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Feeding London, what's required

Richard Wakefield's picture
Posted by Richard Wakefield on January 20th, 2007 at 6:55 am | 1 Replies

I've done some rough calcuations, open to anyone to verify or alter, on what it would take, land wise, to feed London if all food for the entire population was to come locally.

London's population is 460,000 and growing according to http://www.sjhc.london.on.ca/corp/restruct/lhsrr/comm.htm by 11.8% per year.

It takes 2 acres of land to feed one person (including unfarmable land of about 25%, which may be too low). That's using modern chemical fertilizers and pesticides and mechinery.

That requires 920,000 acres of land. Or 1,437.50 sqr miles. London's size is 166 sqr miles, thus an area of 8.7 times will be required. (adding the internal free farmable space in London is small). That's an area 12 miles in radius including the city itself.

But this does not include the people living in these surrounding areas. That adds an additional 659,329 people, more than doubling the required farm land. Add to that farm animals required that must be fed, of 200,000 (which is really low) and we would need 2,638,658.00 acres to feed this area, or a radius of 20 miles. That means we would need a circle from Strathroy in the west, to the lake on the south, to Ingersol on the east, to almost Stratford to the north (Kirkton). And that area would need to grow by 11.8 percent a year. Thus in 10 years we would need an area of 8,048,090.04 (3 times as much) for a radius of 35 miles. Since there is no more south would have to be made up with the rest. Thus Paris in the east, Goderich in the north, and almost Sarnia in the west.

This does not include increased land required due to lost crops. If we remove fertilizers and chemicals and mechanized machinery with a power down, the require land per person will skyrocket. It will only require a 25% crop loss to pests to dramatically increase the amount of land required per person. And that does not include storage loss (much of it will need to be kept from freezing) and transportation loss.

I'm open to reinterpretation of these rough numbers. And I'm not making any judgements on whether this is doable or not.

Richard
Komoka

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Dan B's picture
Dan B
January 30th, 2007

Waterloo Region Food Study

Here is an interesting peak-oil aware study on how much agriculture in the Waterloo area will have to be modifed to feed the community from its own hinterland:

Optimal Nutrition Environment for Waterloo Region, 2006 – 2046

URL: http://www.region.waterloo.on.ca/web/region.nsf/0/D82004FE6AE3B57585256F48006C2264/$file/NER.pdf

An excerpt from the conclusion:

"The hectare targets for local productio n of the studied foods needed to meet population dietary requirements in 2026 and 2046 are 7,444 and 9,071 hectares, respectively. According to the 2001 census, WR had 91,417 ha in agriculture and 1,444 farms (2001 census). Re-allocation from pasture lands to horticulture is not desirable, for environmental reasons, but about 80%, or 72,985 hectares, was in crops. This means that the targets for increased horticultural production are roughly 10 (2026) and 12% (2046) of current cropped hectares – not a major re-orientation of cropped acres. Corn and soybeans took up 29,858 hectares, providing a suitable base for reallocation of acres to rye, oats and white beans. Current fruit and vegetable acreage equals 393 hectares (vegetables 260 ha) with 78 growers reporting vegetables and 120 growers reporting fruits, so there is a significant need to increase both farmers and hectares.

Given historical shifts over earlier 20 and 40 year time periods, such levels of change are feasible. Assuming there is minimal room for increasing agricultural land in WR, it would mean reallocating crop area to different uses. Since little is known about each farm, this is difficult to project, but hopefully some of the growth can come from existing horticultural producers. Increasing horticultural production could come primarily by increasing production in small areas across many farmers, rather than whole farm conversion to horticultural production.

Given the mixture of soil types in WR, finding suitable soils for these shifts would not appear to be a major constraint. It is potentially more problematic to identify new farmers to take on horticultural production, and access seasonal labour, as many of these production systems are labour intensive (e.g., berries, Asian vegetables). However, this represents employment possibilities."

I find both the Waterloo study and Richard's calculations to be very encouraging -- They may be taken to define a high and low (or optimistic and pessimistic) range of the doablity of relocalized food production.

The numbers could be far worse: In either scenario, it looks like the cities of the region can achieve food self-sufficiency, given the right adaptations.