Research & reports

Juliana Ojochide Olori, Ogechi Cordelia Nwahia, F. Siewe · Agricultural Social Economic Journal · Nigeria (Abuja)

A study analyzed savings mobilization for poverty alleviation among 185 peri-urban farming households in Kwali and Bwari Area Councils, Abuja, Nigeria, using cross-sectional primary data. The analysis revealed a poverty incidence of 49%, a poverty depth of 28%, and a poverty severity of 56% among the households. Findings indicated that primary occupation and education reduced the likelihood of not being poor but increased the likelihood of being very poor.

· Crop Research · Global

To address problems such as incomplete kernel development and shrivelled kernels during sweet corn growth, the spraying of liquid organic manures was attempted. An RBD study with eight treatments and four replications revealed that the combined application of FYM at 10t/ha with two sprays of panchakavya 3% at fortnightly intervals resulted in the highest values for all growth and yield parameters while maintaining soil fertility and productivity.

Felipe Parada, Mireia Ercilla‐Montserrat, Verónica Arcas‐Pilz, Elisa López‐Capél, N. Carazo, J.I. Montero, Xavier Gabarrell, Gara Villalba, Joan Rieradevall, Pere Muñoz · Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture · Spain (Barcelona)

In spring and summer 2018, in a rooftop greenhouse near Barcelona, coir, vegetable compost from urban organic waste, perlite, and a mixture of compost and perlite substrates were evaluated over three consecutive crop cycles of lettuce. This study aimed to assess the use of substrates made from local materials as an alternative for urban agriculture during periods of water supply cuts. Results showed that compost and the mixture yielded similarly to perlite, and organic substrates increased crop resilience to water restriction.

Noémie Maughan, Nathalie Pipart, Barbara Van Dyck, Marjolein Visser · · Belgium (Brussels)

This chapter shares insights from the establishment of the Brussels-based Cycle Farm, a reflexive research process involving various stakeholders. It highlights the need for small, local food producers to develop competitive advantages in the context of organic food sector industrialization, as emphasized by Eliot Coleman. The research involved workshops and focused on enhancing the resilience of the Brussels Region, with SPIN Farming concentrating on high-value crops.

Pratik Mishra, Sumit Vij · · India (Gurugram)

Ethnographic research in Budhera, a peri-urban village bordering Gurugram city in Haryana, India, investigated the juxtaposition of urbanization processes and climate variability impacts on peri-urban agriculture. Results showed that dimensions of agrarian livelihoods, such as cropping choices, irrigation cycles, sharecropping arrangements, declining common property resources, and land use changes to non-agricultural uses, were influenced by urbanization processes. It was concluded that changes in land and water use reshape agricultural practices and can cascade upon climate variability impacts, making agriculture more precarious for peri-urban farmers.

İrem YURDAY, Ceren Yağcı, Fatih İŞCAN · Türkiye Arazi Yönetimi Dergisi · Turkey

This study explains the definitions, contributions, and benefits of urban agriculture and peri-urban agriculture. It notes that there is no clear policy framework for urban and peri-urban agriculture in Turkey, although urban interfaces are subject to planners and policymakers. The transformation of villages in big cities into communities under Law No. 6360 is presented from a utilitarian perspective. Urban agriculture has been adopted as a profitable production method in urban and peri-urban areas, and suggestions for its development in Turkey are provided.

Wei Cao, Shenglü Zhou, Minyu Zhou · Land · China

This study analyzed urban-rural reality in Pukou District, Nanjing City, China, and investigated farmers' willingness to achieve urban-rural integration through land use. Pukou District was divided into four land use areas based on resource environment, development intensity, and potential, and most farmers showed a strong willingness for urban-rural integration via land use. The study proposes an operational pattern for regional land use, based on "reality + willingness + policy," utilizing farmland reconsolidation, village reconstruction, and factor reallocation to achieve urban-rural integration.

