Marais

Historically, people have used urban agriculture for more than just supplying food. Excrement and wastewater may be bad for human health, but they can be excellent for fertilizing crops. In nineteenth-century Paris, gardeners found an excellent way to turn unwanted horse manure from all over the city into valuable salad greens that were available year-round. Every year they turned over one million tons of stable horse manure (the city’s transportation service) into 100,000 tons of out-of-season salad, harvested 3 to 6 times a year. So much salad was produced that every person in paris could have eaten 50kg per year. The production was biggest in the last third of the 1800’s. Today there is a Marais district, but that is all that is left of the humongous market gardens covering a sixth of the city.(UN Urban Ag book)

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