Food and the City: Urban Agriculture and the New Food Revolution (31 page)

“This is Growing System Number One,” said Edel as we walked toward the four square plastic 275-gallon (1,000-liter) tubs that were the fish tanks. This was the project that Davis's students were working on, tweaking and perfecting, so that it could be implemented on a larger scale when The Plant ramped up its food ecosystem.

Slivers of fingerling tilapia flashed around the tank, and as soon as they saw us looming over, they made for the surface. “They would eat twenty-four hours a day,” said Edel, as the fish poked at the water's surface. There were two more tanks attached to this chain of plastic vats and white plastic PVC pipes, and the nearby pump was noisily forcing water around through the tanks. Sixty market-weight tilapia swirled in the final tank. “You want to control how much you feed them or they'll get too big, too fast. And you also have to balance the amount of food with the amount of plants you are growing.” Edel explained that the fish were “on a diet” until they got more plants into the system.

The water from the fish pens flowed into another water-filled tank with run-of-the-mill hardware-store black plastic garden netting for filtering. Edel explained that the netting caused “the richer stuff” to fall to the bottom of the filter tank. When The Plant's biodigester is ready, this solid fish waste will be used to produce methane gas, which will be turned back into heat and electrical energy.

The next tank after the netting had a black plastic honeycomb-like panel—“a $400 mistake,” whined Edel. The tank is simply a place to harbor the bacteria that turns the ammonia of the fish waste into the nitrites and nitrates (the nitrogen compounds) that make fantastic plant fertilizer. Instead of the special, expensive plastic comb, Edel proposed that “rocks or old chopped-up plastic bottles” would do just as good a job for a fraction of the price.

The pump then sent the water from the filters into shallow pans where foam rafts studded with tiny plant plugs floated on clear but
nitrogen-rich water. Each hole in the raft contained a small plastic basket filled with coconut husk to stabilize the roots of each little seedling of arugula, red lettuce, or whatever the team wants to grow. The coconut husk fiber is nearly indestructible yet is porous enough to not restrict the rooting systems that dangle through the gaps in the baskets and into the water. As the plants take up the nitrogen, they effectively clean the water—as they do in ecosystems in nature—allowing the water to be recycled back into the fish tanks for the waste-fertilizer loop to begin again.

The plants looked very happy and healthy bathed in the fuchsia light of the state-of-the-art LED grow lights. “Plants can't see green,” Edel explained, so you only need the red and blue lights. Edel, Davis, and students are testing the LED lights, as they are relative newcomers to the market; but if they work, they'll be much more efficient than other grow lights commonly used. A computer engineer is working out the open-source software and hardware that will move the lights along a variable-height track suspended above the seedlings. The lights move slowly from one end of the beds to the other “so they don't end up growing like this,” explained Edel, listing sharply to one side.

I finally asked the big question that seems to be a sticking point where new ideas tend to hit the proverbial brick wall of city bylaws. “And you're allowed to do all of this?”

Overall, the city has just let Edel and company continue without too much concern. The brewing permit was a hassle, but they got it. “The only other resistance we'd had is from the zoning department that didn't like the idea of fish and aquaculture,” said Edel. “Not for any
good
reason, because under the same zoning, you can crush cars, smelt iron, and slaughter cattle. But raising organic fish for some reason is bad. Go figure.”

The fish were not yet a particular concern anyhow, as they were part of Davis's students’ course work. They were working out the details of this aquaponics-agricultural loop as part of the student curriculum, which involved the microgreens, sprouts, and mushrooms that would soon be tested out at the Plant.

Part of this course work also included marketing plans and economic feasibility studies by students at the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT). When I asked Davis how strong the demand was in Chicago for locally grown food, he replied that even drawing from a radius of five hundred miles around the city, there aren't enough farms for the markets and the demand that already exists. And being right in the city will be a huge advantage for restaurants willing to pay a premium for ultra-fresh product. “We're about the only people who can say, ‘We'll pick this for you at nine a.m., have it to you by ten, and you can serve it for lunch.’”
¹⁶

The other factor that favors the viability of vertical farming in the city, according to Davis, is that Chicago's public school system now sets aside 20 percent of its school lunch budget for local foods. “Even keeping in mind that they don't actually go to school in the summer when most of the food is produced, it still creates opportunity for us.”

Food wholesale produce suppliers have also told Davis that they'll take everything The Plant can produce. So whether it is Chicago's sustainable and premium restaurants willing to pay top dollar for The Plant's fresh, local, organic food, or local produce wholesalers, or the Chicago Public School System (though clearly the school board wouldn't be able to out-compete the other two on price), finding markets for the food will be the easy part.

