What is the definition Metropolitan Agriculture, also known as Urban Farming?

The metropolitan agriculture and urban farming industry use space-intensive technologies to produce, process and market crops within a metropolitan area.

Participants

The United Nations Development Program (UNDP), in its 1996 Urban Agriculture handbook, estimates that 200 million people around the world participate in metropolitan agriculture. Participants range the spectrum from the very poor, who use small plots of unused land to grow subsistence crops, to the very rich, who use capital-intensive production systems to grow high-value cash crops.

Scale

The size of individual metropolitan farms varies according to location and capitalization. Location is the proximity to a metropolitan area’s urban center: whereas a farm near the center might be 1/10th acre, a farm 40 miles out in the suburban fringe might be 100 acres. Capitalization is how much money is available for infrastructure: whereas a highly capitalized farm might have 10 acres of greenhouse space, a minimally capitalized farm might have 100 square feet of greenhouse space.

Products

Given the eclectic tastes of urban communities, there are many crop opportunities available to the metropolitan farmer. (MetroFarm lists over 1,000 crops in 36 different categories.) In general, metropolitan farmers produce crops which provide advantages over large-scale competitors in the countryside, including fresh crops, exotic crops and high-quality crops (e.g. “organic”).

Technology

Given the high cost of metropolitan real estate, metropolitan farmers must rely on the centuries-old space-intensive technologies. As example:  Asia– where a 1/2 acre farm might sustain up to 20 people, the Chinampas of Mexico, the Marais of 19th century Paris, and others. Technologies of modern science have also increased the productivity of space:  drip irrigation, synthetic soils and fertilizers.