Project Highlights Vancouver's Farming Potential

Vancouver's Farming Potential

Researchers are using 3-D modelling and water use data to learn just how much food can be grown in Vancouver and how much more water that will require as we morph into a truly edible city.

The project is using laser mapping from aircraft flown over the city to determine where food can be grown successfully in yards, parks and private lands by estimating the amount of solar energy and evapotranspiration, a fancy way of describing how much water returns to the atmosphere through plants and general evaporation.

Vancouver's Food Strategy and its Greenest City Action Plan call for the city to double food production through farms, orchards and community gardens by 2020.

"There's certainly enough available land to double our food assets within the city, but a lot more food can be produced in places that people might be overlooking," said Mark Johnson, an ecohydrology professor at the University of B. C. who is leading the project with colleague Nicholas Coops and two graduate students.

"Front yards, back yards, even places with partial sun or diffuse light can be productive," he said. "When you look at the city from above you can see that it is a significant amount of land."

The growing popularity of yard farming, where homeowners turn over their entire yard to professional growers who cultivate the space over an extended growing season and sell the vegetables, has provided the researchers with an opportunity to collect accurate data on water use for urban agriculture. Researchers installed meters on the water taps used by urban farmers to grow the crops and to wash the vegetables at harvest.

"We tend to think only of the water needed to grow the food, but in many cases the water required to process is significantly more than farmers use for irrigation," said Johnson. "People really overestimate how much water a garden needs."

For most of the year, little, if any, irrigation is required to grow vegetables, and rain collection could satisfy most water needs.

"Each year, every square metre of Vancouver receives 1,000 litres of water just falling from the sky," he said.

The project, funded by the Wall Institute for Advanced Studies, will generate an estimate of how much food can be produced in the urban environment through a detailed assessment of the built environment and tree canopy, identify ideal locations for urban agriculture and then, how much additional water would be required to support that level of agriculture.

The information could prove valuable to policy-makers as climate change is predicted to enhance the seasonality of our weather, meaning longer, drier summers, he said.

Source: Vancouver Sun

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