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Notes from Meetup #16: How will we Feed the City?

Notes from Meetup #16: How will we Feed the City?

SmartSheffield 16 was held on Monday the 2nd of March in the Electric Works building on Sheffield's Digital Campus, you know, the one with the famous slide in the foyer, which several of us had a reyt fun ride down after the event! Thanks so much to our venue sponsors Creative Space Management for hosting us - your hospitality was impeccable!

The topic of this edition was how we are going to sustainably feed our city in the future, and featured talks from some excellent speakers and projects, really pointing the way towards how growing, harvesting and distribution are going to be managed at a much more local and sustainable scale in the near future - essentially if we can take the costs out of the process using cheap, reliable and effective tech then we don't need the economies of scale that demand long supply chains and the carbon overhead that they produce. Nor the anti-resilience either, as events were to show just barely a month later as the whole country went into Covid-19 lockdown.

Below, as per usual are the videos of the talks with short commentaries from me, including the ubiquitous short update on recent SmartSheffield news at the end. Please watch and enjoy the talks, and do get in touch if you have any feedback, news you would like us to share or a topic you want to present at a future meetup. Email me at info@smartsheffield.city, or get in touch via Twitter @SmartSheffield.

Thanks once again to our sponsors at Arup, Pitch-In, Creative Space Management and Sheffield Digital.

Looking to the future, we’ve been on hiatus since March due to the pandemic but are finally going to be holding our next event on Monday the 7nd December - it will be entirely online, but organised in conjunction with Pitch-in at the University of Sheffield.

We hope to see you there,
Chris Dymond (Unfolding and Sheffield Digital)

Gareth Roberts from Regather: "System Change, Not Climate Change"

Gareth is a co-founder of Regather, a food cooperative and social enterprise in Sheffield, which is also a member of ShefFood, the Sheffield Food Partnership that brings organisations with a similar mission together from all over the city. Sheffield is one of 70 cities and towns that are part of the Sustainable Food Places network, all with a mission to make the UK’s food production and supply chain more sustainable.

Gareth gives us a quick primer on the prevailing food system, moving from a simple closed-loop model to a more complex ecosystems view. Food systems thinking is integral to the thinking of ShefFood and other organisations in the national network - the system needs to be considered holistically so that opportunities for change can be identified that are likely to have a positive impact elsewhere in the system. And furthermore, as understanding the reality of the food system is so important, there is a significant digital dimension to it’s analysis as all the significant flows - of produce, water, energy and nutrients, etc. - each carry data with them.

What is emerging from this movement is an alternative food system, which places an emphasises on the creation and maintenance of ‘values-based food chains’. Consequently, consumers increasingly have a choice as to which food systems and food chains they support through their purchasing power. Gareth presents Regather’s Fruit & Veg Boxes and the University of Sheffield’s Fresh Street project as examples of how this can work, even in lower income parts of the city.

The methodology is to configure local values-based food chains and influence the wider food system.

The barriers to this vision are, firstly, that we are facing a land supply crisis - in order to increase the volume of local produce at a scale that is economically viable, much more land will need to be given over to production.

Secondly, there is a labour shortfall - even if we had enough land we don’t have enough people with the right kind of specialist training to work in this area, there’s no local access the training required,

Thirdly, there’s an input crisis - a shortfall of sustainable energy, water, soil, light, heat, nutrients, chemicals, etc. In an urban setting we need to think about other sources of these inputs, such as rainwater harvesting, soil production, closed-loop harvesting, heat from waste incineration and industrial processes, etc.

Can we design a fully integrated urban agricultural ecosystem able to overcome these barriers?

Gareth Coleman from BitFIXit: "How IoT devices can help manage aquaponics systems & connect growers"

Gareth Coleman is the founder of BitFixIT, a project that develops digital inclusion through community computer repair workshops, and has for the last few years been involved in development of aquaponic agriculture technologies in partnership with the University of Sheffield and educational electronics company Pimoroni.

In this talk Gareth explains the origin of these projects and the development path of two key technologies: unPhone: an Internet of Things development platform that provides low energy computing, display and connectivity similar to a smartphone (but not one, an unPhone), and the WaterElf: a control, monitoring and communications device for aquaponics.

Aquaponics is the concept of an agricultural system in which fish, water, algae and plant produce are connected together into a closed loop ecosystem that, with the addition of heat and light, provides it’s own nutrients and high-yield growth environment.

Jack Trethaway from SELA: "Using Data to Improve Sheffield’s Food System"

Jack is an engineering student at The University of Sheffield, and is a member of SELA, the Sheffield Engineering Leadership Academy, which connects students with industry and communities to try to apply their skills to addressing real world problems.

Jack’s team have recently been working with Regather to work out how to gather data about Sheffield Food System, specifically looking at technologies that enable the gathering of data related to Regather’s food boxes, which provide a source of local organic fresh produce to customers all over the city.

The system they are looking to prototype covers where the produce comes from, how it was grown, where it has been and where it is now. It also allows the end user to share in this data, as well as providing Regather with insight over the food system in the aggregate.

Core to this is the design of refrigerated food lockers which can be located in hubs around the city, and which boxes can be delivered to and collected from. Potentially using a smartphone app to unlock the locker, as well using it to engage with the data and provenance of the food contained in the boxes themselves.

Dr. Kate Thompson from District Eating: "A multi-metric approach to sustainability"

Kate is a food sustainability and supply chain specialist, who has joined District Eating - a startup which analyses district heating networks and land availability in order to identify optimum sites for the development of urban agriculture, putting waste heat and CO2 to good use while at the same time making heat networks more efficient by optimising their flows.

She describes how our current food systems have provided us with year-round produce from all over the world, but have also externalised negative consequences of over-production, while also reducing our own self-sufficiency and exposing us to increased risks from system ‘shocks’ from climate change, the rising global demand for food water and energy and the inevitable political instability which will stem from these trends.

But how can we transition from a global food supply chain to a more local one, and do so cost effectively, both in terms of money and resource use carbon use? Kate believes the answer lies in the use of waste heat and CO2, which change the equation dramatically in favour of local production. The key to this is looking at the system holistically - a multi-metric approach to evaluating the costs of food systems and supply chains which come closer to calculating the full impact on people, places and the environment.

If anyone reading this has a site which produces excess heat and/or CO2, get in touch with District Eating - you might be sitting on a very viable urban farming opportunity, and what you may have thought was a liability may actually be a huge asset!

Chris Dymond: SmartSheffield News for March 2020

As always, I finished off the talkie part of the evening with a short segment on recent smart city related goings on in Sheffield:

If you have any smart city-related news for us to share at the next event, please get in touch at info@smartsheffield.city


And that was it for another excellent event! Thanks once again to our hosts at the Electric Works and to Arup, Pitch-In Project and Sheffield Digital for supporting us :)

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