Mark Andrews

UN predictions put the world population at 9.7 billion by 2050 – with 80 percent of them living in cities. That’s a lot of mouths to feed. But food for most city-dwellers comes from thousands of miles away. In the US state of Iowa, which is the third largest for agricultural production, 80 percent of food consumed has travelled more than 1,900km. If cities are part of the problem, then they have to be part of the solution. Rising to the challenge are a new breed of urban farmers. The solutions are as diverse as our cities and often involve cutting-edge technology. ‘We need to see the city as a range of challenges and different urban agriculture methods as tools in the toolbox. There is no one-size-fits-all when it comes to developing local and resilient food systems,’ says Henry Gordon-Smith, the CEO of Agritecture, an urban agriculture planning company.  But these are not your inner-city petting farms of yore. Lufa Farms in Montreal, Canada, is one of the pioneers and builds greenhouses atop industrial buildings equipped with hydroponics, where plants grow in mineral-enriched water. The firm was started by Mohamed Hage, an immigrant from Lebanon, and now operates four sites across Montreal. Having grown up in a small town which largely produced its own food, Hage missed the taste and quality of fresh, locally grown produce in Montreal. ‘Nothing about urban agriculture is really revolutionary, it’s simply a recreation of something that’s very, very old,’ he says. Photograph: