Why urban farming needs to be organic

The success of urban farming might be in the details. Achieving a safe, environmentally healthy and socially acceptable kind of urban farming requires re-designing agriculture to address its current side effects. Some technologies, currently in development, could revolutionize agriculture

By Hala Chaoui
Innovative Science: Agriculture And Food Edition

Hala Chaoui is a research engineer and founder of Urban Farms Organic, an R&D start-up company incubated at the business incubator “Bioenterprise” in Guelph, Ontario Canada. Her research and development interests include the following topics: bioconversion of biodegradable materials into value-added products, and developing equipment for urban agriculture. She also advocates the development of innovative technologies for organic farming.

Excerpt:

Organic plant production is more likely than organic animal production within urban farming, but transportation costs might require animal production to become more common at the fringes of cities, and some animal husbandry, such as urban chicken coops, might occur within cities. City animals could be produced and trained as weeding crews that are hired by urban gardeners, or for dairy or egg production.

Organic animal production standards dictate that the animals be free-ranged, since roaming is required for animal welfare. Shelter is provided to the animals in most cases for protection from the elements, sleeping, laying eggs, milking, or medical care. New technologies applicable to organic animal production can increase the feasibility of socially acceptable and humane animal rearing.

Mobile animal shelters can make rotational animal grazing more feasible. In rural settings, these include egg-mobile for laying hens, and mobile milking parlors such as the one used on the McAfee dairy farm2. On an urban scale, housing for backyard chicken and rabbits such as the Eglu® is commercially available. These are wheeled or light enough for transport. The backyard chicken coop trend in cities has made the news recently. By popular demand, Toronto and New York among other cities are considering re-legalizing backyard chicken. Guidelines for backyard animal rearing, whereby noise and odoor are mitigated could make this practice urban-appropriate. Rotating animal shelters over the gardened area would result in a natural fertilization of the soil without overloading one part of the backyard with animal waste and risking nitrate leaching. In rural settings, free-range animals are rotated over the land they graze, to ensure efficient grazing and avoid over loading the soil with nutrients from animal droppings, which could cause nitrate leaching and runoff. Soil erosion could also occur if animals are not rotated since they furrow consistently. Anderson2 developed prototype-GPS collars used to guide cows into a rotation over pastures, through voice prompts (Figure 2). These prompts are adapted to a cow’s character in order to humanely direct it to move across zones delimited by GPS coordinates.

If such a device is scaled for smaller animals such as chicken it could be used to control the birds’ movement without having to enclose them in a chicken run. Waste produced by the chicken may need to be collected, as it may not be degraded in the backyard’s soil at a high enough rate. This collected waste can be input in an optimally designed backyard waste recycling system, such as a combination of compost and vermicompost. In most climates and pasture conditions free-range animals also require supplemental feed, which increases labor costs. The prototype of a solar powered autonomous animal feeder was shown by Jørgensen and co-authors2 to guide animals to rotate over a pasture, in pursuit of the feed source. If scaled down to urban or small-size suburban animal productions, both these technologies could reduce the labor cost of free-range organic animal farms.

See the rest of this lengthly article here.

See  Urban Farms Organic here.