Title: Addressing agricultural sustainability in desert cities.
Presented by: Dr. Rebecca Muenich
Date: May 7, 2021
Registration: HERE

Bio: 

Dr. Rebecca Muenich is an Assistant Professor of Environmental Engineering in the School of Sustainable Engineering and the Built Environment at Arizona State University. 
Rebecca grew up in the rapidly-urbanizing area of Northwest Arkansas, where local conflicts between urban growth, food production and environmental quality were at the forefront of local and national news. Influenced by these ongoing struggles between human-needs and the environment, she chose to direct her personal career path towards understanding how to address human-induced environmental problems.
Muenich is a watershed modeler focused on surface hydrology and water quality, especially in agricultural ecosystems. She focuses on evaluating the impact of land management decisions within the food-energy-water nexus.
Rebecca earned her Ph.D. in Agricultural and Biological Engineering at Purdue University in 2015, where she also obtained a M.S. in Agricultural and Biological Engineering. She holds a B.S. in Biological Engineering from the University of Arkansas.

Abstract of Presentation: 

As cities expand into extant agricultural areas, there is a growing need to provide local food production to meet demand. Urban agriculture has emerged as one solution to provide a local source of food to city residents. Recent work has demonstrated that many urban growers tend to be new to agriculture and their primary goal for their operation may not be food production alone. This can lead to unintentional unsustainable practices such as overfertilization, overwatering, and more. To ensure that local and small-scale food production can be a viable solution for growing urban populations, more work needs to be done to understand growing practices of these producers. I’ll present the work from a pilot study of urban growers in Arizona aimed to understand current practices and quantify potential sustainability of these practices. We found that their own perception of sustainability often did not align with the environmental sustainability of their practices. Helping urban growers address these challenges can help ensure the sustainability of urban agriculture into the future.