As I explore different ways to grow food, and talk about all of the things that I've learned,
and all of the various issues that I've run up against, I often end up using the word context.
I usually do this as an attempt to call attention to the particulars of the local
climate, the soil conditions, cultural norms, local knowledge, and resource availability,
and how they might all impact the success of different approaches in different places,
or at least provide insight into why things worked or didn't work. For me, as a designer, context is
also a call to explore and better understand the place that we are trying to engage with,
while also recognising that context is always changing, and we may need to anticipate this
change. I usually describe the purpose of my explorations in the gardens and this YouTube
channel as simply trying to help more people grow more of their own food, which I use as a broad and
inclusive description that doesn't presuppose the many different reasons why people would want to
grow their own food in the first place. But for me there is a much larger context here that I've been
thinking about a lot over the years, and more recently I've begun to explore the questions of
how many more people, and how much more more food are we actually talking about?
I think our food systems need to change for many reasons, including climate change,
environmental destruction, biodiversity loss, resource use, waste, supply chain disruptions,
exploitation and economic stresses. There are many areas to focus on within our food systems,
but for the most part I focus mainly on vegetables, as that is where I have
most interest and experience. I work on the assumption that a lot more of the
vegetables that we eat need to be produced as an integrated part of our communities,
and that we need to shift what we eat towards a more plant based diet, and that this should be
recognised as a massive transformation that needs to happen quickly. Or put more simply, we need to
quickly change things so that most of us eat a lot more vegetables, with as much as possible
being produced locally. Of course, this isn’t always the case, and there are many exceptions,
but I think it is a useful approach for many places including within the context of Ireland
where I am based. And while the year 2050 might be a useful timescale to work within, I think
that there are compelling reasons why things need to change much more quickly, and perhaps the more
radical target of 2030 is more appropriate, even if it will be a lot harder to hit.
In all of this there are serious issues relating to land, resources, policy, markets, training
and funding that need to be sorted out, but I am most interested in the people, on focusing on
who is going to be doing the actual growing, and at what scale they will be working at.
I have been thinking of what this kind of change would really look like,
and I have started to put numbers to all of this, to develop a simplistic model
of possible future food production, as a way of understanding the scope of the
change that we could be looking at and how far away from the target we might be.
I generally break down the food supply systems into 3 different sectors or scales of production,
large scale producers growing typically mono-cropped vegetables for the mass market,
medium scale mixed production generally for direct sale in local markets,
and a smaller scale with people growing vegetables mainly for their own use. At
the moment in Ireland and in many other places in the world,
the vast majority of the food that we eat, comes from the large scale, either grown in Ireland or
imported, with very small amounts coming from the other two more local scales of production.
And the big questions for me are how much of a increase can we expect from these currently
tiny components of the food supply system, and how quickly, and what scale of a shift will be enough
to meet the greenhouse gas emissions targets, or to halt biodiversity loss, or allow us to develop
resilient food security locally, nationally and globally? I don't really have an answer for these
questions, but I find that it is useful to go though a simplistic scenario to see what things
might look like, and for a while I've felt that we need to reduce the amount of food coming in
from large scale systems by at least half and to build up the two more local scales of production
to fill in that gap, as well as providing for any increase in vegetables that we do consume.
The island of Ireland currently has a population of about 6.8 million people, including the
Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, and apparently the average consumption of vegetables
is currently about 100kg per capita per year, not counting potatoes. This would translate to
almost 700,000 tonnes of vegetables consumed each year, almost all of it from large scale production
systems. But if we want to see a dramatic shift towards people eating a lot more vegetables,
I think we could easily double that to something like 200kg per capita per year, which would push
the total amount needed to over 1.3 million tonnes of vegetables. And we need to take into account
the likely increase in population, that would slightly increase the total amount of vegetables
that we need to produce by 2030 and a bit more by 2050. In the scenario of trying to reduce
the amount of vegetables that we get from large scale systems by at least half, down to about
350,000 tonnes, then the medium and small scale sectors would need to supply the remaining 1.1
million tonnes of vegetables that would be needed by 2030. For the sake of this simple exercise I
would split that amount of vegetables roughly between the medium and small scale sectors,
but regardless of how it is split this a massive task, and would require a huge number of people
to start growing vegetables as professional growers and simply growing for themselves.
