At their first brush with peak oil, people can become fixated on the transportation aspects. Energy descent will certainly change transportation patterns and possibilities hugely, and adaptation in our transportation and land use systems now is necessary to any resilience plan.

But upon further investigation, one of the scariest issues attached to peak oil is that of food. Our food systems are highly petroleum-dependent in all stages, including the inputs on the fields, the just-in-time delivery from far-flung production sites (aka. farms, but also including processing plants), and food preservation in stores and homes. The specter of widespread food shortages is enough to make just about anyone quail.

But while the transportation connection may be obvious, many local officials and planners can have a hard time seeing how food security is connected to their work. That is, until the land use and zoning issues come up. Ultimately, food comes from farms, and if it's not at the other end of a long supply chain, then those farms are nearby, and potentially competing with other uses.

This year, the American Farmland Trust undertook a study to see if the city of San Francisco could be fed from farms within a 100-mile radius. What they found before the study was even undertaken was that "the agricultural areas within this perimeter are almost all under siege from urban development." [American Farmland Trust] That particular finding is likely to be true just about anyplace we care to check. But what's also true is that, as urban and suburban uses eat away at farmland on the peripheries of cities, horticultural and agricultural activities are easing their way into the fabric of the cities and their economies.

"Interest in growing fruits and vegetables picks up during economic downturns, people in the industry say. Seed companies say a dime spent on seeds yields about $1 worth of produce." (Knoxville News Sentinel)

This year saw a boom in home gardening, with many people planting gardens for the first time and seed companies selling out early in the season. The intertwined themes of community gardens/allotments and victory gardens, laden with the can-do spirit of WWII-era resourcefulness, arose again and again. The gardens moved out of backyards and into front yards and even to San Francisco's City Hall. Groups started lobbying for the next president to install a victory garden at the White House and appoint a food czar.

"Beyond the community-gardening movement, a handful of professional farmers ... have tapped into an even more compelling possibility: The idea is that unused urban lands can generate jobs and serious quantities of food." Michael Ableman, Fields of Plenty.

But beyond the fruitful private yards and the symbolic statements of victory gardens in public places, urban agriculture has been a growing site of economic activity. Decentralized farms like Portland's Sunroot Gardens and
San Francisco's MyFarm bring the community supported agriculture (CSA) model straight to people's backyards, turning otherwise unproductive land to economic and nutritional ends¹. Others look at less obvious, but equally underused, real estate for their farming, like the rooftops that Erin Altz and her company Edible Skylines coax vegetables from.

In Holyoke, Mass., the nonprofit Nuestras Raíces is using urban agriculture to encourage community, public health, food security, and entrepreneurialism among the largely Puerto Rican community there. A community garden grew into many programs, including a restaurant, a new farmer training project, a business incubator, a youth development initiative and green jobs program. Urban agriculture in Holyoke has turned out to be productive of so much more than food.

One of the necessary responses to peak oil and climate change will be many more people getting involved in agriculture. In fact, we are already seeing this happen with farmers markets representing the fastest growing sector of the food economy. To participate, new gardeners and farmers need places to grow food locally and these farming efforts are taking many new forms. -- Aaron Newton

Some local governments are starting to make changes to welcome agricultural activities back into the cities and towns. You may have heard about the backyard chicken trend. The interest of growing numbers of chicken aficionados has led more and more towns to change their codes to allow chickens, which both provide food directly and are a good complement to home gardens.

The city of London, which created its London Food board in 2004, recently launched a scheme to increase the number of allotments for urban gardens, declaring "We have the space available, we just need to use it!" The plan is to have use of the land donated by property owners and managers.

Victoria, B.C. took a more hands-off approach to fostering urban farming by changing their zoning bylaws to include urban agriculture as an allowable home occupation. Something as simple as changing definitions can help legitimize and encourage new uses, while still maintaining peace among the neighbors.

Food affects the economic, environmental, and social well being of every place. . . With issues such as pollution, food safety, hunger, obesity, landfill capacity, and others rising on the planning agenda, planners can no longer ignore the potential of their intervention in the food system. -- Arly Cassidy and Bowen Patterson, A Planner's Guide to the Urban Food System

Urban and suburban agriculture will necessarily have a place in future food systems. Best to start planning for them and integrating them into the local landscape and economy now. Many lessons on urban agricultural activities have been learned in places like Kampala, Uganda; they may require some translation to make them relevant to U.S. or Canadian urban realities, but groundwork has been laid.

Ryerson University in Vancouver, B.C. has just started offering a certificate on urban agriculture and food security, the first I have heard of. Courses such as these represent a critically important for our time: food security. They also represent one aspect of peak oil where delving into solutions can bring visions of bounty and plenty more often than visions of angry car-owners with pitchforks. Or perhaps visions in which the pitchforks are being put to their proper use!

I'll leave you with a quote from Bruce Darrell's essential presentation on the topic, Planning for Food Security. Darrell works with the Irish NGO Feasta.

That was always an essential component of any city throughout the world: if you didn't have a secure food supply, you couldn't have a city.

1^ If you doubt that small plots can be practical sources of food, consider some of the research being done at Kentucky State University regarding the energy and labor requirements and productivity of agricultural land at different scales.

Photo credits:
Woody Woodpecker faces down starvation in Pantry Panic, 1941.
FSA truck by Scott Ash
Simplified Hydroponics by Jack Sanford
Backyard chickens by Laurel Hoyt