Tamy Erissanti, Supadi Supadi, Suharno Suharno · Jurnal Ekonomi Pembangunan Kajian Masalah Ekonomi dan Pembangunan · Indonesia (Jakarta)

This study analyzed the efficiency of rice farming and factors affecting rice production in North Jakarta, Indonesia, using the Stochastic Frontier Analysis (SFA) method with a sample of 80 rice farmers. Findings showed an average technical efficiency of 0.85, allocative efficiency of 3.47, and economic efficiency of 2.95. Land area and fertilizer positively affected production, while labor and education had a significant negative effect, and ownership rights had no significant effect.

Joanna Wiśniewska-Paluszak, Grzegorz Paluszak · Agriculture · Poland

This study investigated how nine urban and peri-urban farms (UPFs) in Greater Poland Voivodeship, Poland, formed business relationships in food networks, surveying managers and owners in 2019 and 2020. The research identified UPF business relationships and key features of their networks, leading to the development of a conceptual relational UPF model. This model indicates that diversification of activities, competitiveness of resources, and formality of organizational structures form the basis of farm businesses, while integration of activities, sharing of resources, and collaboration among actors form the basis of relationships.

Teresa Rodríguez-Espinosa, José Navarro-Pedreño, Ignacio Gómez Lucas, María Belén Almendro Candel · Journal of Geographical Research · Global

This paper argues, without presenting new primary data, that as world population grows toward a projected 9.8 billion by 2050 and urban agglomerations expand across all continents by 2035, competition for land near cities with high agricultural potential will intensify; it proposes that land rehabilitation using constructed Technosols on brownfield sites and de-sealed soils can recover ecosystem functions, including food-supply services, as a substrate for urban agroforestry.

Fatiha Hakimi, Mohamed Brech · Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) · Africa

A survey of 50 purposively and stratified-randomly sampled farmers in the Metropolis of Rabat, Morocco, used field observation, interviews, chi-square tests and Principal Component Analysis to assess peri-urban agriculture practices. The main practices found were horticulture (fruit and vegetables), crop farming and livestock rearing (beef, sheep, poultry), contributing income, employment and food supply to the city; farmers face legal constraints — no laws regulating the activity and obligations to pay housing taxes — plus technical constraints including insufficient and costly labor, difficult irrigation access, and lack of training and technical support.

Wei Li, Yang Zhou, Zhanwei Zhang · Land · China

A study analyzing rural planning through policy analysis and focus-group interviews in Pu'an Village, a peri-urban village near Changzhou city in China's Yangtze River Delta. It examines the process of identifying the bulrush as a local multifunctional cultural symbol and proposes a "bulrush + creative industry" framework, with a creative processing industry as the core and creative planting and creative tourism as two extended industries. The research emphasizes participation by local villagers, outsiders and urban tourists, and the creative class and entrepreneurs, stressing the revival of local rural culture in peri-urban villages.

Mosen Farhangi, Sara Farhangi, Paulien C. H. van de Vlasakker, G.J. Carsjens · Land · Iran

An exploratory case study of Rafsanjan county, Kerman province, Iran—where agriculture, one of the sectors most vulnerable to water scarcity and climate change, is losing pistachio orchards to water shortages—analyzed the actor network behind the rise of high-tech urban agriculture and examined the role of technology in supporting citizen participation in local urban planning. Against a backdrop where modernizing irrigation and transferring water from other regions had failed to succeed, data gathered through observation, document study, and in-depth interviews with farmers, planners, researchers, and policymakers showed that governmental planning bodies such as the Agricultural Research, Education and Extension Organization (AREEO) and the 10-year greenhouse development plan were the most influential actors in the transition, reconfiguring relationships with the private sector, knowledge institutes, and farmers in ways that strengthened participatory decision-making in local urban planning.

Shingo YOSHIDA · Institutional Repositories DataBase (IRDB) · Japan

Against a backdrop in which revision of the Productive Green Land Act and a new law for leasing urban farmland enabled existing farmers to expand and new entrants to begin farming in metropolitan areas, this study used survey data from 317 farms in cities of the Tokyo metropolitan area, plus semi-structured interviews at two fruit farms in Ichikawa City, Chiba Prefecture, to examine the significance and characteristics of introducing regular employees on peri-urban farms. The survey showed that the number of regular employees varied by farm developmental stage, distinguishing farms with only one employee from those with two or more in terms of management capability and social networking; interviews indicated that even among similarly sized farms, differences in farm objectives and family-management thinking affected the presumed role of regular employees and future human resource plans.