In Davis's opinion, however, Edel's plan of having manufacturing tenants subsidize the food-growing spaces was a key element to turning The Plant into reality while the other more ambitious “food-only” skyscrapers are lingering on paper at this point. “We've been to almost every other urban agriculture site within five hundred miles, and we noticed that almost all of them are being run on job-training grants from foundations. We thought that this was probably not a good way to run this. That's why I really jumped on to this project. It's technically interesting, but it has a commitment to creating a business model that can be replicated. The problem with social services and forty-story urban farms is
that you train a bunch of people, but there are no businesses out there to hire them.”
¹⁷

When I remarked that it's somewhat surprising that the world's first vertical farm won't be nestled in among skyscrapers in uptown Manhattan, or in the anything-is-possible cities like Shanghai and Dubai; that it will happen on a very modest scale, on a very modest budget, in Chicago, Davis just smiled. “That's kind of the tension between New York and the Midwest. All the actual urban agriculture is happening within five hundred miles of Chicago, and all the press is about these forty-story buildings.”

“When Sam Walton [founder of Walmart] started, he didn't try to build a four-hundred-thousand-square-foot superstore. He took an old Kresge's and said, ‘I'm going to figure out this business model in this relatively small space. If it's successful, I'll make another one.’ And at some point, you can afford to build a single-purpose building for a Walmart. I think if you get good at urban agriculture, and have a few technological breakthroughs, at some point you'll need an architect to design an eighty-story urban farm. Maybe your business model will be sound to do that. It's just a bit premature right now.”

I asked if the city was therefore giving The Plant any breaks or help in any way. “They're not subsidizing it,” answered Davis. “But the most important thing in Chicago is that they're letting us do it.”

Edel's concept of industrial reuse seems like a reasonable solution to the very sticky wicket that has so far kept urban vertical farms confined to academic presentations and scrolls of architectural plans. And, as Edel put it, “You've got to sell a lot of rutabagas to pay for a $100 million building.” Edel's ability to reinvigorate unwanted commercial space, make it beautiful, and, perhaps most importantly, make it productive and profitable once again, might just be a catalyst that will serve post-industrial
Chicago well. And it might be vertical farming's Sputnik moment, launching a vertical-farm race, so to speak, that will leave those ego-driven skyscrapers on the drawing board for the time being.

W
hat
would
it be like if the borders were to close and cut off all food imports? What if that global food chain that supplies our supermarkets and restaurants broke down or those supplies simply went elsewhere? What would happen if there suddenly was no fuel to pump into the state-of-the-art combines, tractors, seeders, and sprayers? No replacement parts when machinery broke down. No chemical fertilizers, pesticides, or herbicides to spread on fields. And no one was willing to trade, even if you wanted to. In other words, what would happen if a sudden food shock hit an industrial, fossil fuel-dependent, globally interconnected food system of an entire nation? As Bill McKibben wrote in “The Cuba Diet: What Will You Be Eating When the Revolution Comes?”—a feature article that appeared in
Harper's
magazine in 2005 (one of the few mainstream media outlets that even
acknowledged Cuba's multiyear food crisis)—“It's somehow useful to know that someone has already run the experiment.”
¹

So what was the experiment, in Cuba's particular case?

From the late 1950s into the 1980s, communist Cuba followed the same path that capitalist nations did. It embraced the efficiencies of large-scale industrial agriculture, perhaps even more so in its centralized communist economy and state-owned farms. Highly mechanized monocrop farming (specifically sugarcane) and intensive livestock farming dominated. By the 1980s, 1.3 million tons of chemical fertilizer and $80 million worth of pesticides were being used on the state-directed Cuban mega-farms.
²
Sugar was king—I personally saw the legacy of the Cuban sugar mills, now rusting monoliths, in the narrow, flat midlands of the island from the window of our tour bus—with the help of copious amounts of chemical fertilizers, herbicides, pesticides, and tractors. Bulk-sugar shipping terminals could export up to 75,000 tons a day, and this one crop accounted for 74 percent of the total value of Cuba's exports in the mid-1980s.
³
The Castro government was financially and ideologically invested in high-yield, industrial farming. It was a triumph of Cuban communism that collective farms could be modern, efficient, and virtuous at the same time.

It was a false economy, however. Cuba had preferential agreements with select trading partners. The Soviet Union paid above world prices for Cuba's sugar in return for its continued enthusiasm for communist ideals and an ideological presence within 100 miles (160 kilometers) of the United States. Cuba got a sweetheart deal on fuel, machinery, rice, and wheat as it slid into the specialization trap with just a few exportable field crops. While the agreement worked, however, times were relatively good in Cuba.

