Population Growth
OKAY, FOR OUR FIRST FORAY into urban agriculture, we wrote Backyard Farming, a blog about vegetable gardens and fruit trees. For those interested in kicking it up a notch, we brought you Backyard Chickens, a blog about raising birds right outside your house. I imagine that we’re already treading on weird and wacky territory here when we start talking about food-producing animals. You may know a couple people in the neighbourhood that take care of a vegetable patch, but you probably aren’t aware of anyone that’s providing a happy home for chickens and turkeys, ducks and geese. So I don’t actually expect anyone out there to take me up on what I’m going to talk about next. But in the event that you’ve already aced Homesteading 101 and you’re past the intermediate class, then we’ve got to give you something to shoot for: an entire menagerie of livestock, fauna of the land, sea, and air!
THERE IS AN ELEPHANT in the room, and its name is Population. Whenever we start to discuss the global food crisis and its possible solutions, there is always a staunch unwillingness to look into the abyss at the population issue and its inevitable implications. After drafting plans for the Toronto Skyfarm, featured in the last Green Apple Pie blog entry Grasping at Grass, local architect Gordon Graff justified the high-tech hyper-densification of our agriculture by stating that “unless we want to start talking about human population control — which is politically impossible, in a democracy — we have to start considering new strategies… There’s either going to be massive famine, or we’ll have to condense our agricultural practice… Human beings have never shown the capacity to consume less… The simple fact is that, somehow, we have to find a way to produce more.”
