‘The old saying that money doesn’t grow on trees is now totally obsolete.’

—Wayne Roberts

Field notes from this week

Please stay with me through five outlandish and seemingly unrelated lead-off statements, because in fewer than three pages, you will see some powerful connections to the future of food, farming and cities.
1. One of the great fallacies of our age is that farmers mainly grow food.

I’ll start with a little-know fact about the history of agriculture.

Until fossil fuels became plentiful after World War 11, people got almost all their fabric, fiber, fuel, cleaners and cosmetics from farms. Clothing and fiber came from crops such as cotton, flax, hemp, straw, and trees. Fuel to power horses came from hay, while candles that produced light came from beeswax and animal fat. The best cleaners came from palm and olive oil – whence the brand name Palmolive.  Most of these onetime farm products were displaced by fossil fuels after World War 11, and farmers in the Global North had no choice but to focus almost exclusively on food production.
 2. One of the great fallacies of greens who want to protect the climate is that we must move to a low-carbon economy.

Now that fossil fuels have to be phased out because of global warming, we will soon go back to the future, and get less-polluting fuel, fiber, fabric and cleaners from farms.

One reason why agriculture didn’t contribute much to global warming before the era of fossil fuels is that farmers buried huge amounts of carbon in the soil, or stored it in trees and bushes — keeping it out of the atmosphere. Farming in those days was part of a carbon-rich economy, which we should aim to return to. We need to take carbon from the atmosphere and put it back in the ground and in plants, where carbon is a god-send.

Putting more carbon in soil and plants is a huge part of the solution to global warming.

3. Farmers will soon make half their income by producing ecosystem services.

When farming gets into the swing of carbon storage – including making things such as tables and textiles that last a long time, and thereby sequester carbon and keep it out of the atmosphere for generations – farmers will likely cash in on two new markets, besides food. They will receive fees for burying carbon to keep global warming to a minimum. They will also enjoy brisk local sales of fiber, fabric, fuel and cleaning-cosmetic products.

In all likelihood, the agricultural labor force will double. While the fibers, fabrics and fuels are growing, they perform a wide range of valuable services to Nature, thereby making Nature more productive from a human point of view – by reducing flood damage, filtering water and air, stabilizing the climate, creating scenery that brings in tourists and visitors, supporting pollination for favourite fruits, and so on. That’s how farmers will get into the business of producing ecosystem services – estimated to have a value of $2.6 billion a year, just in the Greenbelt of Ontario, the province that hired David Crombie to do this report.

Putting more carbon in soil and plants is a huge part of the solution to global warming. To that extent, we need a carbon-rich economy, an economy rich in opportunities and incentives to store carbon in plants, soil and objects made from plants, most notably wood, which can sequester carbon for generations. I think environmentalists have been slow to understand this because they do not see beyond harm reduction. They do not see that agriculture has the potential to not only reduce harm, but to also be regenerative, to heal, make whole, to literally recover lost ground. They do not see, in short, that we can grow toward a carbon-rich economy.

In this scenario, agriculture should no longer be called “commodity agriculture” or “production agriculture” or “industrial agriculture” or “cash-crop agriculture.” It deserves the name given by the late Tom Lyson – civic agriculture. It will be about goods and services agriculture, a full partner in the service and knowledge economy. These twinned trends – sharp increases in the range of farm-grown products, and sharp increases in the range of farm-grown ecosystem services – will do yeoman service reducing future levels of global warming (which is called mitigation), as well as controlling the global warming-caused climate chaos that is too late to stop (which is called adaptation). That’s a pretty good deal for everyone – reducing both future damage levels and present-day damage control at one and the same time.
 4. These twinned trends toward new farm products and services will benefit cities and countryside

There are three reasons why this necessary shift is a particular bonus for cities, as well as farmers,  and why cities, as well as farmers, should be at the forefront of speeding up this trend.