Starting with the scale of growing that I am most familiar with, I have found that
in the family scale gardens that I manage, I can generally produce about 500kg or half a tonne of
vegetables each year from each of the gardens, not including potatoes. This is a fair amount
of vegetables and a reasonable amount of work, but I think achievable for a lot of people who
focus on growing food for themselves. Given that the average household size is about 2.75 people,
500kg is not far off supplying the 200kg/person that an average household would need,
or good enough for the purposes of this back of the seed packet kind of calculation at least.
If we want to get to the point where 35 to 40% of the total supply of vegetable
was produced by people for their own consumption, then this could be seen as comparable to about
35-40% of all the households producing all of their vegetables in a large back garden,
or a really productive allotment or some other growing space. This translates to more than one
million avid vegetable growers on the island of Ireland, or about 15% of the total population,
and I doubt it is currently even 1%. If the challenge was to get this many people growing
substantial amounts of their own vegetables by 2030, then this means that on average more
than 120,000 people would need to make a serious start of that journey each year.
Actually given that so many people seem to struggle with growing food and eventually give up,
and it usually takes a number of years for others to skill-up and get a garden to be
reasonably productive, and that a certain amount of those that are successful will end up stopping
at some point along the way due to life changes, a lot more need to start each year. So it seems
to me that we need to see in the region of 150,000 people start a garden each year,
or perhaps we could reduce that to about 50,000 people if we felt that we could extend
the target date to 2050, and a lot of them need to be really productive quite quickly.
While there has been a dramatic increase in the number of people growing food in this past year,
I don't know if it's been any where near that number, and I wonder what will have
to change in order to enable this to happen year after year until that target is reached.
But these numbers are too big to really get a handle on, and I find it useful to bring this
kind of analysis down to a scale that is easier to understand, and into a context that I'm more
familiar with. The small village that I live in is likely to have a population of 1000 people
or about 360 households by the year 2030, assuming that household sizes remain similar
to the national average, and recent high rates of population growth in our community continue. So
a population of this size and a shift in our diets to eating more vegetables, which quite a few of
us have already done, would mean that about 150 tonnes of vegetables would be need to be supplied
within and around our community. And based on previous back of the seed packet calculations,
we would want to see about 150 avid vegetable growers providing all of the vegetables for 35-40%
of the households, collectively producing a total of about 75 tonnes of vegetables, each year. We
have definitely had a head start on this compared to other communities,
but we are still a very long way off, as there are probably less than 5% of households growing
anywhere close to that scale at the moment. If we want to reach the target of 2030 in 9 years time,
then I would hope to see an average of at least 15-20 additional households each year in my small
community make a realistic start in trying to trying to grow a lot of their own food,
but I don't see this happening, yet. And if we think we can wait until 2050 to reach this target,
and assuming that recent population growth rates continue until then,
we would still want to see at least 10 new substantial vegetable gardens started each year.
There are a lot of people in my community who are eager to eat fresh locally produced vegetables,
and one of the main reasons why a lot of them aren't growing their own vegetables
is because we already have decent supplies from other producers. We have a Community Farm,
which together with the surplus vegetables that I grow as part of this RED Gardens Project,
I would estimate we produce a total of about 20 tonnes of vegetable for the local community each
year. This is a decent start towards producing the target of 75 tonnes of vegetables a year
that this medium scale sector would need to supply by the year 2030, but I don't think that the RED
Gardens and the Community Farm would be able to produce enough to meet this target even if both
enterprises increased and maintained production quite significantly over the next 9 years. We
are definitely going to need some more dedicated growers and enterprises
working to supply our local community, especially as the population continues to grow by 2050.
