View from the Top: Window Farming

How often do you find yourself sitting in the living room of your modest Brooklyn apartment chatting with your roommates about how important the environment is, why organic and local foods are better, essentially enumerating the many reasons to be sustainable and healthy. Discussion soon turns to how great it would be to move to a farm and grow your own food and how the rural holistic life would be ideal. Then the conversation ends and you are back in Brooklyn, in your apartment in a city, surrounded by plaster and concrete and steel but you don’t even notice these things anymore. What happens to those fantasies of surrounding yourself with plants and nature and growth? They fly away in the chaotic whirlwind that is life in this city. They are too far away to holdfast in our minds and instead you fixate on something more tangible –closer to home.

What if instead of letting these thoughts float away until the next time you sit down and reflect on our lives in a massive city, you did something in your small little apartment to bridge the gap between these two worlds. Could you somehow bring some part of the rural world, some sense of growth and greenery into the cold grinding city that harbors the dreams of artists and business people alike? I believe that with a little time and interest this merging of worlds is entirely possible.

One common approach to the idea of bringing vegetation into your life is a garden. Urban gardens are a great way to live the city life with the satisfaction of watching plants grow and getting a little closer to the farm life ideal. Unfortunately, urban gardens take a lot of work and starting them can be relatively costly. Whether you want to grow in planters or in soil is another important consideration. In many urban environments such as New York City the soil in the ground is actually filled with lead residue from industrial plants that contaminate water. This means that growing vegetables is practically impossible or if you do grow them, you cannot eat them. Still the thing that makes urban gardens most difficult is space. Anyone living in an apartment knows that while talking about urban gardens in nice, it’s simply an impossible feat. There is no room.

So without space or money how is one to make any considerable move towards having and keeping plants in your home. Think simple and intuitive. Where is there access to sunlight in your apartment? What materials are similar to pots but aren’t expensive or hard to find? How might you utilize the space in your apartment even though you only have 600 sq feet of floor space?

Answer these questions correctly and you have the brilliant innovation that is sweeping the sustainable community Window Farming! The idea is perfect for homes or apartments with no backyard, little money to start growing and who want the freedom and peace of mind to grow vegetables at home. To start will cost about $125 which is a small price to pay for fresh home grown greens. This is because the project uses easy and cheap materials like plastic water bottles and tubing. Space is also taken care of because of the vertical design of the window farm. As long as you have a window that has access to sunlight for a good portion of the day, there is practically nothing stopping you bringing the farmer mentality and aesthetic right into your cramped New York City home.

Check out this website for directions on how to start your Window Farm.

The Real Price of Organic Farming

After a brief investigation into the technical differences between organic and conventional farming practices last week I think it is apparent that organic farms can be sustainable. In fact, many of the studies I cited last week point out that organic farms are often more environmentally friendly than conventional ones. Still, as this article on the Ethicurean rightly observes, there is a price to pay for being organic, and that price might be undesirable labor practices.

Why is this? The answer is that organic farms for the most part use less machinery and chemicals to solve the problems of farming and instead do things by hand. In other words, these farms employ workers to do things like weeding, setting pest traps and keeping animal quarters clean than do conventional farms.

According to this study (PDF form) I found by the University of Maine, hired-labor is one of the two factors that make organic dairy farming so expensive compared to conventional methods. It also notes that organic farms use considerably more hired-labor than non-organic farms.

What does this mean? It means that while organic farms may be a good move towards sustainable farming they are still a costlier one. Because organic farms require a lot of labor they are generally more expensive to maintain and that is one reason that organic food costs so much. The increased labor demands of an organic farm can also result in practices that are out of line with human rights ideals and labor union groups. Because organic farms have to compete with farms that have significantly lower labor needs, they often employ non-unionized and immigrant labor which is cheaper overall than union workers. This study (PDF form) titled “Farm Labor Conditions on Organic Farms in California” showed me that the average non-organic farm provided better benefits and wages to its workers than did organic farms of the same scale. The question we have to ask is can organic farms be both sustainable and humane?

After reading up about the issue of labor in organic farming I was naturally a little discouraged to find that human rights and sustainable organic practices were in some senses at odds with one another. However, I was excited to stumble upon the Swanton Berry Farm in Davenport, which is the only organic strawberry farm in the country that has a contract with the United Farm Workers Union.

Their statement on the issue of labor which can be found here on their website is one that makes the difficulty of working within the parameters of both organic and humane work practice sound easy. Furthermore it shows that even though the difficulty may in fact be great, it can be done and there is no question that it is the right thing to do.

Can We Go Organic Sustainably

Think about that fact that when you walk into the grocery store that offers both organic and conventional options the organic ones always cost more. Why is this? Advocates claim that organic produce, because it is unexposed to chemical pesticides and has not been pumped with growth hormones is cleaner and better for you, which although it has been contested sounds like a good argument but does it mean we should be paying more?

I’m concerned that too little of the public’s attention has been directed, toward the relationship between organic farms and the sustainability movement. Food safety and sustainability are two movements happening today that in my mind, want a world that has similar standards for human and environmental health, but do their respective practices actually line up? Often critics (like ones noted in this article) of organic produce will claim that organic farms have smaller and less efficient yields and are ultimately worse for the environment than conventional farms. It seems like the question is up in the air so I decided to do some investigating.

First of all, I think it is easy for people to believe (without knowing) that organic farms require more energy and effort than conventional farms because they have to pay more for organic produce. What is being misunderstood is that even though organic farms have different methods of coping with the hardships of farming like disease and nitrogen resources they have methods that work. This article uses a table shown here explain the methods of each type of farm.

If you do a little research, it’s clear from the variety of studies on energy costs of organic farming that the issue has not escaped the lens of the academic microscope. Cornell University, a top dog in the agricultural studies world put out this study in which Dr. David Pimentel, a professor of ecology and agriculture, states "Organic farming approaches for these crops not only use an average of 30 percent less fossil energy but also conserve more water in the soil, induce less erosion, maintain soil quality and conserve more biological resources than conventional farming does,” Other studies have made similar assertions.

So if all the experts say organic is more efficient and you can sell organic food for more, what stops all the farms from going organic? The answer is labor. An organic farm while it does have innovative solutions to the problems of farming sometimes those solutions require a lot more labor than conventional farms. For example, a conventional farm deals with the problem of invasive species of weeds by spraying chemical herbicides that prevent those weeds from growing and hurting crop yields.

Organic farms, which don’t want to use these, have to hand weed or mulch, which costs a lot compared to the spray on weed killers. Ultimately it becomes a numbers game, and from observation alone it seems that more often than not, the conventional farm wins. In the end, it’s not all wrong to believe that the cost of organic food reflects the effort put into growing it. What is doesn’t mean is that it is less efficient or out of line with the move towards sustainability, which is a happy notion. It would be a shame to see the two movements towards sustainability and organic farming pitted against each other when their worldviews seem to match up so well.

If you are still curious here are some more articles on the matter:

1. http://food.change.org/blog/view/organic_farming_can_feed_the_world

2. http://www.hodgeslab.org/2008/05/organic_farming_efficiency.html

3. http://www.cnr.berkeley.edu/~christos/articles/cv_organic_farming.html