By Oluwafemi Adeleke
There was a time when a house was not complete without something growing around it. Our fathers and mothers,grandparents and great-grandparents, may not have called it urban agriculture or food resilience, they simply called it farming. Behind the house there might be maize, cassava, pepper, tomatoes, or plantain; some families kept chickens or goats. Food was not something that existed only in a market, it was part of the household, and the distance between production and consumption could be measured in metres rather than hundreds of kilometres.
Today, much of that has changed. The modern Nigerian home can have a refrigerator, television, generator, and several cars, yet have nothing edible growing around it. We have become disconnected from the production of the food we eat, and that disconnection should concern us.
Recent concerns about food contamination, pesticide residues, and unsafe preservation practices have made food safety a subject that deserves far greater attention. A 2026 systematic review of food contamination studies in Nigeria identified heavy metals, pesticides, mycotoxins, and microbial hazards across different food categories, describing the country as facing a dual burden of chronic chemical exposure and acute microbial hazards. That does not mean every food sold in Nigerian markets is dangerous, or that conditions like kidney disease can be attributed primarily to food-preservation chemicals without strong epidemiological evidence. But the underlying concern is legitimate. If we are increasingly uncertain about what is entering our food chain, perhaps it is time to rediscover something our parents understood very well: grow something.
It does not have to be a farm. It can be a backyard, a balcony, a rooftop, or a carefully designed vertical garden. The idea is not that every Nigerian should become a full-time farmer, but that households should produce at least a portion of what they consume. There is something empowering about eating a vegetable you watched grow, you know where it came from, what water was used, whether pesticides were applied. That knowledge does not make the food automatically safe, but it gives the household greater visibility over one small part of the food chain, and that matters.
This idea is not merely nostalgic, it belongs to a broader global conversation about urban food resilience. The Food and Agriculture Organization recognises urban and peri-urban agriculture as an important component of resilient food systems, improving food availability and accessibility while contributing to nutrition and employment. Nigeria has enormous potential here: our cities are growing rapidly, land is becoming more expensive, and food prices are increasingly sensitive to transportation costs, insecurity, and disruptions in agricultural production. A household growing even a small amount of food is not solving Nigeria’s food crisis, but it is reducing its own vulnerability, imagine the cumulative effect of thousands of households doing this, estates turning unused spaces into community gardens, schools growing vegetables for environmental education, and churches, mosques, and community centres putting available land to use.
There is also another reason to reconsider how we grow food. The modern food system depends increasingly on technology, improved seeds raise productivity, climate-resilient varieties help farmers deal with drought and disease, but that advancement should not mean abandoning diversity. Across Africa, conversations about improved, hybrid, and genetically modified seeds have sometimes become mixed together, creating confusion; a recent World Economic Forum article noted that improved and hybrid varieties are often incorrectly conflated with genetically modified crops. There is also growing discussion about the Gates Foundation’s role in African agriculture, which has indeed supported seed systems and agricultural research, including efforts to strengthen seed systems in Nigeria. But we need to separate evidence from suspicion here: claims that such seeds are part of a plan to make Africans dependent on corporations should not simply be presented as established fact, even as legitimate debates about seed ownership, biodiversity, and the concentration of agricultural technology deserve serious attention. The more important principle is that farmers and consumers should retain choice, discussing conventional, improved, hybrid, indigenous, and biotech seeds based on evidence rather than fear. Perhaps the best protection against dependence on any single system is diversity, grow different crops, preserve indigenous varieties, save seeds where legally permissible, and do not lose traditional knowledge. Our grandparents understood crop diversity because survival demanded it: if one crop failed, another might survive. Food security today requires the same principle at a much larger scale.
This is where backyard farming becomes more than a lifestyle choice, it becomes resilience. Food shortages do not always begin with a lack of food; sometimes they begin with disruption. A flood can destroy farms, drought can reduce harvests, conflict can prevent farmers from reaching their fields, a pest outbreak can destroy a crop. Households with even modest food-production capacity possess a small buffer, a few tomatoes, a basket of vegetables, some pepper, and multiplied across millions of households, small production becomes a national resource.
The good news is that fertile land is not strictly necessary. Hydroponics allows plants to grow without conventional soil, with nutrients supplied through water; research on hydroponics in Nigeria has identified it as a potential response to land and water constraints, with economic potential at small and medium scales. For an urban household, that changes the equation, a balcony can produce leafy vegetables, a rooftop can become a garden, containers can be repurposed where suitable, and kitchen waste can be composted rather than sent to landfill. The objective is not to recreate a commercial farm inside a three-bedroom apartment, but to rethink the relationship between the household and food. Not everybody needs hydroponics, either,container gardening with buckets, grow bags, and boxes can be remarkably effective for peppers, tomatoes, and herbs.
One issue deserves particular attention: growing your own food does not automatically mean growing chemical-free food. If contaminated water or soil is used, or pesticides applied incorrectly, residues can remain, so household agriculture should be paired with basic food-safety knowledge, especially in urban areas where soils may have been exposed to industrial activity. The principle should be simple: know your soil, know your water, know your inputs.
That is also why the answer to food safety cannot simply be to stop buying food from markets. Millions of Nigerians depend on farmers, traders, and food processors, and urban households cannot produce everything they eat. The objective should instead be to strengthen the entire food system: regulators need effective monitoring of pesticide residues, farmers need training on safe chemical application, and consumers need reliable information. A 2026 review of Nigeria’s food-safety system identified pesticide misuse, poor enforcement of residue limits, and inadequate storage as contributors to risk. The evidence itself is mixed, one market study detected pesticide residues exceeding maximum limits with potential health risks, while another found residues below applicable limits and no serious dietary threat, which tells us the conversation should be driven by evidence, not panic. The answer is not to fear every tomato; it is to build a food system we can trust, with the household as one of its building blocks.
There is something else worth recovering: the culture of teaching children where food comes from. A child who grows a tomato understands something a supermarket cannot teach, that food begins with soil, water, sunlight, and time, an understanding that can shape healthier consumption and environmental responsibility for life. Schools can turn gardens into living laboratories, teaching biology through planting and responsibility through caring for something that depends on them, while organic waste becomes compost and people develop a stronger connection to the ecosystems that sustain human life.
Nigeria’s food challenge is too large to be solved by backyard gardens alone, we need productive farmers, better storage, irrigation, functioning markets, and stronger food-safety regulation. But we also need something simpler: to rediscover the idea that producing a little food ourselves is worthwhile. Our fathers, mothers, and grandparents before them did not have sophisticated hydroponic systems; they had soil, seeds, patience, and knowledge. We have more technology than they did, and perhaps we should combine both worlds, preserving indigenous crops and traditional knowledge while embracing hydroponics, vertical farming, and responsible agricultural science, questioning new technologies without automatically rejecting them.
And let us start small. Plant the pepper. Grow the tomatoes. Put some vegetables in a container. Teach a child how to plant. If there is no soil, explore soilless systems; if there is no backyard, look upwards, the roof may become the farm, the balcony may become the garden. Food security is not only about what government produces; it is also about how resilient society becomes. A nation of households that can produce a little food is different from a nation entirely dependent on distant supply chains.
We may not return to the farms of our fathers and grandfathers, and perhaps we should not. But we can recover the wisdom behind them: grow what you can, know what you eat, protect the soil, protect the seed, reduce waste, learn the science, preservethe knowledge. In an uncertain climate and an increasingly complex food system, the humble backyard garden may be more than a return to the past. It may be a small investment in our health, and our future.
