Abstract
In our visions of the future, urban agriculture has long been considered an integral part of the ‘sustainable city’. Yet urban agriculture is an incredibly diverse and variable field of study, and many practical aspects remain overlooked and understudied. This paper explores the economic sustainability of urban agriculture by focusing on the physical, practical, and economic aspects of home food gardens in South Australia. New data from the Edible Gardens project online survey is presented on a broad range of current garden setups, including a figure illustrating the statistically typical South Australian food garden. The differences between the survey data and a recent optimized garden model further highlight the gap in knowledge regarding existing home food gardens. With regard to the financial accessibility and economic sustainability of home food gardens, there is also still much more work to be done. Although saving money is a top motivation, with many survey respondents believing that they do succeed in saving money, it remains to be seen whether their current gardening practices support this aspiration. Measurement of the full costs of different gardens would allow for better predictions of whether growing food can save household’s money and under what circumstances.
Highlights
In our visions of the future, urban agriculture has long been considered an integral part of the ‘sustainable city’
Additional results collected by the Edible Gardens (EG) survey, including motivations, social learning sources, food preservation methods, food distribution frequency and recipients, and the value of growing food will be presented in a separate paper
The EG survey results, which are applicable to the Ward and Symons [34] optimization model include the number of people in the household, their years of gardening experience, the size of the area under production, and the types and number of production methods used
Summary
In our visions of the future, urban agriculture has long been considered an integral part of the ‘sustainable city’. As the most dominant form of UA in the developed world [7,8,9], home food gardens have the potential to greatly contribute to future sustainability. Home food gardens are widely spread across urban areas; they are on private property—often hidden behind fences or in backyards—and there is great diversity in the ways people grow food. These characteristics all contribute to the difficulty of conducting research on home food gardens [8,10,15]
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