Overview of the wider region
Though the focus of this paper is the Leeds metropolitan area, in respect of ongoing research into potentially optimising the efficiency of the system and understanding opportunities offered by the wider city region (discussed below), the immediate mapping area beyond the metropolitan boundary of Leeds was initially set at 33 km as this distance has been shown to be important in the development of regional resource efficiency (e.g., Jensen et al. 2011; Jensen 2016). The regional data mapping process highlighted that Leeds and the wider city region is an area of distinct food system activity; albeit, as shown in Fig. 4, there are clear geographic differences in activities across the extended region’s 5720km2. Indeed, within the mapped 33 km zone, it can be seen that agricultural production is largely concentrated to the east of the region with the west, aside from some areas of grassland employed in livestock grazing, largely devoid of primary crop production. Indeed, grasslands, whether permanent or rotationally used for grazing and leys, make up the majority of ‘production’ in the area. Using the Calculate Geometry function of the GIS to derive the total area of crops within the land cover data, this observation could be quantified. Duly, it was found that from 2016 to 2018, grassland made up 41% of the approximate 341,000 ha (Ha) of total parcels of agricultural land within the 33 km zone, with growth of spring and winter wheat being the next most prominent use of agricultural land (23%). In regard to these agricultural variations, it should be noted that the area to the west, which appears largely devoid of agricultural activity, contains other relatively large urban conurbations, most notably, population wise, the Bradford metropolitan district (with ~540,000 residents) and Kirklees (incorporating the large market town of Huddersfield, with ~440,000 residents).
Production in the City boundary
Focusing on the metropolitan district of Leeds, which includes the city and the immediate urban and rural areas within the control of the local authority (as depicted in Fig. 5), the mapping exercise and cross reference to the anonymised agricultural production tables, indicated that the district’s ~ 23,000Ha of agricultural land produced almost 300billion kilocalories (291.6B kcal) of metabolisable food in 2018 for consumption by humans (i.e., the figure excludes feed/energy crops and nursery/breeding stock). The vast majority of the produced energy derived from arable products and the edible content of wheat and barley grain (~131B kcal, ~80B kcal, respectively). The largest share of animal derived products (92%) was found to be in the form of milk production and beef (both ~9B kcal) (see Table 2). Time series land cover maps highlighted that crop rotation and changes to grazing area does occur on an annual basis, however the changes in total area and crops being produced was negligible for the years that could be mapped (i.e. 2016–2018), with most variation existing between types of grain production. As such, with minimal variation in area cultivated and crops grown, it is assumed that the total figure calculated for metabolisable food production is typical and applicable over the most recent past and immediate future.
Table 2 Summary of Dietary Content of Food Produced for Human Consumption within Leeds As noted throughout this study, within all populated areas there is a need to provide a varied and healthy diet to people of all ages and needs. The above production assessment largely focussed on energy production in the form of total calories. Though this would be important in the short term and in response to the immediate impacts of any scenario where greater dependence on local food supplies may arise, it does not cater for medium to long term nutritional needs. Further work is needed to determine the specific micronutrients provided within the ~300billion kcal of crops and animal products produced within Leeds; however, the lack of crop diversity would suggest that sufficient amounts of micronutrients and omega 3 fatty acids, for example, are unlikely to be produced from an agricultural base in the north of England currently dominated by cereals, potatoes and food products derived from cows (i.e., milk and beef). However, with cross-reference to a food composition database, it is it is relatively simple to derive an estimate of the macronutrient content of the food produced in Leeds. Based on the calculated tonnage of crops and animal products it was be duly estimated that 10.1kt of protein, 6.2kt of fat, 39.2kt of net or available carbohydrates and 9.1kt of dietary fibre is typically produced within the city in recent years (i.e., 2016–2018). When combined, the available macronutrient tonnage, including fibre, equates to approximately 58% of the total mass of all locally produced foodstuffs, with the balance made up of varying proportions of water, ash and minor organic compounds (e.g., vitamins and nucleic acids).
Food demand in the City
As part of the food equitability aspects of the food system mapping project, the UK Government’s Multiple Index of Deprivation statistics, assigned to Lower Super Output Areas, were mapped onto the council ward boundaries which they fell within and aggregated or averaged depending on the type of dataFootnote 9 (i.e., population figures were summed, indices were averaged). From this exercise the total population for each ward and the age and gender profiles were derived, with the assessment indicating that 784,846 people live within the metropolitan area, largely within the inner-city. The age profiling exercise showed that of the total population 65.3% are of working age (i.e., 16–64) and live predominantly within the inner-city highly urbanised areas; 19.2% are infants and children (i.e., 0–15) and 15.5% were 65 or older, many of which, lived within the suburbs or rural areas of the metropolitan boundary. As described within Section 3, based on mean gender calorie and macronutrient demands for each age range (calculated to be 1638 kcal across 0–4, 5–10, 10-15 yrs.; 2245 for 16-64 yrs.; 2093 kcal for 65>), it was determined that the total demand of the city was more than 600billion kcal (603,011,707,839) per annum. Based on Public Health England’s most recent dietary recommendations (PHE 2016), it was further calculated that, based on the city’s population and age profile, the city had an annual macronutrient demand of ~13.1.kt of protein, ~23.6kt of fat and ~ 79.6kt of available carbohydrates (i.e., not including dietary fibre, which would equate to ~7.9kt for the age profile of Leeds population) (Table 3).
