Published in "Nature Cities." Volume 1, Issue 1: January 2024. Great advertising/marketing, huh?
Yes, it says to grow 90% flowers instead of vegetables in order to outperform conventional ag.
Because gardens are more climate friendly than conventional ag unless you count the "carbon cost" of sheds, paths, and raised beds which they figure are built mostly of new materials divided by the lifetime of the garden - which they figure is five years. And count the carbon costs of landfill and incineration for those materials at their end of life.
But that don't count if they are used for flowers.
"...
This study takes a conservative approach by allocating all supplies and irrigation to food production, and infrastructure is allocated to food and social co-benefits based on interviews with farmers and standardized calculations (for example, 10% of a raised bed allocated to non-food if 10% of the area grows ornamentals).
Assuming farms adopt climate-friendly practices for their supplies, what percentage of infrastructure must be dedicated to non-food outputs to produce food with lower carbon intensity than conventional agriculture? Sensitivity analysis showed that most of our urban farms and individual gardens outperform conventional agriculture when more than 90% of infrastructure impacts are allocated to non-food services (Supplementary Fig.
3)...."
It looks like torturing the data to get a desired headline.
The solution is to either (or both) build sheds, paths, and raised beds with mostly scrap materials and/or use them for more than five years and/or reuse or recycle them after you are done.