And thirty years from now, I seriously doubt I will still be growing at anywhere near the
scale that would be needed, so someone will have to step in to fill that gap as well. The
number of professional or dedicated vegetable growers that we will need in the future
depends on how much each of them can manage or can produce using methods that are appropriate
to that future context, which at the very least would be biodiversity friendly, with low
greenhouse gas emissions, and broadly resilient. Another way to look at this is to determine what
ratio of resident to grower is appropriate in terms of the amount and diversity of supply,
as well as financial viability. Could one dedicated full time grower produce 20 tonnes
of a diverse range of vegetables, which would be enough to feed 100 residents for the year,
assuming that the winter and seasonal shortages can be managed with storage and preserves? And
could these 100 residents afford to pay enough to cover the costs and for the grower to have
a liveable wage? I don't know the answer to this, but 100:1 seems like a reasonable place to start,
or at least it is a nice round number to work with, though I suspect it would require a fair
amount of skill and experience, and quite a few years to get established.
So in this possible scenario, with these basic figures, and a back of the seed packet kind of
calculation, and a target of the year 2030, a community like ours with an anticipated
population of 1000 people, would likely need about 4 full time skilled vegetable growers
to supply 35-40% of the vegetables consumed, and about 150 the households would also have large
and productive gardens or allotments, producing another 35-40% of the vegetables consumed. And
we would have about nine years to get to that point, and I think that all of this is something
we need to plan for in our community, or at least try to facilitate. There are a lot of
different options that could be included in the mix, including school and community gardens and
collaborative farming, but it will still take a lot of people getting directly involved. With
this scenario, we would still be importing 50 tonnes of vegetable into our community each year,
almost as much as we currently do, and I am not sure if that is enough of a change to meet the
challenges ahead. Of course there is a lot that can be done to improve the large scale vegetables
production and distribution systems, and we need to make radical changes to so many aspects of this
method that we currently rely on to feed so many people, but I believe that the closer we can get
to producing the vast majority of our vegetables locally within our own community, the better. The
same could be said of many places, and this simple exercise could be extrapolated to other
communities, to the full island, and to different places around the world, but of course there will
be much more complex issues to deal with in many other places, especially in cities. There are
huge possibilities with urban and peri-urban agriculture, and a lot of open spaces in and
around a lot of cities, but it will be a lot harder to achieve this kind of transformation of
our food systems in an urban environment. Which I think actually places greater responsibility
on smaller communities like ours, to radically relocalise whatever parts of the food supply
system we can, to go farther and faster with the transition than would be possible in urban
environments, or in many other places that don't have such good conditions for growing vegetables.
Looking again at the full island of Ireland, which is perhaps better placed for this kind
of transformation than many other locations around the world, this simple scenario would
require one million avid growers producing lots of vegetables, mainly for their own households. And
we would also need between 25,000 and 30,000 new dedicated full time vegetable growers, assuming
that the 100:1 ratio between consumers and growers is a viable and appropriate proportion. While
there is a huge amount that would need to be done to provide access to land,
funding, resources, training, and markets, and all of these are essential parts of the process,
I keep coming back to the fact that all of this requires a lot more people doing the hard work and
getting their hands dirty, quite literally. If we want to hit the target of the year 2030,
then we we need to see at least 120,000 people starting to grow serious amounts
of food for themselves each year, and at least 3,000 vegetable growing operations
or market gardens starting up each year, and to hope that most of them are highly successful.
If we think we could extend the period of transformation to the year 2050, then we
might only need 40,000 new large vegetable plots in back gardens and allotments each year, and 1000
new professional growers each year, but even that seems way more than is possible at the moment.
Most of the time I simply focus on a more bottom up view of things,
to engage with people who are already growing food for themselves, and with
a belief that each person who is able to grow a bit more of their own food is a success story.
And this can be a really wonderful and encouraging space to be in, to share in the collective
learning process with so many people around the world, and right here in my own community.
But I also think it's important to occasionally step back and to take a more top down view,
a general overview of the whole system, and to try to figure out how far along we are in this global,
national and local transformation that is both massive and urgent. And that overview can be
really demoralising, but I also think that it's essential to have a better understanding
of that larger context, even if our own contributions seem incredibly tiny in comparison.
Personally, I try to find a balance between being delighted with all the things that we've
been able to do so far, excited about the possibilities of the next growing season,
and frustrated or worried that it's not enough yet, and I do struggle with that balance
sometimes. But I keep going, knowing that my job is to grow more food, and to help more people
grow more of their own food, because I think the world desperately needs a lot more of us.