in-puts), severe climate events such as drought, flooding or unseasonal freezing, or political and economic upheaval? Growing our own food in and around where we live will certainly be on the table as a key response to this scenario.
4. Grass Roots Interest – Individuals and communities around the world are showing a marked increase in connecting more directly with and participating in food production activities. Whether motivated by concerns for health, environmental sustainability or food security, or perhaps by a deeper emotional or spiritual need, an increasing number of North Americans are planting, hoeing, hatching and harvesting within the cities where they live. They are also demanding greater access to land and the right to raise their own food within city limits.
5. Policy Changes – In response to the pressures from the above four factors and others, municipal governments and regulators are being forced to play “catch-up” by updating their by-laws, regulatory frameworks and programs relating to urban agriculture. Some municipal governments continue to do this begrudgingly, responding only to pressure from citizens, while others take a more proactive role in encouraging apropriate urban agricultural activites within their cities. Currently, there remains a tremendous variability in regulation of urban agriculture within cities in North America and around the world.

Food Trends 2013 - a healthy Choice?

Here is an excellent uptake from goodfood.com posted on Style Weekly. Shopping at the butcher, the baker and the candlestick maker, wagyu beef burritos and share plates – these are some of the elements that will come together in the food bowl of Australia next year, according to a report on food trends released this week.

A survey of more than 1000 consumers and taste-makers around the country commissioned by public relations agency Weber Shandwick, found that artisan supermarkets, nostalgic menus and an "international flavor duopoly" between South America and Asia are among the trends set to turn up the heat in Australian kitchens in 2013.

There is now a generation of people who didn't necessarily grow up eating at the table every evening. They are comfortable with a kimchi pork burger from a food truck one night, to sitting up at the bar having a snack and a glass of wine the next. 

Viva Mexico and the Chinese revolution
It could be tacos topped with kimchi or wagyu beef burritos on menus next year, with South American and Asian flavours tipped to boom. "Korean, wagyu and Peruvian restaurants; spicy food from northern China; and kimchi – a fermented Korean dish made of vegetables" are among the flavours set to captivate the nation, the report, predicts.

Mexican food, the perennial polariser, is expected to become "an essential part in any Aussie kitchen", a trend seemingly confirmed by the Mexican wave that's engulfing Sydney and Melbourne.

The spate of rival restaurants opening on his turf has not escaped the attention of the chef and restauranteur Elvis Abrahanowicz. The co-owner and chef behind the Spanish tapas bar Bodega and the Argentinian restaurant Porteno in Sydney says Latin American cuisine is an obvious choice for Australia.

Return to artisan shopping
Consumers want personalised shopping experiences and even supermarket giants Woolworths and Coles are introducing bakeries, butcheries, sushi-chefs and pizzerias into stores, the report notes.

The gourmet food importer Simon Johnson points to the craze surrounding the high-end Italian food emporium Eataly in Europe and New York, which has individual retailers selling everything from breads and pastries to fresh fish, cured meats and handmade cheeses and pastas.

Consumers can't seem to get enough, Johnson says. "It's all about quality and . . . getting people off the bottom shelf of the supermarket and onto artisan producers."

He says the resurgence of artisanal shopping is largely driven by a return to the kitchen. "People are realising that cooking is enjoyable and everyone can be part of the experience. It pulls the family together."

Novelty dining
Food trucks, children's food for grown-ups and the "casualisation" of menus are the restaurant trends for 2013, with "entrees and mains a thing of the past", the report says.

Restaurant critic Terry Durack says the growth in popularity of share plates, tapas and meze-sized servings is speeding up the death of the "entree-mains-dessert" style of dining.

"We just don't need to eat that much any more and we don't have the time or the money for a three-course meal. It's more accessible and flexible to cover the table with small share plates and everyone has what they want, pays less, and leaves earlier."

But it's not just food on the run for the cheap and the young, Durack says. Flexible dining is also more fun.

"There is now a generation of people who didn't necessarily grow up eating at the table every evening. They are comfortable with...a kimchi pork burger from a food truck one night, to sitting up at the bar having a snack and a glass of wine the next."

As for children's food for grown-ups, that's just taking young, fun dining one step further. Besides, asks Durack, when did that ever go out of fashion?

"British restaurant critic Jan Moir once wrote a fictionalised review of a fashionable new restaurant called Baby, which served up food in baby jars, had nursery style lighting and attracted a roll-call of celebrities including Posh and Becks. Yes, it did appear on April Fool's Day, but that didn't stop hundreds of people from calling the number listed and trying to make a booking," Durack says.

His point is simple: "The appeal of ice-cream and jelly, party pies and sausage rolls is universal, not to mention being too good to waste on kids."

