It was certainly a blessing to have ‘chai-paratha’, with family and friends, on a chilly but pleasant morning, around 60 kilometers away from home, at Gharo. It was later justified as veracious decision to leave my cozy bedroom or clannish dining area on a windy Sunday morning to have a lavish desi breakfast, at Café Imran, after having a hectic 45 hours week work.
It was a pleasant surprise for all of us see green fields on both sides of the road, just outside Karachi. Gharo, an agricultural town, feeding to the millions inhabitants of the metropolis of Karachi. It looks sluggish, in compare to the concrete jungle and chaotic traffic of Karachi.
Ghalum Qadir Chandio, one of our hosts, informed us that well-off families of Karachi are having farm houses or investing in agriculture at Gharo and adjoining areas. He further told us that the land is rich fertile and irrigation water is also available. “Manpower is cheap and easily available,” added Allah Wasayo” a local driver.
The idea of urban farming is catching-up fast; appraised by Mrs. Shehla Khan, an entrepreneur who accompanied us and running her business in Clifton. Moreover she shared her US experience. The food growing in or around city is becoming popular in cities across the world. It offers multiple benefits like food security, easy access to fresh produce. Urban farms add to the greenery of a city, increasing shade and also providing buffer against climate change by reducing the heat impact.
In metropolitan cities, like Karachi, innovative ideas are taking place, as there is a shortage of land. People are developing ‘rooftop farms and gardens’. Such projects helps in reducing the energy consumption of a building. Even the town planners and architects are experimenting with vertical farms.
Mrs. Shama Tabassum, a proud housewife residence of Malir, Karachi, having a small kitchen, said that she feel immense pleasure when her lemon plant have juicy lemons or when she plucks coriander and mint leaves for her curry and salad. Her proud assets is her tomato plants, which she has grown in pots, placed at the rooftop.
Mrs. Zahra Ali Husain, a writer, urban farmer and sustainability educator, has founded Crops in Pots, Green Schools Pakistan and Organic City Pakistan. The Crops in Pots connects and shares local knowledge of seeds and farming with urban growers. Whereas the Organic City is an organization that promotes green living through sustainable living, culture, media and arts. On the other hand the Green Schools Program of Organic City is designed to be piloted in a traditional school set-up in Karachi. At the core of this program is the Learning Garden, where activity-based gardening and environment classes following a Green Curriculum in an organic patch and classroom leads to student certification.
The Organic City team wants to spread this initiative far and wide. As Zahra puts it, “each school must have a learning garden where children can appreciate nature while observing and learning its divine ways to nurture life. In doing so, children get to understand the impact of the little things they do, and realize that they are global citizens.”
The first such functioning course has been hosted at a local charitable school. The curriculum serves the core requirements of the Green School Program as well as hosting a seed bank for growing local heirloom seeds that can be re-harvested.
The program kicked off last year with the active support of the school management. In the first year, the garden had three vegetable patches — one for the students to work on, one shared by the teachers, management and working staff while in the third, the vegetables were taken by a local restaurant. The produce included kale, coloured bell peppers, broccoli, lettuce, herbs such as parsley, and five types of tomatoes, including cherry tomatoes, and the giant-sized brandy vine. For this year there are plans to add eggplant, spinach, pumpkins, carrots, mint and ginger.
The students learn to manage the whole process — from seed to harvest. They prepare the vegetable beds themselves and also learn to prepare compost. In addition to the host school, an educational outreach program is provided to students from other schools and regular visits take place. The program has become so popular among the city’s schools that, at a time when the law and order situation in the city was disturbed, Skype sessions took place from the learning garden to the participating schools.
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Urban farming is a complex system encompassing a spectrum of interests, from a traditional core of activities associated with the production, processing, marketing, distribution, and consumption, to a multiplicity of other benefits and services that are less widely acknowledged and documented. These include recreation and leisure; economic vitality and business entrepreneurship, individual health and well-being; community health and well-being landscape beautification and environmental restoration and remediation.
Urban farming has become a means to increase access to locally grown food and a way of reintroducing the public to the many aspects of food that we have lost as a culture. How food grows, what grows regionally and seasonally are all important lessons and make a better informed urban consumer. Urban farms can be the front line of the food system. Some cities are giving up part of their park systems to allow urban farmers to plant their seeds. Every urban farm is different just as every rural farm is different.
Today, most cities have lots of vacant land due to urban sprawl and home foreclosures. This land could be used to address food insecurity. One study of Cleveland shows that city could actually meet up to 100 percent of its fresh produce need. This would prevent up to $115 million in annual economic leakage. Using the rooftop space of New York City would also be able to provide roughly twice the amount of space necessary to supply New York City with its green vegetable yields. Space could be even better optimized through the usage of hydroponic or indoor factory production of food. Growing gardens within cities would also cut down on the amount of food waste. In order to fund these projects, it would require financial capital in the form of private enterprises or government funding.
Vacant urban lots are often victim to illegal dumping of hazardous chemicals and other wastes. They are also liable to accumulate standing water and ‘grey water’, which can be dangerous to public health, especially left stagnant for long periods. The implementation of urban agriculture in these vacant lots can be a cost-effective method for removing these chemicals.
In the process known as Phytoremediation, plants and the associated micro organisms are selected for their chemical ability to degrade, absorb, convert to an inert form, and remove toxins from the soil. Several chemicals can be targeted for removal including heavy metals (e.g. mercury and lead) inorganic compounds (e.g. arsenic and uranium), and organic compounds (e.g. petroleum and chlorinated compounds).
In urban setup the town planner are having innovative ideas. Many have wondered for years if vertical farming is really the answer to the shortage of food in the world. However, strange the concept of vertical farming, might seem too many startups, it is an ingenious method to produce food in environments where arable land is unavailable or rare at the most.
This method is especially handy for challenging environments such as deserts, mountainside towns, and cities where many diverse types of vegetables and fruits are grown using precision agriculture methods and skyscraper-like designs.
Vertical farming is a revolutionary and more sustainable method of agriculture than its counterpart as it lowers the requirement of water to up to 70 percent and also saves considerable space and soil. This innovation in the field of agriculture with sustainability as its motto is making more and more heads turn today with its eco-friendly methods and making the possibility of farming real in difficult environs.
[box type=”note” align=”” class=”” width=””]The writer is a freelance columnist and is an educationist by profession. He could be reached at nazir_shaikh86@hotmail.com.[/box]