What is the title of your proposal?
Park N Farm – Terraforming the Strip Mall Parking Lot

How would you describe it? 50 words
Park N Farm reconnects farmers and consumers as co-producers of the foodscape. The strategy transforms oversized strip mall parking lots into farms. Nearby residents and restaurants pay for a share of the crop.

How does it fix our energy addition? 50 words
In our industrial food system, up to 44% of the oil consumption occurs during distribution, processing, and packaging. Farming oversized parking lots provides local produce on fallow land without this additional carbon footprint. Each parking space could feed 2-3 omnivores for six months significantly reducing the demand on industrial food.

What makes it important? 500 words

After cars, the food system uses more fossil fuel than any other sector of the economy, between 19 and 37 percent depending on the study. Contributing to the fossil fuel costs of the food system are: gas-powered farming equipment; chemical fertilizers made from natural gas; pesticides made from petroleum; gas-powered food processing machines; oil based packaging materials; and refrigerated transportation. Our food system is at a critical point: we either reconnect to local resources, or we risk the health of ourselves, our communities, and the land. As an additional issue, chronic disease due to the subsidized production of corn and soy products has been needlessly on the rise in our children for years, and has put a strain on our medical system. Our economy is linked to agri-business’ dependence on oil and pharmaceuticals for the cheap production of food-like substances: we need education regarding the real price of sustainable, healthy food.

While bringing farming to the suburbs significantly reduces the amount of fossil fuels in our food system, there are additional environmental benefits to locating it in the strip mall parking lots. One of the largest issues for our watersheds located in metropolitan areas is storm water pollution and runoff due to large amounts of impervious surfaces. Strip mall parking lots are typically oversized for the majority of the year: they may be maxed out during the holidays, but during the growing season they lie fallow.

The vastness, ubiquity, and emptiness that characterize most strip mall parking lots has led many to critique big box architecture paradoxically as ‘nowhere’ and ‘anywhere’ at the same time. The parking lot is different than the big box in that the big box has an understood purpose of commerce…the parking lot is merely an inbetween space that one has to endure. If we understand the big boxes as the urban centers of the late 20th and early 21st century, what are the possibilities of the parking lot? The space is cheap and abundant. Imagine the cross section of population that enters these lots at any specific time. Park N Farm allows food culture to thrive in the middle of daily suburban errands.

The rituals of preparing and eating meals are the foundation of culture: it is how we celebrate the gift of life, and how trust is established in a community. Park N Farm provides local jobs, local economic growth, and a sense of stewardship and pride in the community: it educates, organizes, and mobilizes new social relations around food. Integrating a new farming model into the existing (sub)urban fabric is a radical approach without massive investments. If applied across all the urban centers in the United States, Farm N Park is a lean strategy to overhaul the food system.

Our environment teaches us how to behave: Park N Farm educates and empowers people to vote for their food system with their food dollars.

How do the photos or renderings illustrate the concept?
Oil use diagrams show how much oil is consumed in five different food distribution strategies: the agribusiness model, Fresh Direct, community supported agriculture, the farmers market, and terraforming parking lots (Farm N Park). Clearly, the oil use is significantly reduced from the most typical food distribution in the suburbs, the agribusiness model. There is still minor gas-powered equipment needed when farming the parking lot, but there would be no refrigerated trucking to the processing plants, no gas-powered machinery processing the food, no oil-based products or processes used to package the food, and no refrigerated trucking to the supermarkets. Everything happens on one site.

Fresh direct only saves the oil of consumers driving to a supermarket. Not much of a savings considering that production, processing, and packaging account for up to 44% of the oil used in the industrial food system.

CSAs and farmers markets offer a way to reduce oil consumption, but while they have been growing in number, they cannot keep up with demand. There is also an extra transportation cost getting the produce to the customers.

Farm N Park puts the produce right where the population already goes for all their other errands. It requires little oil consumption: the first year, dump trucks would transport soil to the site, and each year a front-end loader would be required to spread the soil at the start of the season and store it at the end of the season.

The aerial view of the sample parking lot is in southeast Michigan, but the same principles could be applied to any strip mall or big box parking lot. Farming covers approximately 50% of the lot, but parking remains available in areas that are heavily trafficked year round: these spaces generally form around places where people spend more time such as coffee shops and bookstores. While most customers could buy shares in the farm and pick up their weekly produce, a farmers market would be available on site to sell individual items.

Outdoor outposts, seating areas for the public, will help restaurant, coffee shop, and supermarket business. Restaurants could have outdoor service adjoining the farm that features local produce. Supermarket outposts could sell items that people may want to add to their picnic from the farmers market such as cheese and bread.

One parking space, which includes half the aisle width, could feed 2-3 omnivores for five to six months of growing. With the average American household hovering at 2.5 people, each parking space could feed a household. In this case, 625 parking spaces were available which feeds an area of approximately 3000’ in diameter.