Mark Thoma at Economist's View points us to an article by Edward Glaeser in the Boston Globe about "urban farming." The "buy local" movement has contributed significantly to the growth of urban farming. Glaeser acknowledges that urban farming has many positive characteristics (for example, the educational value). But Glaeser makes a clear assertion:
There are many good reasons to like local food, but any large-scale metropolitan farming will do more harm than good to the environment. Devoting scarce metropolitan land to agriculture means lower density levels, longer drives, and carbon emission increases which easily offset the modest greenhouse gas reductions associated with shipping less food.
His article reviews some research on the potential impact of urban farming and concludes that:
We must weigh the environmental benefits from shipping less food against the environmental costs of producing and storing local food in a state that doesn’t exactly have ideal conditions for every kind of produce.
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