page_title: Urban agriculture
section_title: Energy efficiency
hierarchical_section_title: Urban agriculture / Impact / Energy efficiency
context_page_description: Urban agriculture, urban farming, or urban gardening is the practice of cultivating, processing, and distributing food in or around urban areas. Urban agriculture can also involve animal husbandry, aquaculture, agroforestry, urban beekeeping, and horticulture. These activities occur in peri-urban areas as well, and peri-urban agriculture may have different characteristics.
  Urban agriculture can reflect varying levels of economic and social development. It may be a social movement for sustainable communities, where organic growers, "foodies," and "locavores" form social networks founded on a shared ethos of nature and community holism. These networks can evolve when receiving formal institutional support, becoming integrated into local town planning as a "transition town" movement for sustainable urban development. For others, food security, nutrition, and income generation are key motivations for the practice. In either case, more direct access to fresh vegetables, fruits, and meat products through urban agriculture can improve food security and food safety.
context_section_description: The current industrial agriculture system is accountable for high energy costs for the transportation of foodstuffs. According to a study by Rich Pirog, the associate director of the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture at Iowa State University, the average conventional produce item travels 1,500 miles (2,400 km), using, if shipped by tractor-trailer, 1 US gallon (3.8 l; 0.83 imp gal) of fossil fuel per 100 pounds (45 kg). The energy used to transport food is decreased when urban agriculture can provide cities with locally grown food. Pirog found that traditional, non-local, food distribution system used 4 to 17 times more fuel and emitted 5 to 17 times more CO
  2 than the local and regional transport.
  Similarly, in a study by Marc Xuereb and Region of Waterloo Public Health, they estimated that switching to locally grown food could save transport-related emissions equivalent to nearly 50,000 metric tons of CO
  2, or the equivalent of taking 16,191 cars off the road.
caption: A windowfarm, incorporating discarded plastic bottles into pots for hydroponic agriculture in urban windows
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