Mainstreaming production and nutrient resilience of vegetable crops in megacities: pre-breeding for terrace cultivation

Abstract

Modern megacities offer convenient lifestyles to their citizens. However, agriculture is becoming increasingly vulnerable, especially during unexpected public health emergencies such as pandemics. Fortunately, the adaptability of terrace vegetables cultivation presents an opportunity to grow horticultural crops in residential spaces, bringing numerous benefits to citizens, including enhanced nutrition and recreational engagement in the cultivation process. Although certain planting skills and equipment have been developed, the citizens tend to sow some seeds with unknown pedigree, it is rare to find new plant varieties specifically bred for cultivation as terrace vegetables. To expand the genetic basis of new breeding materials, elite parents, and varieties (pre-breeding) for terrace cultivation, this review not only discusses the molecular breeding strategy for the identification, creation, and application of rational alleles for improving horticultural characteristics including plant architecture, flavor quality, and ornamental character, but also assesses the potential for terrace cultivation of some representative vegetable crops. We conclude that the process of pre-breeding specifically for terrace cultivation environments is vital for generating a genetic basis for urban terrace vegetable crops.

Home food gardening in modern cities: advances, issues, and future perspectives

“…Instead, they allocate more space for other public landscapes like lawns for exercise and street trees, or for car-parking bays in new housing schemes, consequently potential spaces for HFG is more compact than some old residential quarters, and in some cases, there may be no space available at all (Burgin, 2018;Chalmin-Pui et al, 2021). A more demise of the spaces for HFG occurred worldwide, as a consequence, HFG is considered a luxury in particular in several megacities nowadays, as well as most often the purview of the "upper class" rather than the "middle class" and "working class", simultaneously, making plant architecture that has excellent adaptability in a small volume space become the most ideal plant architecture and highest priority breeding objective for HFG (Burgin, 2018;Cruz et al, 2023;Ma et al, 2023). Besides, the demand of wall-type cultivation infrastructure used for HFG is also increasing because of space constraints.…”

“…Actually, HFG is a kind of smallscale farming implemented within the urban areas or rural areas, and its products are mainly used for self-consumption rather than for profit. Additionally, there is a cross relationship between HFG and indoor farming, because HFG can be carried out indoors (e.g., kitchen windowsills, and bay windows) or in open spaces (e.g., backyards, and rooftops) (Ghosh, 2014;Degefa et al, 2021;Mullins et al, 2021;Hong and Zimmerer, 2022;Richardson and Arlotta, 2022;Baliki et al, 2023;Cruz et al, 2023;Ma et al, 2023;Ezzeddin et al, 2024).…”

“…Furthermore, they have exposed the fragility of food supply chains and highlighted the shortcomings of long food mileage in urban and urbanizing areas, thereby profoundly derailing civic sustenance availability worldwide (Erokhin and Gao, 2020;Laborde et al, 2020;Basu et al, 2021;Cerda et al, 2022;Godrich et al, 2022;Turnšek et al, 2022). Especially in populous cities, the availability of fresh and nutritious vegetables has become a major concern for urban inhabitants, especially those belonging to marginalized and mid-to low-income populations (Theodorou et al, 2021;Baliki et al, 2023;Ma et al, 2023). The precarious or totally disrupted food supply chains caused huge panic among urban denizens, stimulating them to empty municipal grocery stores or supermarket shelves in proximity (Cattivelli, 2022).…”

“…Numerous urban residents and policymakers are deeply aware of the significance and necessity of self-sufficiency of inexpensive sources of high quality and nutritious produce in closed urban residential areas for emergencies (Aditya and Zakiah, 2022;Cattivelli, 2022;Turnšek et al, 2022;Baliki et al, 2023;Perez-Lugones et al, 2023). Within this crisis, peoples' interest and participation in HFG that is lack of focus prior to the COVID-19 pandemic has substantially enhanced, making HFG are becoming trendy on residential compounds and apartment blocks in many countries or territories like China, American, Indonesia, Canada, Slovenia, Norway, Estonia, Switzerland, Iceland and others (Mullins et al, 2021;Aditya and Zakiah, 2022;Kim et al, 2022;Music et al, 2022;Turnšek et al, 2022;Ma et al, 2023;Perez-Lugones et al, 2023). A survey showed that 17.4% of respondents in Canada and the United States started carrying out HFG in 2020 during COVID-19 pandemic (Mullins et al, 2021).…”

“…In actuality, HFG effectively reduces "food miles", decreases the demand for logistics processes, conserves more fossil fuels, lowers transportation emissions, minimizes perishable food losses during transportation, contributes to a partial improvement of food sovereignty, and tackles starvation and malnutrition caused by delays in long-distance fresh products transportation owing to a pandemic and other forms of traffic congestion or major disruption (Richardson and Arlotta, 2022;Ma et al, 2023).…”