Table 3 Nutrition Demand of Leeds City Residents Rationalising and closing the gap
From the above it can be seen that that the gap between food production and demand in Leeds is in the region of 310billion kcal (i.e., ~603billion – ~291.6billion). In overarching terms, this translates as the city being 48.4% self-sufficient or, in respect of metabolisable energy provision, possessing a 51.6% deficiency in year on year food security and resilience. This, notably, is in line with a UK production-consumption gap that, minus minimal exports, stands at 50% (Defra 2018). In respect of macronutrient supply and provision of a sufficiently nutritious diet, the deficit is more striking. Analysis of nutrient production in Section 3.2 demonstrates that available carbohydrate dominates production (i.e., 39.2kt, or 61% of total nutrient tonnage), but does not meet the demands of the city. Protein and fat production, meanwhile, demonstrate extremes in deficits. Though both are produced in minimal amounts compared to available carbohydrates, the deficit in supply is 22.4% and 73.9% for protein and fat respectively. Beyond a probable shortage in locally produced micronutrients discussed in Section 3.3, this analysis suggests that any targeted attempts to increase nutrition availability within the local food system would need to pay particular consideration to the provision of (healthy) fats.
In respect of any arguments for wanting or needing to close this gap, referring back to Fig. 4, it can be seen that simply extending the boundaries of what is deemed the local food system would not necessarily provide a solution to the lack of regional food security. Indeed, Fig. 4 shows that the west of the wider city region is heavily urbanised with several other prominent cities who could lay claim to any locally produced resources. Meanwhile, the area to the east, beyond the city’s metropolitan boundary, lies largely within other planning and council authorities control and, in terms of any form of crisis management, other Local Resilience Forums.Footnote 10 As such, any considerations around improving the resilience of the city in respect of its ability to feed its population, in a crisis situation or otherwise, would have to consider these points. That is to say, if such a situation did arise where the city was reliant on local resources for any period of time, any planned or ad-hoc solution would not be as simple as looking directly beyond the city’s boundaries for a reliable supply of nutritious food, particularly as the wider country can only meet 50% of its demand for food from current native production.
Moreover, as has been noted elsewhere (Defra 2009), food security and resilience is different to, and goes beyond, being self-sufficient. Further exploring this premise and the feasibility of the city to sustainably grow more food, based on a total metropolitan area of 55,172 ha, and a population of 784,846, there is 0.07Ha/pp. directly, ‘on the ground’, land available for food production. This figure, based on an impossible scenario of every square metre of land within the city and urban area being cultivated, falls some way behind the FAO (2011a, b) estimation that a minimum of 0.22Ha/pp. is required to adequately feed an individual for a year,Footnote 11 and is commensurate with similar findings for the neighbouring area of Kirklees (i.e., Lever et al. 2016). the Leeds Ha/pp. is also, notably, less than the average 0.09Ha/pp. available to the wider population of the UK which, due to its population density, is itself some way behind the European Union’s requisite 0.22 (i.e., World Bank 2020). Even if extending its boundary was possible, such figures for the UK suggest that this would not necessarily provide an immediate solution to any food security concerns. Moreover, simply extending boundaries does not fit in with the idea of ‘local production’, which, within urban agriculture studies, has been acknowledged to be a subjective term (Morrison et al. 2011). Moreover, the urban food system idea is connected to: “so-called “zero miles” food production” (Castrica et al. 2020: 2). As such, zero miles production is, where possible, something that from a city resilience and environmental perspective should be aspired to, as it implies that the city is closer to being sustainable and self-reliant. The mapping and wider data appraisal of the Leeds food system, however, suggest that growing options within the city in regard to closing the demand and resilience gap are currently minimal.
