[Scpg] KICKSTARTER/URBAN AGRICULTURE Faraway farms: Chronicling urban agriculture around the world by Karney Hatch ·

[Wesley Roe and Santa Barbara Permaculture Network]

URBAN AGRICULTURE
Faraway farms: Chronicling urban agriculture around the world
BY CLAIRE THOMPSON

Get "Plant This Movie" To Bloom
A Documentary project in Portland, OR by Karney Hatch ·

KICKSTARTER to RAISE $9,500 by Sunday April 1 20-12

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/karney/get-plant-this-movie-to-bloom

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14 MAR 2012 7:29 AM


In all our excitement about the growth of urban agriculture here in the 
U.S., it can be easy to forget that the tradition of farming in cities 
has a long international history. “We feel like we’ve reinvented the 
wheel, but urban farming has been going on as long as cities have 
existed,” says Karney Hatch, a filmmaker who spent five months traveling 
the globe to gather material for a documentary about urban farming 
beyond our borders.

Films about gardening in U.S. cities are practically a dime a dozen 
these days, but what could we learn from projects in Shanghai, Havana, 
or Accra? Hatch plans to start post-production work on his film next 
month, so it’ll be a while until we get all the answers. In the 
meantime, we couldn’t resist calling him up in for a preview of what he 
found.

Q. What places stood out to you for their urban farming efforts?

A. In terms of really fascinating stories, I would say Ethiopia and 
India. In Calcutta, you ask yourself, “Why are we not doing that in the 
developed world?” Calcutta does not have a sewage treatment plant. They 
have a big canal full of waste that leaves the city flowing east toward 
the Bay of Bengal. They use that waste stream to feed traditional farms 
as well as fish farms. The waste flows out into these huge ponds and 
settles to the bottom and feeds algae, and the fish feed on the algae. 
It’s an ecosystem. [Recycling waste water] is actually happening here in 
the U.S. more than you would realize, but I think we have to stop being 
so squeamish. The fish aren’t directly eating poop.

Q. What’s the attitude toward urban farming it in other parts of the 
world? Is it seen the same as elsewhere?

A. When I first went to China and told my translator that I was looking 
for urban farms, there wasn’t really a translation for that, because 
culturally it’s just what they do.


An urban farmer in Ghana. (Photo by Karney Hatch.)
Cities in the developing world are growing exponentially right now. 
There [are] huge inflows of people, and for a lot of them, once they get 
to the city, real life is not quite as easy or exciting as they thought 
it would be. A lot of them end up living in slums. In Accra, Ghana, I 
met young farmers all apprenticing under old urban farmers, working on 
their plots as hired hands. They were all super excited to have a decent 
job instead of being stuck unemployed on the street.

In the U.S. a lot of times people are taking up urban farming as kind of 
a fun hobby, which is great — the more food being produced the happier I 
am — but they’re not depending upon it for their survival. Community 
gardens are fine, but I think if we’re really looking at a way to scale 
it up, you have to look more at the for-profit model.

Q. How does farming for survival change the nature of the practice?

A. It’s more productive and it seems to lead to much stronger 
communities. Because if you’re growing food to survive, you have a 
strong motivation to grow really well. You ask the people around you 
what their secrets are. You all work toward this common cause. When your 
caloric intake doesn’t depend on it, the stakes are not as high; you’re 
not forced by necessity to work together.

Q. How can we encourage innovative urban farming models in the developed 
world, then, where the stakes are not as high in terms of basic survival?

A. We’ve gone through really hard times before, in the Great Depression 
and World War II. We’ve shown that during hard times we can pull 
together and grow a lot of food in our cities [see: victory gardens]. 
And times are hard now; a lot of people are suffering. The economic 
model is there to create a profitable business doing this — all we have 
to do is spread the word.


A young goat farmer in Accra, Ghana. (Photo by Karney Hatch.)
It’s so important that kids are exposed to this stuff really early on, 
so it’s not some weird thing. If you are exposed to [farming] at your 
grade school or your middle school, you realize that it’s easy and beats 
the heck out of sitting behind a desk. Most of us are not so far removed 
from it; our grandparents and our great-grandparents lived on farms. But 
now we’ve moved into cities; our food is produced far from where we 
live. If we want to start turning it the other way, we have to start 
with the children. And old people. If you go to China, it’s not uncommon 
to see people who are quite elderly out there spending most of their 
free time growing food. They’re serving an important function, and 
they’re making extra money; it’s just win-win-win down the line.

Q. What can we in the U.S. learn from other countries about how to raise 
food in cities well?

A. To [build] a mature urban agriculture system in the U.S., you would 
end up pulling from a lot of different examples. Cuba is kind of the 
famous one. One of the things I’m getting excited about is animals in 
the city. Especially fish — there’s a lot of aquaponics getting started. 
In 1996 I was in China and I saw [people] harvesting freshwater eels out 
of the rice paddies. It’s something we would [almost] never do in the 
U.S., because we’re like, “I’m a fish farmer, [you’re] a rice farmer, we 
do not mix.” In China it’s just natural.

There are some cities in Africa where somebody has a plantain tree, and 
[somebody else has] pineapple, and corn, and there’s a herd of goats 
going down the street; it’s all kind of integrated together. We’re a 
long ways from that, but once you’ve seen it, it’s not that hard to 
imagine having that sort of integrated system in some of our cities in 
the U.S.

Q. How did you find the urban farmers you talked to for the film?

A. I got in touch with some experts in the field, just to get advice on 
where some of the most exciting projects were going on. Sometimes, by 
chance, somebody would get ahold of me and say, “Look at this amazing 
project … ” When I was in Accra I wanted to interview some urban goat 
farmers, so one afternoon I just followed the herd of goats until they 
went home. In Shanghai, I was having trouble finding urban farmers. I 
actually went to satellite view on Google Maps, because if you zoom in 
far enough you can see rows of plants. I found farms that way. I would 
get on the subway and get as close as I [could] and then get a taxi. I 
had this map, and I had circled urban farms on the map, and the taxi 
driver was like, “If you want to go see a farm, we have to go way 
outside the city.” Five minutes later we’re standing with a 
second-generation urban farmer on the same location his father and 
mother had been farming since the 1940s. It’s that way a lot of times — 
it could be happening a lot closer to where you are and you don’t 
realize it’s there.

Claire Thompson is an editorial assistant at Grist.