March 2025

I had never heard the word “organoponico” until I got hold of a book by Monty Don, “Around the World in 80 Gardens” (BBC 2007). He had a chapter on them. Organoponicos were a form of urban farming developed in Cuba in response to a sudden devastating emergency. When Cuba became a communist state in 1959, agriculture was taken into the hands of the state.  Farming was mechanised and industrialised in the same way as in the Soviet Union. Cuba’s nearest neighbour, the United States, strongly objected to communism and set up a trade embargo which is still in place, and for many years Cuba traded mainly with the Soviet Union, exchanging sugar cane for practically everything else. The Cubans created a state whose excellent education and health services were acknowledged internationally, although the material goods which are considered a mark of success in Europe, such as private cars, shops, restaurants and cafes, were few and far between. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1990, their trade ended practically overnight and there were no more imported foods, medicines, fertilisers, or fuel. The population began to starve, especially in cities. Organoponicos were a response to this.

The Cubans began to concentrate on growing food for domestic consumption rather than export. They started growing food in allotments and city gardens. It was a community-led movement but supported by the government. Staple crops for calories were still grown in the countryside (remember WWII Britain) and people were encouraged to move from the city to the land, but fruit, vegetables and medicinal herbs were grown in these city gardens. Sage magazine reported in 2018 that around 350 square kilometres of ‘land’ in Havana – rooftops, balconies, communal spaces, derelict sites and parts of the green belt – had been converted into market gardens, and half of the fruit and vegetables consumed in the city were produced in these gardens and sold locally. The author of the article reported it as “the largest conversion from conventional to alternative, organic agriculture in the world’s history”.

It was a startlingly environmentally-friendly way of growing food by the standards of today. Since the Cubans couldn’t import fertilisers, they had to use organic methods such as composting. It was no longer possible to use hydroponics, which rely on chemicals added to the water the plants are rooted in.  Tools were mended, reused and recycled as long as possible, since they were so difficult to replace that nothing could be wasted. They could not use machinery as they could no longer import fuel, so they used human and animal labour, as they had done in the past. It was a very labour-intensive way of growing food, and many of the gardeners had to learn on the job, as they had never done any gardening before.  Most of them were volunteers, who worked for the food they grew and for the good of the community.

The results, as reported by Monty Don, were amazing: in 2005 over 90% of Havana’s fruit and vegetables were grown inside the city limits, in over 7000 separate organoponicos. Each garden had its own market stall. Some began to employ workers for wages as well as using community volunteers, and they started to process things like fruit juice and dried fruit. The gardens gave, and still give, local people access to inexpensive, fresh, healthy food, they give the workers a small but important share in the profits, the market stalls attached to each garden are a place for people to gather, and it has cut food miles drastically. Cuba still had to import some of its food, and there has been food rationing, but overall the method was a successful solution to a particular emergency and a fascinating experiment in organic farming.

Urban farming i.e. growing food within the boundaries of a city among the streets and buildings is a practice which goes back millennia, all over the world.  For centuries, many people in British towns had vegetable plots in their back gardens. Patrick Neill, in his “A Tour through some of the islands of Orkney and Shetland” 1806, pp 6-.7, visited Kirkwall and records that “What was formerly the palace garden is now rented in small patches, or hundreds (as much ground as will raise 100 cabbages) by the town’s people, who plant it with kitchen-stuffs…  In all the gardens which we had an opportunity of seeing at Kirkwall, artichokes were growing with uncommon luxuriance. Cabbages and cauliflowers were also in high perfection…” The idea has become increasingly popular recently, as the world population continues to rise in spite of all warnings, and cities take over more and more of the earth’s surface.

Some forms of urban farming, like the organoponicos, are linked to organic practices, encouragement of wildlife, community involvement, and the reduction of food miles. They are also places for city children to learn that food doesn’t actually originate in brightly-coloured plastic packets. Some urban market gardens include bee-keeping, and many include animals.  There are organisations in the UK for promoting city farms and community gardens, and there are now quite a large number of these. At the moment they tend to stress education, mental health and community engagement rather than being primarily for growing vitally-needed food. They come in all sizes, from quite large farms such as the 100-acre Lauriston Farm in NW Edinburgh, to a tiny project I particularly liked in Thurso (Caithness), where wooden tubs had been placed at intervals along a street and planted with herbs and vegetables. Passers-by were invited to help themselves. There is a similar project in Inverness alongside the river.

However, urban farming also has its industrialized, business-oriented side, some linked to the large supermarket chains. If you search the internet for “urban farming companies” you will get a long list of names. These use high-tech machinery, are AI -controlled, use artificial lighting, and hydroponics, where the plants are grown in water with nutrients added rather than in soil. Light levels, humidity and temperature are strictly controlled, and crop yields are high and dependable. The water can be recycled, and the lighting and heating can use LEDs and renewable energy. To save space, the hydroponic troughs can be stacked vertically on slow-moving machinery. These known as ‘vertical farms'.  Another form of hydroponic gardening is aquaponics, where the vegetables are grown in troughs flushed through with the waste water from tanks of fish, helping to clean the water for recycling while providing the vegetables with nutrients from the fish waste. Although it is as environmentally-friendly as possible, it is farming for profit by businesses, high-tech agriculture which employs few people. There is certainly going to be a place for it, but it seems to me that it has one crucial difference from organoponicos; it relies on trade links and long-distance transport. Do not tell me that that all the electronic components for the heat/light/humidity/machine controls, and all the AI equipment, all the parts for the greenhouses and conveyor belts, are manufactured in the UK, or even in Europe. If we suffered a sudden interruption to our international trade, as the Cubans did, urban hi-tech farming would become very difficult.

As of 2020, organoponicos were still an important part of agriculture in Cuba. They may not stand up forever to modern economic and social pressures. The idea is not popular among some political and business circles, for obvious reasons, and there is a will in some circles for it to fail. The relentless rise of the world’s population may be more than it can cope with successfully. But it remains an inspiring example of what can be done in an emergency. Just in case we end up facing one.