Though small niche growing activities are taking place or planned within the city (e.g., community interest farming groups), no industrial scale vertical farming or similar urban growing innovations were found to be taking place within the city that could notably compliment or add to the production of food in traditional production settings. As shown within Fig. 5, however, it can be seen that parcels of allotments ranging from <1Ha to 5Ha are distributed throughout the inner-city. Again using the Calculate Geometry function of the GIS, tallied to council and private allotment records, it was possible to estimate the scale of these urban growing areas. It was found that the largest allotments where located within the densely populated areas of the city of which 93Ha in total were under council control and complimented by a further ~39Ha of allotment and community growing areas within private hands. This compares favourably to the reported 97Ha within Leicester and, when including the privately owned allotments, nearby Sheffield’s 138Ha. Based on Edmondson et al. (2020a, 2020b) potential production figures of up to 1.8 kg/m−2/yr−1 of fruits and vegetables on allotments in the UK, this would suggest that almost 2400 t of mixed horticultural produce could potentially be cultivated within the city per annum. This, of course, assumes that all allotment area would be in use (i.e. it excludes the almost certain presence of access paths and storage areas) and that all growers are horticulturally adept. Nutrition wise, though such use of allotments producing additional fruits and vegetables could contribute to micronutrient demands, such a potential total production figure, even if solely growing one of the more easily cultivated and calorie dense crops such as potato, could only add in the region of 2–4 billion kcal,Footnote 12 i.e. closing the production-demand gap by 0.3–0.6%. Additionally, any coordinated attempt to bring allotments into a wider city food provision scenario, questions could arise over the delegation and governance of managing such dispersed multiply stewarded land.
Moreover, as a product of a carefully balanced ecological system, food production is of course more than a matter of available growing area. Whether by historic accident or design it is noticeable from the mapping process that Leeds allotments, and much of Leeds more diverse areas of industrial farmland, lay on the better loamy soils away from the primary flood plains (Fig. 6). This suggests that arguments for boosting local food security through repurposing of existing green spaces and gardens (e.g., Edmondson et al. 2020b), though possible, would not necessarily be achievable in Leeds without significant access to labour and/or imports of growing material and other necessary resources.Footnote 13 This observation highlights one of the benefits of the food system mapping and visualisation process and the value of mapping all potential indicators of the system’s wider operation and function. For such repurposing of city assets, such as allotments, greenspace and other spaces and infrastructure, careful assessment of the wider community impacts would be required if the sustainability of urban agriculture is to be assured. Indeed, though UK councils are obliged to provide urban residents with sufficient growing space, from a social perspective it has to be recognised that existing green spaces are intrinsically valuable to residents’ well-being - albeit other studies have raised the potential of urban agriculture as a way of reconnecting people with nature and food or, simply, as a pleasurable viewing experience (Wiltshire 2010). Overall, it has been noted that urban agriculture, in its variety of forms, must be developed in a careful manner to make best use of available ecosystem services whilst not transferring environmental impacts from one place to another (e.g., Russo and Cirella 2019; Beacham et al. 2019). Any marked increase in local production of nutritious foods would thus require some level of innovation, community coordination and associated investment.
Potential urban food system innovation
Having considered the expansion of the Leeds food system boundary and increasing local food production in more conventional ways through greater use of green space, the opportunity to increase nutrition security and equitability could exist through system optimisation, including multi-spatial and temporal use of available growing areas and resources. As demonstrated within the introduction to Leeds, it is home to a significant amount of food activity, including food outlets that produce waste and food support ‘banks’ that redistribute excess or donated food from a variety of sources. The presence of such an established network of food outlets and food banks, along with other underutilised or abandoned city infrastructure, could help bring food production innovation into the city by actively pursuing a circular economy based urban agriculture that, to some extent, could limit the resource constraints and contention that possibly emanate from the repurposing of a city’s green space. It is known that vertical farming and similar innovative uses of space within urban areas can be energy and resource intensive (Jenkins 2018; Beacham et al. 2019). However, this is where the benefits of a circular economy based food system could be witnessed, particularly with regard to utilities sharing and the efficient use and reuse of water and many essential nutrients. Going beyond simple recycling of products, a circular economy is designed to conserve and regenerate resources within a system and can and should do so in an environmentally and socioeconomically just manner (Velenturf et al. 2019). Indeed, circular economy simply embodies the practices and long held principles of agroecology.
Detailed discussions on the technical development of a circular economy based food system within Leeds and the socioeconomic and environmental benefits of such a system are beyond the scope this article. However, the mapping process has highlighted the scale of food based activities that are taking place within Leeds and the spatial (food and health) inequalities that also exist that could perhaps benefit from a circular city-based food ecosystem. Indeed, notably, the Utrecht-10 RUAF study considered the role of a circular economy in their city-region and the beneficial effect it could have on the system, including in respect of development of local business opportunities (Haenen et al. 2018). However, beyond exploratory research, at the time of writing they reported limited signs of a circular economy being connected to the region’s food system – this was true for innovative valorisation of food wastes to produce essential nutrients or, more simply, in the areas of energy (re)use or conservation. It was suggested that, much of this limited activity could be due to economies of scale and/or existing restrictive policy and legislation, i.e. unintended barriers created by existing narrowly focussed system governance. Though there are particular policy issues with (re)use of biological wastes, policy in numerous regions is, however, changing toward adoption of circular economy (UNIDO 2017; EC 2020) and, within a non-profit community based food system, the particular barrier of scale is or could be somewhat lessened.
