Dear Los Angeles, 

This is a love letter, make no mistake. Though I'm relatively new here, you have me utterly smitten. I find myself defending some of your worst flaws at parties: when rotten New Yorkers or pompous Bostonians unleash their easy blows on your traffic, I tell them I use the extra time during my commute to meditate, like I probably couldn't on a noisy, crowded train; when Midwesterners start explaining that Angelinos are lazy, I propose a link between light working hours and creativity; if my friends from Seattle, Portland, or the Bay tell me LA is where art goes to sell out, I remind them that you give art the shelter of an industry.  

Nonetheless, I have this one request.

Over the last two years, I've waded waist-deep into the sustainable food movement. I've been doing a lot of reading about the secondary effects of the Farm Bill, about the plight of topsoil in the United States, about how mono-crop cultivation with synthetic fertilizers and pesticides affects the ecosystems of our farmland and the nutritive value of our harvests. Like many people in our country now, there's a lot about agriculture-as-usual that's got me upset. I'm not happy about food deserts and diabetes rates, I'm not happy about irresponsible irrigation practices, I'm not happy about the carbon footprint of food production and distribution, and I'm not happy about the flagrant abuse of this nation's soil ecology. Los Angeles, with over twelve million residents, you consume a lot of food. That's why I'd like you to take a serious look at the potential of sustainable urban agriculture here in the metropolis.

Can urban farming feed a city? At a refreshment table after a sustainable food seminar I attended at the University of Pennsylvania last year, I asked this question to one of the presenters. "No," she mumbled, mid-bite on a local, organic brownie. She cited a study which calculated the square footage of San Francisco's rooftops and multiplied the result by the average area yield of an urban farm -- the figure came up far short of annual food consumption numbers typical for the Bay. So I'm ready to concede that San Francisco cannot feed itself by planting all its rooftops with summer squash. Moreover, an aspiring rooftop farmer would struggle to compete against the economics of rural farmland and discounted agricultural water. There's a good reason the city-state structure -- township in the middle encircled by rolling, cultivated acreage -- has persisted in familiar form since the dawn of agriculture, prescribed by the relationship between land use and land valuation. And yet somehow this woman did not dissuade me.

I remain unconvinced because I suspect in wintry Philadelphia she answered me as she did without the City of Angels at all on her mind: overlooked, exceptionalist Los Angeles, infamous for its traffic, for its glamor and wild indulgences, the land of the Colorado River Aqueduct, fifty-mile commutes, purse dogs, conspicuous consumption, and silver screen dreams;  a nexus for creative industries, regrettably overshadowed in the green movement by powerhouses like Portland, Seattle, Austin, Minneapolis, San Francisco, Boston, or Denver.

But I'm thinking perhaps even as the specter of post-peak oil looms large before the sprawling suburbs, our wide-open lots could offer us a hidden blessing: Angelinos have a unique opportunity to refashion a great deal of underdeveloped land for intensive gardening -- an option that our San Franciscan cousins might soon envy. Our sunshine and property lines provide more favorable inputs to the same equation that fails on San Fransisco's rooftops: we've got yards -- great big ones -- open for farming if we collectively decide to tap their productive value and capitalize on our year-round growing season. Granted LA faces daunting water issues, but dense urban agriculture tends to be more water-wise. We should be at least as excited about the prospective reduced "water footprint" of yard-farmed produce as we are about its humbler carbon footprint.

I see in you, Los Angeles, a unique opportunity to incubate a fuller, more spectacular model for urban agriculture. Unlike most cities in the world, LA breaks from the city-state tradition: the Los Angeles castle is squat and distributed, the township wall is missing. In its place stretches a long, low-stacked blur of sparse development in breach of the ancient principles of urban planning. Our tract suburbs and spacious city grid twinkle in ephemeral homage to the miraculous Age of the Automobile, but now as we worry about oil reserves or cap and trade, the fate of our superstructure feels ominously unstable. Do we need to rapidly rebuild the core? Must we remodel LA to look like Manhattan or Seattle? Will our city slowly wane, defeated gradually by changing economic realities? 

I'm a plucky optimist about human ingenuity as oil supplies dwindle -- I'm counting on internet technologies to reshape the workplace and reduce our need to commute, I'm hopeful that public transportation projects can reconfigure transit, and now I think Sun Belt cities might be able to find, by happy coincidence, a unique agricultural advantage in our sprawl if we can just establish a system for disaggregated suburban gardening. If LA's guilty pleasure is castle-homes on excessive lots, give these castles their farms. Let's build a chain of intensive gardens strung from yard to yard, Agriculture 2.0 for a city built on dreams and sun beams. If we can have as many specialized sustainable farmers as we now have mail carriers, as many hire-a-farmer EVs as we now have pool maintenance pickup trucks, I see jealous bohemians up on Hawthorne Street in Portland grinding their teeth and shaking their fists at the clouds in their cold, dark sky.

I love you Los Angeles. Let's grow some food together.

Respectfully,

Jesse DuBois

Jesse is the co-founder of Farmscape, an urban agriculture company in Los Angeles which designs and maintains densely yielding, raised-bed microfarm modules.