In preparing for this special issue on the future of food and farming, California writer Rick Wartzman and executive editor Patrick Dillon invited food and land-use experts to help frame the questions we subsequently spent several months exploring. Here are their remarks.

My name is Sibella Kraus, and I’m the program director of Agriculture at the Metropolitan Edge, which is a new program under the auspices of the Center for Global Metropolitan Studies at Berkeley. The center understands that we really need to look closely at agriculture as part of the regional metropolitan framework rather than as a thing separate from it. I also run a nonprofit called SAGE—Sustainable Agriculture Education Enterprise. Our primary projects these days are investigating and developing agricultural parks at the edge of the city.

I’m Michael Dimock, executive director of Roots of Change, a statewide collaboration involving foundations, business, government, and NGOs focused on a common vision of creating a sustainable food system in California by 2030. We’re in a five-year development phase to create a structure and institution that will last until 2030 and provide $5 million a year to fund initiatives focused on transforming the food system to a sustainable framework.

I’m Harrison Fraker, dean of the College of Environmental Design. It was formed in the very late ’50s to try to bring the disciplines of urban planning, landscape architecture, architecture, and environmental planning together to collaborate on some of these larger issues. It has great depth and expertise in each of these disciplines, and what’s exciting here is that we’re now actually realizing the vision of trying to collaborate across the disciplines. And this is a perfect issue, and it’s a very important one. Most of the promising sustainability options require deep collaboration. This includes financing, infrastructure, law, and a full range of things to try to create real change in the institutions that have promoted the way we do business now.

I’m Patrick Dillon, an urban planner wannabe, architect wannabe, weekend farmer, and executive editor of California magazine. The beauty of our magazine is that it really acts as a village green, in what Harrison described as hosting and harvesting interdisciplinary approaches to big problems. Berkeley is becoming foremost in demonstrating to the rest of the world how to do this. We and our readers are its beneficiaries. To amplify: when you think about embracing agriculture into the urban landscape, you’re also talking about public health, public health institutions, what Alice Waters is doing with the Edible Schoolyard; you have to factor farming and agriculture into the vascular system of California. But what we are here to talk about now is what California’s agricultural landscape will look in 2025 or 2050. Is it fair to begin looking forward now?

HF: Great. I guess the first question I have is probably—maybe it’s so simple, it’s complicated—tell me what you mean by “sustainability.” And if there’s an example of a community that’s gone from a starting point to closer to what you’re looking at. What does it mean to be sustainable as a community?

MD:    I can give you an example from England that you might want to look to. It’s called BedZED. It’s about 20 minutes by train south of London, and it’s a little neighborhood right next to the station. The best way to describe it is it’s a series of live-work row houses, very high density—about 100 homes—and it has tried to push this whole sustainability idea.

First of all, they’re very well-insulated, very energy-conserving homes. And they use passive solar heating, natural ventilation—in a very sophisticated way. So the energy demands and loads have been reduced dramatically. One side of the street faces south: that’s where all the residences are because in London, you need heat for your residences. The north, back, side faces the other street, and that’s where all the work is because all you need in those units is daylight. And you can buy a home and have a workspace with it or you can come in and rent your workspace.

Now, how do all the other systems work? They collect all the water on the site and use it for irrigation. They treat all the sewage naturally. And they give the—let’s just call it night earth—back to the farmers for fertilizer. And the farmers have a market Wednesdays and Saturdays on their own streets. So waste is turned into fertilizer; food’s brought back to the folks. They’re integrating agriculture into their lifestyle. And the city brings its wood chips to the site. They are burned in a very efficient system. It’s an emulsified system and it creates electricity and hot water. The electricity powers the sites. The hot water gives them domestic hot water and it’s the back-up heat. Now, that’s the first built example of starting to do this whole systems integration, where you’re using green systems to help. And agriculture is all part of this.

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