A cursory spatial analysis of options for reorganising urban assets able to engage in a circular food system showed that there are 518km2 of warehousing in the centre of Leeds in various stages of occupancy, with direct or possible connections to renewable energy and water, that could be employed in, for example, significant vertical farming efforts and/or other innovative green wall or rooftop agriculture. Perhaps of more immediate and obvious use, however, there is 200km2 (20,000Ha) of derelict or vacant buildings and land with a total of 544km2 of floor space within the city that also lay within areas of notable renewable energy production (or opportunities) and in close proximity to food banks, community centres and numerous food processors and outlets (i.e. potential ready sources of nutrient dense wastes, growing medium and containers). Though there may be questions over the ability to use the entire floor space of buildings and land classed as derelict (e.g., due to concerns over building integrity or land contamination), they represent underutilised city assets that could be incorporated into a resource efficient food ecosystem within the auspices of innovative vertical farming, hydroponics and/or through more conventional, low or no dig methods (perhaps within containers where concerns over land or building integrity exist). Most notably, many of these areas of potential food system symbiosis are found to be within those suffering most from food poverty, diet related health issues and a limited intake of fruit and vegetables, i.e. those who are usually the first to suffer during a crisis situation.
Creating a symbiosis between communities officially classified as multiply deprived, underutilised local assets and infrastructure, and the activities of those operating within the local food sector that are potential sources of critical resources, presents opportunities for myriad beneficial food production, processing, distribution and education hubs (Fig. 7). Though studies on the subject are currently limited, as stated elsewhere within work on urban vertical hydroponics, resource symbiotic circular production systems have and could indeed improve the environmental performance of such systems whilst providing wider learning and social development benefits (Martin et al. 2019). As highlighted above, such innovative options for community production could be an option for Leeds or similar cities.Footnote 14 Though extremely unlikely to provide the total calories or macronutrients required to lessen the city’s production-consumption gap and thus notably increase its absolute food security, community food hubs existing within a local circular economy could provide those most in need with an appreciable level of microsalads or fungi that are a source of many micronutrients and, perhaps, the protein and some fats that the city is deficient in (i.e. through farmed fishFootnote 15). Such endeavours would, however, face the same sustained engagement, access to labour and coordination challenges as any other proposal for community farming. Moreover, the development of a symbiotic or smart urban food system, requiring the matching and integration of practices and social and technical assets, would require critical appraisal of urban food governance in all its forms, including the production, collection and provision of food system data (e.g., Maye 2018; Helenius et al. 2020). Beyond the long-term encouragement of bringing local food onto local plates through lobbying of local producers and supermarkets, and thus reducing the reliance on precarious global supply chains, an urban food symbiosis within a circular economy would seem however to be one of the better options for improving the city’s food resilience in a socioeconomically and environmentally sound manner, albeit still likely to leave the city someway short of ever being self-reliant.Footnote 16
Limitations to results
The total calorie production figure could be affected by a number of uncertainties, for example within the continued production of crop types over a series of growing seasons and/or within the accuracy of the remote sensing techniques used to determine crops being grown within the Land Cover maps. However, the producer of the Land Cover data, The Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, indicate a crop identification accuracy of 90%, 95% and 97% for cereals, improved grass and oilseed rape, respectively; with beans and root crops returning an accuracy of 80% (see CEH 2018). Given the predominance of grass and cereal production within the region, and the similarity of total crop hectares provided within the Defra regional farm output database, some confidence can be placed in the calculated city-wide production totals. Moreover, in contrast to many food system and urban agriculture studies, which employ broad estimates of food availability based on total populations and production tonnages, within this article an attempt has been made, wherever possible, to determine calorie figures from the specific edible and killing out portions of the region’s produce. As such, any missing calories that may have been lost in the Land Cover data or Defra reference accounts, or within other unidentified urban agriculture activities, are compensated for with the accuracy of final figures in regard to edible content of foods and indeed the use of a specific age and gender calorie demand profile for the city, instead of a generic daily kcal/pp. figure. Additionally, in respect of the demand figure, as highlighted within Section 2, the denominator employed could also be higher if the higher national dietary guidelines were employed (i.e. the demand figure was reduced by 52Billion kcal to avoid obesity). It also must be recognised that it is unlikely that 100% of the useable portion of the food produced in the area could be consumed. Invariably, there is food wastage at all stages of the supply chain during food processing and during preparation, whilst some spoiling and waste is always present within food systems. As such, it is with some confidence that the food production-demand deficit for Leeds is presented and believed to be at least 51%.