In their own way, Cubans lived a very similar life to their North American neighbors: they went out to restaurants, concerts, and movies during the week; they took annual family vacations in the car to beaches on the island; and their television sets illuminated living rooms in the evenings.
⁴

Domestically, Cubans were feverishly proud of their dairy industry. One cow named
Ubre Blanca
, or White Udder, achieved mythical status. You can still visit her marble statue in her hometown of Nuevo Gerona on the Isla de la Juventud. She was the most productive dairy cow in the world in the early 1980s, another achievement of Cuban industrial food production. Epic amounts of milk flowed from her teats. One day, she produced 29 gallons (110 liters) of milk—over four times the normal volume of a dairy cow.
⁵
It was enough to get her recognized by the
Guinness Book of World Records.
White Udder's daily production would often be reported in the national news and quoted by Fidel Castro in his speeches. The problem was that she was part of a livestock and dairy industry in Cuba that required annual imports of six hundred thousand tons of feed.
⁶
The tropics is no place to grow grain.

During those years of heavy agricultural industrialization, Cuba's population urbanized drastically. In 1956, about 56 percent of Cubans lived in the countryside; by the end of the 1980s, only 28 percent of the population was rural.
⁷
What was unique about Cuba's overwhelmingly urban population—liberated from the backbreaking work of labor-intensive traditional agriculture but without a capitalist, entrepreneurial system to invest their energies—was that they took advantage of free education, even at the university levels. Literacy and the ranks of educated citizens ballooned. This, as it turned out, would be a huge factor in how Cuba was able to survive the coming food shock.

As the communist countries in Europe's Eastern bloc started to fail in the late 1980s, and ultimately with the official dissolution of the Soviet Union on Christmas Day in 1991, Cuba had nowhere to sell its sugar. Simultaneously losing 85 percent of its foreign trade was devastating for a country that relied on foreign imports for two-thirds of its food supply, all of its fuel, and 80 percent of its farming equipment.
⁸
As any Cuban over the age of thirty will tell you, it's like someone turned off the lights, shut off the gas, and emptied the fridge. Cuba was adrift in a world not particularly sympathetic to a nation whose communist
leader had thumbed his nose at its capitalist neighbors for thirty years running.

Without electricity, factories shut down. Tractors rusted in the fields where they were abandoned. Crops unable to be harvested began to rot. And tens of thousands of livestock starved to death on the poor native pastureland.
⁹

Sensing an opportunity to finally strike a fatal blow to Fidel Castro and Caribbean communism, the United States strengthened its economic sanctions of the 1960s against Cuba with the Torricelli Act of 1992. This imposed a strict ban on trade with Cuba by any American company, including its foreign subsidiaries. Foreign ships were not allowed to use any American port if it had been to Cuba within the previous 180 days. And cash remittances by Americans to family and friends in Cuba were outlawed. It was thought that this would bring about the swift demise of the Castro government and Cuban communism. When that turned out not to be the case, the Helms-Burton Act was voted into law in the United States in 1996; its purpose was to punish foreign corporations for engaging in trade and commerce with Cuba.

Cuba was isolated from outside assistance. The most immediate concern was mass starvation. The daily caloric intake dropped by 30 percent, and the average Cuban lost thirty pounds in the three long years following the collapse of the Soviet Union.
¹⁰
Castro declared a state of national emergency and called it the Special Period in Time of Peace.
¹¹
The austerity plan, which still lingers, was enacted to get Cuba through this post-oil, postindustrial, post-global reliance crisis. Food rationing was implemented, and the Cuban government focused its highly educated citizens’ attention on revamping the Cuban food system.

The nation's scientists were tasked with helping farmers come up with high-yield growing systems that didn't require much more than human labor and cheap organic inputs. Oxen were reintroduced to work—and fertilize—the fields. Scientists developed biopesticides and experimented with companion planting and crop rotation. National
seed-sharing programs were established, and state soil experts were trained and made available to any farmer who needed advice. To get around the lack of fuel for transport (and refrigeration, for that matter) Cubans turned bare lots in every city into
organopónicos
—urban organic farms with small retail shops attached, laying the foundation for a massive urban-agriculture component to anchor the nation's new urban food system. By the early 2000s, Havana was growing 90 percent of its fresh produce in
organopónicos
directly in or near the capital.
¹²

What began as an emergency measure—urban agriculture—emerged as a critical cornerstone of Cuba's decentralized, deindustrialized food system, or what came to be called the Cuban Model in food-security circles.

