My Travels in an Urban Farmscape

I chaired the sustainability session of an entrepreneur’s conference, and though many of the attending “green” guys were from the solar energy and other clean energy areas, our main speakers were actually mostly focused on urban sustainability, including vertical farming.

During the banquet after the conference, I had a chance to talk to one of the solar consultants, and when we talked about the presentations he told me directly that he didn’t focus on “soft” areas like those, but rather on “technology” driven businesses such as solar and wind.

Now I come from a science background, and I know that when the moniker “soft” is used to describe anything in the sciences, it’s usually leavened with a mixture of disdain for the subject. Thus, you get biologists deriding sociology and psychology as “soft sciences”, while the physicists lord it over everyone else (in their weird, geeky way).

I got the same sense when I attended another meeting, this time at the “NYCEDC Bathgate Proposal – Design Charrette” at NYU’s Stern campus, where the main presenter prefaced his talk with the slogan that the proposed Bathgate Urban Food Industry Center in the Bronx, NY would be “Beyond the Urban Farm”.

I think such things highlight the divergence between those who actually practice “Urban Farming” now and those whose focus is more towards gaining access to financing and venture capital for future “mega” projects.

Let’s face it, “urban farming” is just not “sexy” enough to pour large amounts of capital into. It’s usually low-tech, with the exception of some that dabble in hydroponics/aeroponics, and the feeling seems to be that most of its practitioners are hippy types and raging idealists who are avowedly anti-technology and anti-big business.

Personally, I’m a sucker for  nature. I’d rather go visit a tropical rainforest than do the rail thing in Europe. I’d rather explore vine-entangled Mayan ruins than pretend to be a sophisticated urbanite in some gentrified art museum.  Saying that, I was trained as a molecular biologist, and I’ve been a Java programmer since this iconic computer platform first surfaced in the late 1990s, so I can understand this love-hate relationship with technology.

I think humanity, with our large brains, relatively puny musculature, and dexterous fingers have EVOLVED to be symbiotically tied to technology. Rejecting this due to some misdirected effort to be “closer to nature” is actually going against  what we were meant to be. In the same way, I think sustainable and pervasive agriculture will go a long way towards actual sustainability and economic feasibility by embracing our technological heritage and not scorning it.

Sometimes I just like doing things for the sake of experimentation. So one fine day earlier this summer, it occurred to me that it would be interesting to grow rice as one of our “crops” this year.

Now I’ve never grown rice before, and though I eat it everyday, I am almost completely disconnected from the hardships associated with the growing, harvesting, and processing of this essential staple food to most of the world. I also live in a surburb in the northeast USA, which is hardly the place one finds rice fields or even rice in containers, though the latter was the plan I settled on.

I started out by selecting and buying some brown rice from the local Asian food centers. It’s necessary to use brown rice and not white rice because the bran layer of the rice grains are removed to make white rice, and this processing eliminates the ability of the grains to germinate.

I settled on three varieties.

• Cock on top of the world Thai jasmine rice
• Goya Arroz Integral medium grain brown rice
• Organic Brown Basmati

One of the rice varieties I selected to grow was organic basmati brown rice. Please click on the image above for a detailed picture.

I first soaked the rice in water for a night, then had to figure out how to germinate the seeds. I placed artificial media (a starting seed mixture with sphagnum peat moss, perlite, and some wetting agents) on a 15 cm shallow plastic plate, then slowly filled the container with water. The very light media floated to the top, with the water soaking it slowly from the bottom. I then carefully placed the tiny seeds onto this “Floating Island”, pushing them slightly into the media but not otherwise covering them. I then exposed the setup to full sun.

All three varieties of rice germinated by the 4th or 5th day. In fact, many of the seedlings were 2-3 cm tall by this time, and many continued to grow at a rate of 2 cm or so per day, which was to me a rather remarkable growth rate.

Seedlings grew at the astounding rate of 2-3 cm per day. Please click on the thumbnail above to view detailed image.

By the second week many seedlings had grown beyond 100 cm, and some were nearing 0.2 m tall. It was time to replant them, and I chose to distribute them onto two different containers. The first was a deep (45 cm tall) plastic pot with a bottom diameter of 35 cm and a top diameter of 50 cm, to which I replanted three of the older seedlings. The second container was a rather shallow (20 cm tall) black plastic container normally used for mixing cement with dimensions of exactly 90 cm x 60 cm, onto which I replanted six seedlings.

I must admit that I did not have high hopes for the rice. For one thing, the only location that could accommodate the containers only had full sun for part of the day, and these crops are very sun-loving. Secondly, it was almost July when I first started growing, and this meant we would be into late Fall by the time the plants matured enough to flower.

The rice grew strong and tall, and looked decidedly ornamental in its large green pot. Click on the thumbnail above for a detailed image.

Nevertheless, I was heartened to see my crop grow strong and tall even under these conditions. In fact, the effect of the gently waving rice in its dark green pot was decidedly complimentary to our backyard, and the blades of the plants in the deep container grew taller even than the tomato and pepper plants around it.

Well, August turned grudgingly to September, and cold air rolled in by October, and the night air temperature dropped precipitously to the 10 degree Celsius level. By this time the tomatoes had spent most of their strength and were managing to eke out only a few fruits per day, with their leaves and stems looking quite ragged and decrepit.

Imagine my surprise when I found panicles rising from the rice in 10 degree Celsius weather. Click on thumbnail above for detailed image.

But imagine my surprise when I found many rice panicles sprouting from the rice last week! The weather had turned cold by this time, and yet here amazingly was visible proof that this tropical species was quite capable of fruiting amidst such hardships.

The growth and development of the flowers and seeds is probably being severely affected in such extreme weather, so I don’t harbor high hopes right now for actually harvesting the mature grains, but I have to admit this project of rice growing in a suburban environment certainly filled my with excitement and deep gratification.

Perhaps I will take it one step farther next season. Some permaculturists believe our lawns are a stupendous waste of water and energy, with one person saying up to 60% of water use in the USA goes to watering of the lawn. Now, if only I had the courage to remove large parts of that lawn and plant grain crops instead. Can you imagine suburbs with gently waving corn fields, or wheat fields, or even rice fields?

I have always been fascinated with plants ever since I completed a degree in Plant Molecular Biology. My interest ranged from studying and photographing various magnificent trees such as the banyans and strangling figs, to cultivating smaller but no less fascinating aroids.

For the last decade or so, I have also discovered the joys of growing my own vegetables in a garden plot in my suburban home. We routinely grow thousands of cherry and grape tomatoes every season, as well as cucumbers and peppers and other crops. There is almost something spiritual in harvesting the crops every day after watching your plants soak up the sun’s rays and grow large and healthy.

Recently, my interest has turned to what I like to think of as High Density Urban Farming (or HIDUF), which promises to change the way people view the relatively deserted and pauperized natural ecosystems in urban and suburban areas. In my mind’s eye I see a future cityscape that is transformed from cold steel and hard concrete to a verdant paradise of greenery, where people routinely shop for fresh vegetables grown only a few steps away from their apartments or homes.

I hope that my writings get you excited about this new endeavor too, and that you will join me in finding new and ingenious ways to cope with a world that has seen humanity’s rise become increasingly unsustainable and dangerous to our own future survival.