The Urban Potato: It’s Time Has Come
By Jac Smit
October 29, 2008
From the Desk of Jac Smit

A few years ago I stood on the roof of a hospital in Port au Prince, Haiti. The surface was half straw and other half organic thrash and half potato foliage. A week later I visited a friend in Washington DC. He took me out to his porch and there was a bale of hay [wire bound] with potato foliage on three sides.

I soon learned that these two cases were examples of “Lazy Man Farming”. Lazy Man was invented in Germany in the 19th Century. Its most cited practice is roadside cultivation in Newfoundland Canada. There the farmers collect seaweed, off load it on the side of the road, and insert seedlings.

Potatoes, sweet and sour, do not need soil. Potatoes can be produced soil free on any flat surface: roofs, roadsides, off-season ski resort parking lots, and-so-forth. And its not just hay or seaweed; supermarket and restaurant waste work as well or better.

On a recent visit to Mexico City I discovered the “Potato Tree”. I learned that potatoes grow up and sideways, not down. Home owners and shopkeepers were planting potatoes in a waste filled discarded automobile tire; in a few weeks they added a second tire and within three months had a six-tire high “tree” full of potatoes. The ‘Potato Tree’ is also practiced in garbage cans, black plastic bags and in wooden boxes.

On a visit to a health care center in Nairobi, Kenya I learned of the many benefits of Sweet Potato production. Not only does the sweet potato have the benefits listed above but the foliage is edible and very healthy. The more you harvest the leaves the more the root is stimulated to expand. Sweet potato also lasts longer in storage than most regular potatoes.

A lot is happening in the arena of the potato. The United Nations declared 2008 to be “The Year of the Potato”. In China potato production was up 50% from 2005 to 2007. In India yields increased on demonstration farms from 4 tons to 8 tons per acre, when they bought better seeds. In Peru, where the ‘Potato Center’ research includes 200 varieties, yields were up 20% from 2007 to 2008.

I am sorry that none of these stats report on the Urban Potato. They do hint at what’s possible in the bag, the tire and on the roof.

A rural acre of potato delivers more protein than an acre of wheat in half the time. Urban potato technology produces ten to twenty times as much per square yard as the rural potato patch and it requires both less storage and less shipping.

Urban Potato References:

1. UNFAO, UN Food and Agriculture Organization, Bambi Lotalado, Italy
2. CIP, International Potato Center, Pamela Anderson, Peru
3. McCain Food Ltd., David Caldiz, USA
4. AGRITECH, Bangalore, India
5. AVRDC, Asian Vegetable Research and Development Center, Taiwan
6. Univ. Of Idaho, Potato Production Systems Program
7. www.ehow.com/how Grow-Potatoes-garbage-can
8. Mother Earth News: Grow Potatoes in Hay

See more of Jac Smit’s writing here.

The International Year of the Potato 2008 website here.

See ‘A History and Social Influence of the Potato’ by Redcliffe Salaman here.

Edible of the Month: Potato – National Gardening Association.

The Book of the Potato

By T. W. SANDERS

Early 1900′s book cover: The Book of the potato. A practical handbook dealing with the cultivation of the potato in allotment, garden and field; also the pests and diseases thereof; together with selections and descriptions of the most productive, best cooking, and disease-resisting varieties, etc.
By T. W. SANDERS, F.L.S., F.R.H.S. (Thomas William), 1855-1926
Editor of “Amateur Gardening” ; Author of “Allotment and Kitchen
Gardens,” “Vegetables and their Cultivation” etc.)
See flip book edition here.

Urban Agriculture is Supporting Faith, the Environment and Community

By Jac Smit © Sept 13, 2008

It is fair to say that faith-based groups have been leading urban agriculture for 25 or more years. Something has changed this movement in the 21st century. It is the merger of religion, social science and natural science. We now see faith based groups working with groups concerned with our civilization’s environmental survival as well as community building organizations. There may well be a new leadership for farming the city.

Church and other religious property is a major land use in urban areas. In general religious property does not pay taxes. Often it is a purposed gift not a purchase. Commonly the place of worship is centrally located within a community, town or city. This ‘idle’ land has a substantial potential to contribute to locally-based food systems.

Church property in a majority of cases can be considered as “the commons”. It’s purpose being to serve its community and may be owned by a community service not-for-profit organization.

Church grounds with vegetable gardening, plus some poultry and small livestock, have been in existence since medieval times. They were also a part of 18th and 19th century colonial development programs, used to feed the church and related school culinary needs and to introduce the colonial population to “modern” food practices.

See the rest of Jac Smit’s article here.

Some articles about Church gardens.

Hingham church raising veggies to offer at food pantry.

Church has plot to tackle food prices – Waukesha parish would like to turn lawn into gardens.

Sale of church garden produce helps food bank.