Organopónicos
, with their supply-and-demand pricing, direct-to-consumer farm-gate retail kiosks and farmers’ markets, are now as common in Cuban cities as convenience stores or grocery stores are in cities in North America and Europe. There are literally several dozen urban farms teeming with vegetables, fruits, and “green” medicines (medicinal plants) that change with the season operating in even a medium-size Cuban city. Havana has close to two hundred for its urban population of two million residents.
¹³

Perhaps the most shocking element of Cuba's food system to a North American or European visitor is the total lack of grocery stores, even little food marts. The urban nature of the food production and direct farmer-to-consumer nature of the Cuban food system has made the grocery store largely irrelevant. I saw just one supermarket in the diplomatic zone of Havana, and I went inside a food store in Old Havana where people were buying a few things like cooking oil, chocolate, and other otherwise rationed food. Those were the two examples of a grocery middleman I spotted in two visits. Cubans buy their food directly from urban farms or at farmers’ markets and therefore eat a largely organically produced, seasonal diet that emphasizes fresh vegetables and fruit over meat and processed carbohydrates—though, to be
honest, Cubans are extremely resourceful at getting access to meat and white rice, and with even the smallest affluence gains, waistlines are expanding.

Nevertheless, Cuba has emerged as a global leader in establishing ecologically sound, extremely productive, locally managed food systems driven by nutritional needs, not by profits for multinationals. And as it turns out, it's a much more sustainable and secure way to feed people. In North America, we spend between ten to twelve units of nonrenewable energy for every one unit of food energy on our plate. In Cuba, this ratio is basically reversed.
¹⁴
In 2006, Cuba was the only country in the world to achieve the targets of the World Wildlife Fund's Living Planet Report for sustainable living and development.
¹⁵
(2006 was also the year that the United States and Canada were among the ten “blacklisted” countries for their wasteful ways with energy and resources.)

Whereas an urban farm that rises from the pavement or a razed building site with dozens of types of picture-perfect varieties of seasonal, organic fruits and vegetables makes news in Canada, the United States, or the United Kingdom, in Cuba it's just the
organopónico
down the street. As a result of Cuba's unique food system, agricultural tourism has become a small but nonetheless important type of business.

It's the reason that I made two trips to Cuba. I went to Cuba in 2007 on an island-wide tour of Cuba's food and agriculture system with Canadian agricultural expert Wendy Holm. Like other people interested in urban agriculture, alternative-food systems, and food-security models, I was curious about a country that has been more or less off-limits for so long and wanted to see firsthand what an actual back-to-basics food system looks like.

I returned to Cuba again in 2010 to attend the VIII Meeting on Organic and Sustainable Agriculture international conference in Havana.
¹⁶
On both trips, though, the hardships and sacrifices of a deindustrialized food system were shockingly evident to me. Neither trip could be considered culinary tourism by any stretch of the imagination;
instead, it was a frank look at what it takes to achieve a sustainable, local, clean, and equitable food system. The Cuban model attains ideals with which we are just beginning to wrestle back home: the ecological footprint of the food we consume and a transparent and secure food supply, one driven by nutritional needs, not by corporate profits. It's not easy and it's not cheap, two fundamental values that the industrialized world clings to. Nor was Cuba's transition to this model by choice. Anyone you ask who lived through this radical experiment in revamping Cuba's food system will disabuse you of any romantic notions of this period. Meat and refined carbohydrates (which Cubans dearly love) are rationed, and the selection of vegetables and fruit depends on the season. Food scarcity, twenty-plus years in, remains a daily reality for many Cubans, and between food and clothing expenses, there's little left over for even everyday luxuries, as I discovered over and over again while touring dozens of Cuba's ubiquitous urban organic farms.

T
HE
L
ITTLE
R
ADISH
(E
L
R
ABANITO
)
O
RGANOPÓNICO
, IN THE CITY OF
C
IEGO DE
Á
VILA
, C
UBA
, 2007

Jorge Carmenate, a stocky, sun-weathered man in his mid-forties, welcomed our small group of curious Canadians and Americans to the
organopónico
El Rabanito, the Little Radish.
¹⁷
As he began to talk, he instinctively edged his stocky frame under the canopy of a nearby neem tree, a large tropical tree grown for the pesticidal compounds in its leaves. Our ten-person, pink-cheeked group, clutching cameras and notebooks, followed suit. Even though it was February, the midmorning heat in central Cuba was searing.