Back to basics
Sadly for the bratty kid in all of us, it won't all be mac 'n' cheese and chicken nuggets next year. Australians will breathe new life into staple ingredients, with vegetables becoming "the centrepiece of Aussie meals", Weber Shandwick predicts.

"Rising meat costs are contributing to vegetables taking centre stage, and more families are growing their own food and helping out in community and school vegetable gardens," food writer and Epicure columnist Jill Dupleix says.

She echoes the report in drawing attention to a genuine interest in native foods like the Kakadu plum and warrigal greens. "It's time we stopped living on imported ideas and techniques and claimed our own unique food as our own. How chefs as diverse as Kylie Kwong in Sydney and Ben Shewry in Melbourne use native ingredients is brilliant – it's the future of Australian food."

But while most of these trends have tongues wagging, mouths salivating and foodies panting in feverish excitement, there's one prediction that cuts a swathe through leading taste-makers: "novel foods from nature . . . will be gracing our plates; and we may even see a rise of edible insects like grasshoppers and locusts", the report says.

Original Article Posted: goodfood.com.au (Edited for Style Weekly)

Image Credit: enroute.aircanada.com

Intelligent Sensing Agriculture Robots To Harvest Crops

Check out this great article by Jennifer Hicks on the next generation of robotics in the global agricultural arena published in Forbes.com.   Agriculture might be the last place you would think to look for robots. To be more specific, high value crops such as greenhouse vegetables, fruits in orchards and grapes for premium wines. But it does make sense. Anything that technology can do to foster the sustainable development of agriculture benefits the world.

A new project that’s part of the European Union Seventh Framework Program (FP7) cRops (Clever Robots for Crops) is focusing on creating robots to harvest high value crops.

The cRops robotic platform will be capable of site-specific spraying (targeted spraying only on foliage and selected targets) and selective harvesting of fruit. The robots will be able to detect the fruit, sense its ripeness, then move to grasp and softly detach only the ripe fruit. Another objective of cRops is to develop techniques for reliable detection and classification of obstacles and other objects to enable successful autonomous navigation and operation in plantations and forests.

Projects like cRrops are significant because they can accelerate sustainable development of agriculture.
– Catherine Simon, Innorobo

The European project, made up of universities and labs from 10 different countries including Netherlands, Belgium, Israel, Slovenia, Sweden, Italy, Spain, Germany, Chile and France started in October 2010, but sources say it will take at least five more years before it could be commercialized. So why is Europe moving so slowly in terms commercializing robots and moving them into mass market?

“One of the main reasons is simply because robotics is still in an early stage of maturity and we continue to see projects coming out of academia, government or EU commissions,” said Catherine Simon, Founder and organizer of Innorobo, the leading robotics conference taking place in Lyon, France in 2013.  “Europe needs to make the shift from projects to product faster like the United States if we want to remain a leader in the the field of robotics. If the cRops project were to focus on detecting one specific type of fruit, it might be a shorter path to market. But in this case, with multiple countries, government funding, demand for subsidies and coordination across associated agencies, it slows the innovation process.”

Simon’s point about targeting a specific fruit or problem is key. Harvest Automation, based in Boston, MA, raised $7.8 million in a series B funding round in November 2011. Harvest is focusing on agricultural robotics and focusing on greenhouse and nursery automation. They want to resolve acute manual labor problems across multiple industries but are starting with agriculture.  The Harvest Automation robot costs around $25 to $50k and because the manipulation requirements of the robots are lower in this sector, the company focus on creating a viable business, reducing costs and higher yields, rather than worrying about how to incorporate expensive robot arms into their operations.

But, there are other fruit picking robots on the loose. In Japan in 2010 the Institute of Agricultural Machinery’s Bio-oriented Technology Research Advancement Institution, created a strawberry picking robot with a stereo camera system that images the strawberries in 3D and image-processing algorithms determine their ripeness. If a strawberry is at least 80 percent red, the machine snips it at the stem and puts it in a padded bin. It can harvest 60% of the strawberry crop, taking only nine seconds to pick a strawberry. But, according to a machine-vision specialist who worked on the strawberry picking project, this robot won’t happen without government subsidies.

But times are changing. We are starting to see a true shift in the ecosystem surrounding robotics – moving from a heavily academic foundation to a more entrepreneurial approach.  In 2011, Hizook reported that VC funding in robotics surpassed $160 million, with Restoration Robotics taking a whopping $43 million (an image-guided hair transplant robot). And with outsiders like Dmitry Grishin, Founder, Grishin Robotics, believing it’s time to open up the insular world of robotics to entrepreneurs and raise the profile of the robotics industry, and insiders like Bruno Bonnell, Robultion Capital in France establishing Europe’s first robotics fund dedicated to service robotics toGoogle investing quietly in robotics in the form of cars that drive themselves, the race is on.