Tucson is not ready
Tucson needs a secure food supply we can count on. But Tucson, and in fact the entire country, relies on a “just-in-time” food system. We only have a few days of food in our stores and warehouses, and only a few percent of our food even
comes from Arizona. There are times during the year, when a majority of America’s food is imported.
We have vast, untapped resources
Every square foot of Tucson receives an average of over 6.5 gallons of rain every year (that’s before Global Climate Change), or about 175 million gallons per square mile. That’s 80,000 gallons of harvestable rain per person.
... And we waste virtually all of it on decorative landscaping, a 19th century sanitation system, or simply letting it run down the street until it evaporates. Only about 2% of our rain ends up as recharge for future use.
We can do better.
There are almost as many different ways to grow food sustainably in Tucson as there is water that we waste.
In theory (not in practice, because perfection isn’t possible), and (based on
preliminary calculations) there is enough harvestable rain to:
* Support an urban food forest of over 100 square miles, turning our neighborhoods into rain-watered, shaded food parks that are safe to walk and safe to play
and meet friends.
* Support over 1000 SF of conventional gardens and controlled environment (aquaponics) grow-beds per person
* Provide over 100 loaves of bread per person
· * Create whole new food sources that are unique to our region or new to most of us - prickly pear, mesquite, local mushrooms, edible annuals, goats milk cheese, chickens & eggs, pomegranate,
chiltepin, the Three Sisters (corn, beans, squash), ... and on and on and on.
And we can do it all, and still recharge 1/4 of our rain for future droughts (compared to 2%).
As the teacher said to the parent of the problem child, “There are great opportunities for improvements.”
So what can we actually do? ...
The Feeding Tucson project will determine how much food we can produce, if we really want to, and what’s standing in our way. And it will initiate the
Feeding Tucson Champions’ Network -- the first step to mobilize Tucson to create a resilient, local food supply, based on our renewable rainfall.
The Feeding Tucson project will do three things:
* Determine how much food we can raise with our renewable rainfall and what bottlenecks and obstacles we must overcome to us it.
* Develop a toolbox of “best practices” from around the world that we can use to create a complete food system for Tucson.
* Establish the Feeding Tucson Champions’ Network made of local food advocates who will identify and promote promising food system projects and help them to get funding.
Join
Feeding Tucson Champions' Network
Today!
Who am I?
My name is Tres English. I have been active in Tucson for over 40 years, in all aspects of sustainability. For example, I co-founded both the Neighborhood Coalition of Greater Tucson and Sustainable Tucson. I successfully fought a 1.5
billion dollar tax increase for a massive road plan, organized a city-wide tree planting program with dozens of neighborhoods, and developed a program to teach remodeling skills by organizing teams of volunteers to repair old houses of low-income families.
I am a licensed remodeling contractor and a property manager. And I am currently experimenting with a family-scale aquaponics system.
The new Feeding Tucson project is the capstone of my life’s work, and I invite you to be a part of it.