Samuel Ziem Bonye, Gordon Yenglier Yiridomoh, Emmanuel Kanchebe Derbile · International Journal of Urban Sustainable Development · Africa

A mixed-methods study in Wa Municipality, Ghana, examined how peri-urban agricultural land use change affected farmers' food security, surveying 235 smallholder farmers with questionnaires, interviews and GIS-based historical data. Over the past three decades, peri-urban agricultural land was drastically lost to residential and infrastructural development, and this land use change resulted in food insecurity, with most smallholder farmers unable to meet their food needs over the past decade.

Tarmo Pikner, Hannes Palang · · Estonia

A study of dacha-style allotment gardens in the border city of Narva, Estonia, on the eastern edge of the European Union, used ethnographic fieldwork and qualitative interviews to examine how plural mobility and emotional human-nature interactions shape periurban landscapes. Results indicated a persistent rural dimension and multiple engagements with nature within Narva's wider urbanization dynamics. Plural mobility and emotional care motivated and sustained by allotment gardening constituted dispersed landscapes as connective tissue across periurban features. Landscape histories of the periurban area showed particular ruptures and reassemblies tied to shifts in the state-border regime.

Melanie Jans-Singh, Rebecca Ward, Ruchi Choudhary · Journal of Building Performance Simulation · United Kingdom

A study addressing the lack of quantification of combined building-integrated greenhouse performance developed a building energy simulation (BES) of an archetype school building in EnergyPlus, co-simulated with a validated greenhouse energy simulator (GES), for school buildings in London, UK. Different greenhouse-building coupling configurations were evaluated via sensitivity analysis and a parametric study to estimate potential crop growth, heat recovery, and reduction in ventilation demand. A 250 m2 greenhouse on the top floor of the school could produce 6 t of lettuce with half the energy demand of an equivalent standalone greenhouse. Trade-offs among increased humidity, yields, and energy efficiency show that modeling is needed to ensure optimal designs.

Syariful Mubarok, Salsabila Ananda, Farida Farida, Ainun Fadilah, Rija Sudirja · Kultivasi · Indonesia

An experiment conducted from August to September 2020 in a densely populated residential area on Jalan Caringin Raya, Bekasi City, Indonesia, used a Randomized Block Design to grow two amaranth (bayam) cultivars, 'Maestro' and 'Mira,' under three different cultivation systems — conventional, verticulture, and floating-raft hydroponics — with four replications each, on narrow urban plots. The results showed that amaranth grown under the floating-raft hydroponic system produced the best growth, yield, yield quality, and revenue compared with the conventional and verticulture systems.

Carolina Baldini, Mariana Edith Marasas, Andrea Alejandra Drozd · Journal of Environmental Planning and Management · Colombia

A land-cover change study (Journal of Environmental Planning and Management, 2021) applied a supervised classification of Landsat satellite imagery from 1986, 1996, 2005, and 2015 to Argentina's largest peri-urban horticultural region in South America. Between 1986 and 2015, open-field horticulture extent decreased by 51.47%, while greenhouse area increased by 2652.83%, high-density urbanization expanded by 111.58%, and low-density urbanization increased only between 1986 and 2005—expansion that came at the expense of natural grassland, herbaceous parks, and livestock land. The authors conclude this reflects a regional process of urban growth and productive intensification that has caused losses of open-field horticultural areas and produced a non-equitable distribution of remaining semi-natural areas, and they call for territorial planning that prioritizes ecologically resilient, semi-natural land cover.