First Church Garden Growers – Video

A short documentary of the garden project at the First Congregational Church in Old Greenwich, CT.

Desk of Jac Smit
August 21 2008

Prior to the industrial revolution every village town and city had a commons for food production and marketing. In the 21st century the commons is regaining popularity and applications. My personal experience of the spatial commons is the Boston Common and Garden, a both glorious and cordial public space. My second is the Calcutta Maidan, from Hooghly River to the New Market. It incorporates fishing, goat grazing, horse racing, religious festivals and much more.

Urban agriculture exploits the commons more than rural agriculture, and is increasingly doing so, in some places. The best known application is Community and Allotment Gardens. Community or Cooperative aquaculture is significant in ponds, and bays. Less well known is aquaculture in urban waste water lagoons. Community Forest Gardens in Nepal and Kenya are deservedly receiving attention as women’s cooperative ventures. Community irrigation, neighbors deciding who gets how much water when, is well documented in Spain and Taiwan. Urban farmers’ collaboration in production within utility rights-of-way is worldwide and particularly noted in Brazil and the Ivory Coast. In African towns cow share is widespread.

See Jac’s complete article here.

Urban agriculture, commons and commoners in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: the case of Sudbury, Suffolk

By H. R. FRENCH
British Agricultural History Review
Volume 48 Part II 2000 pp. 171-99

Abstract Urban agriculture and town commons have been largely overlooked in the existing literature, and have never been systematically surveyed. This study lays out a typology of urban commons, citing examples from across the country. It focuses on the uses and users of one urban common, in the cloth-producing town of Sudbury, Suffolk, between 17m-28. It details the occupational profile of commoners, distinguishes differences in their use of the commons, and compares them with those freemen who did not common animals. The study explores corporate management of this resource, in response to economic uncertainty, and in the context of wider urban agriculture. It concludes that the importance of urban agriculture and agrarian resources has been under-estimated, as has their survival and significance into the ‘modern’ period.

Link to complete paper here.

Urban common rights, enclosure and the market: Clitheroe Town Moors, 1764-1802

By H. R, FRENCH
British Agricultural History Review
Volume 51 Part 1 2003
p.40

Abstract
The social and agrarian impact of parliamentary enclosure is again in dispute. However, the effects of enclosure on urban agriculture and commons have yet to be examined. This detailed case study of the small borough of Clitheroe, Lancashire, examines the usage and the social profile of users between 1764 and 1779. It also depicts the local enclosure process, and argues that little redistribution of land or extinction of rights occurred. Access rights and stints had been subverted before enclosure by the creation of a ‘market’ in entitlements that reflected the distribution of property and resources in commercial agriculture beyond the commons. Urban sources provide unique detail to illustrate how fundamental change could occur in the management of commons before their abolition by enclosure.

Link to complete paper here.

By Jac Smit
See ‘From The Desk of Jac Smit’ here.

There are 110 million Small-Scale Vegetable Growers in the USA in 2008: 95 million of them are urban and peri-urban.

The National Gardening Association [NGA], with inputs from a Roper survey and the USDA, finds that 40 percent of America’s 275 million households are growing vegetables and culinary herbs, approximately 110 million households. The US Census tells us that the country is 80 percent urban. In rural communities the share raising veggies is about 2 of 3 and in urban neighborhoods, from Boston to Fargo, it’s about 1 in 3. Arithmetic says 15 rural and 95 million urban healthy food producers.

The last peak in our file cabinet is 1975 when the NGA reported 49 percent growing vegetables. Are we catching up?

There has been a remarkable jump in the past year Atlee-Burpee Seeds, our largest seller, reports a doubling of vegetable seed sales in 2008 over 2007. In London it is reported that vegetable seed sales have surpassed flowers for the first time since WW II. Organic Gardening Magazine repots that for the first time in a generation we are growing more vegetables than flowers. A similar finding has been reported in the United Kingdom. Mother Earth Gardens in Minneapolis reports sales of three times as many fruit trees as ever in their history.

Since 1975 there has been a revolution in the productivity of small-scale vegetable production. Thirty years later a packet of seeds produces twice as much per square foot and close to that per hour of labor. The breakthroughs include: hydroponic methods, drip irrigation, plastic greenhouse, roof and wall production, improved seeds, composting, fertilizers, insecticides.

In much of the USA and Europe the growing season has stretched. In London UK and Washington DC we have two more weeks per year, and closing in on a ten percent increase.

Perhaps we are arriving in a new food system era with urban agriculture at its core. The coincidence and merger of the Food, Energy and Climate crises, in a not yet well understood way, is causing a “tipping point” and the end of the global corporate dominance of our nutrition and food security is tapering down.

Refs:
Bruce Butterfield, National Gardening Association?Scott Meyer, Organic Gardening Magazine ?Robert LaGasse, Garden Writers Association

See ‘From The Desk of Jac Smit’ here.