Bonus #1: Increases job action
Why can’t city farmers (we used to call them gardeners and landscapers) also grow carbon crops, crops that offer a safe harbor for pollinators, crops that grow up the green walls of buildings to filter and cool smoggy air, crops that prevent erosion and filter water, rain gardens and rooftop gardens that store water from unexpected heavy rainfall? Providing ecosystem services throws open the doors on what urban agriculture can include as revenue streams – providing habitat for pollinators, keeping food scraps out of landfill, supporting heirloom seed varieties, growing heritage trees as carbon filters for air and water as well as carbon sequestration (individual trees are often estimated to have a lifetime value north of $50,000), and so on.

Bonus #2: Prevents disasters
Cities will have to pay a huge cost if green infrastructure is delayed. Older cities, established before the era of railways and before cars, were based around rivers, and were often built on river floodplains. That makes them highly vulnerable to the kind of torrential rains that used to come one year in a hundred, and now come along one year in 20, thanks to global warming. It’s no longer a matter of if a city will face floods, but when. Even a brief torrential rain leaves billions of dollars of damage in its wake when it overflows sewers, then starts filling basements and running havoc with road beds instead – creating staggering debts and inconvenience that could have been avoided by green roofs, rain gardens, tree plantings, rain barrels, porous pavement, and so on.

Green infrastructure is the ounce of prevention worth a pound of cure. This is now an obligation of due diligence for city officials.

Bonus #3: Saves money
Green infrastructure is a pressing city issue because that old and creaky cement-based infrastructure for water is becoming intolerably expensive. It costs a lot of money and causes a lot of global warming. Most cities spend half their electricity budget moving water – to and from toilets, sinks, clothes washers, showers, lawn watering and drinking water. That’s a major cost, a major sustainability black eye in terms of profligate energy use in an era of restraint, a major expense and hassle to repair, since getting to pipes usually means digging through pavement. When lawns can be irrigated by rain barrels or grey water from bathing and dishes, and when the grey water can be cleaned by garden plants and soil filtration, it doesn’t make sense to move drinking water-quality water from afar by electricity. 
   5. David Crombie, a former big city mayor who chaired an Ontario government panel on Planning for Health, Prosperity and Growth, has provided all governments with a good handle on these changes.

Crombie’s report brings these realities to the attention of city dwellers, who might otherwise think green infrastructure is none of their business. Green infrastructure is listed prominently in the first recommendation of the report, because, Crombie claims, it was prominent among suggestions citizens made to him in public meetings he held.

Crombie also breaks ground in the green infrastructure discussion in Recommendation 56 by coupling structural changes to buildings (green roofs, for example) with “low-impact development techniques,” designed to “protect water quality, reduce stormwater runoff and improve resilience to climate change.” By coupling infrastructure with low-impact development techniques, Crombie opens the doors to hundreds of landscape improvements, including porous pavement in driveways, gardens on school grounds, tree-lined streets, and so on.  

Crombie also breaks ground with Recommendation 58, calling on governments to define green infrastructure as eligible for all the special investment treatment now given to cement- and steel-based infrastructure. Open the floodgates to teachers’ and other massive pension funds!

The old saying that money doesn’t grow on trees is now totally obsolete.

Green infrastructure does many things at once that grey infrastructure does as stand-alone tasks. Green infrastructure prevents global warming from being worse while adapting to the global warming that’s inevitable.

It creates jobs galore, and unlike grey infrastructure, provides jobs for many people (women, for example) typically excluded from working on grey infrastructure projects, which hire mainly men who have won a place over many years in construction union hiring halls.

Finally, green infrastructure

It’s a “no-regrets investment,” which delivers benefits (including recreational, scenic and green space) in years when the weather is good, as well as saving our butts in years when it’s stormy.

Like solar electricity and electric cars were a few years ago, before they started breaking records for heavy investment and quick implementation,  green infrastructure is about to win its place on the to-do agenda.

Anyone who thinks keeping land in agriculture means keeping land in a use with few jobs and low income is trapped in yesterday’s thinking and realities.