Ram Ranjan · Water Economics and Policy · India

This study examines the potential for industrial wastewater remediation through agroforestry in a peri-urban farming region of India. Under a payment for ecosystem services (PES) mechanism, farmers are incentivized to convert farmland into poplar-based agroforestry and use industrial effluent to irrigate the trees, with income from poplar timber sales enhancing the mechanism's attractiveness. A dynamic optimization model compares farmers' optimal land use allocation to a socially optimal case, and compares the firm's effluent discharge outcomes to an alternative arrangement in which it is fined for discharging untreated wastewater without the agroforestry remediation option. The results support the attractiveness of such PES mechanisms in addressing industrial effluent discharge while simultaneously mitigating water scarcity through wastewater reclamation. The optimal tax level required to achieve complete effluent treatment is several times higher than PES payment levels. The incentive to convert farmland to poplar plantations increases with higher PES payments but declines as the profitability of agricultural crops rises.

Shrabana Mazumder, Joydeep Saha, Gouranga Nandi, Mrinmoyee Naskar, Jibananda Gayen, Debajit Datta · SN Applied Sciences · India

A study of the Kolkata Metropolitan Area, India, used free and open-source geospatial software and multi-temporal databases to assess land use/land cover change from 1990 to 2020, focusing on the transformation of urban and peri-urban agricultural land, and projected cropland change to 2030 using an artificial neural network module (MOLUSCE). Built-up areas persistently expanded into croplands, wetlands, vegetation, and water bodies throughout the period, with an estimated loss of 181.11 sq km of cropland between 1990 and 2020, concentrated in the northern, eastern, and south-eastern parts of the study area. The 2030 projection indicates a further loss of 15.46 sq km, bringing the cumulative cropland loss to 37.39% of its 1990 extent under current socio-economic and administrative conditions.

WRI Ross Center Prize for Cities · WRI Ross Center Prize for Cities · Argentina

Rosario, Argentina launched an urban agriculture program in response to the 2001 economic crisis, evolving through a 2004 ordinance allowing temporary use of vacant land, two flood-mitigating 'Parques Huerta' opened in 2007-2008, and a 2011 ordinance designating 800 hectares of peri-urban land as a green belt. The program now covers 75 hectares of agroecological production plus the 800-hectare peri-urban belt, yields 2,500 tons of produce a year, involves more than 2,400 participating families, and has created 7 new permanent market spaces. Locally produced vegetables are estimated to cut associated greenhouse gas emissions by as much as 95%, and the project won the WRI Ross Center Prize for Cities 2020-2021 grand prize.

Guido Lautaro Padin · La tinta / Revista InterNos · Argentina

Reporting on Rosario's 2021 WRI Cities Prize win ($250,000, selected from 262 proposals across 54 countries), this article explains the programme's mechanics and history: 40 hectares across 7 Park Gardens (2.5-3 ha each) producing 2,500 tonnes a year, over 250 participating families/organizations, land granted through free indefinite loan (comodato). It also notes that around 2000-2002, roughly 800 community gardens sprang up within two years serving about 40,000 people, and that the municipality has reserved 700 hectares of peri-urban land as a protected 'green belt'.

Dora Neina, Sibylle Faust, Rainer Georg Joergensen · Chemical and Biological Technologies in Agriculture · Ghana

A study in Ghana investigated the potential agricultural value of charcoal and firewood ashes by examining differences in their chemical and mineralogical compositions and the suitability of various extractants for plant nutrients. Charcoal ash had higher pH, EC, and CCE than firewood ash, while firewood ash contained higher levels of As, Cu, Mg, and Zn, and more Mg-rich minerals. Both ashes contained trace elements, but their bioavailability and plant uptake after field application may differ and may not necessarily lead to plant uptake.

Laura Wynne, Laure‐Elise Ruoso, Dana Cordell, Brent Jacobs · Australian Geographer · Australia (Sydney)

This paper investigates metropolitan-level strategic planning documents in Sydney, Australia, using a Foucauldian governmentality approach, to understand how they relate to peri-urban agriculture. The analysis reveals that prevailing rationalities, including the global city, compact city, and sustainability agenda, frame the urbanization of peri-urban agricultural lands as necessary and inevitable. Consequently, peri-urban areas are not considered to have unique planning needs but are instead imagined as latent spaces for future housing and job development, integrating agriculture only when it aligns with the 'global city' narrative.