New Stories From 'Urban Agriculture Notes'

Soiled is ‘hosed’ into the grow beds at SOULfood Farm.

A large urban farm on Vernon Drive near Terminal and Clark

Photos by Michael Levenston

We’ve linked to news reports about SOLEfood Farm’s exciting new development on the EXPO lands in Vancouver. SOLEfood is also building another large farm next to the busy cross streets of Clark Drive and Terminal Avenue in Vancouver.

After searching the area for some time, we discovered the site on Vernon Drive just under the Terminal overpass and watched an employee ‘hosing’ soil into the unique grow beds built on pallets. The pallets can be moved with a forklift if the farm needs to change location.

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Camil Dumont (left), head farmer, co-owner and co-founder of Inner City Farms, and intern Michelle Radley convert a chafer beetle-infested lawn to commercial agriculture in Vancouver on Monday. Photograph by: Glenn Baglo, PNG, Vancouver Sun.

Homeowners fed up with turf pests are turning over a new leaf by having their sod replaced with organic vegetable crops

By Randy Shore
Vancouver Sun
May 16, 2012

Excerpt:

Urban farmer Camil Dumont and his partners couldn’t be happier about the chafer beetle epidemic ravaging lawns across the city.

Dumont’s Inner City Farms – a partnership of five young farmers – is growing organic vegetable crops on 19 residential yards in Vancouver, most of which had been laid waste by voracious predators of chafer larvae. Skunks, raccoons and crows eat the grubs, but the animals have to tear up the sod to get at them and they have devastated thousands of lawns from New Westminster to east Vancouver.

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Collecting cherry fruits from a terrace organic farm garden in Kochi. Photo by Dr Sageer.

Around 500 families will be provided with seedlings

The Times of India
May 15, 2012

Excerpt:

KOCHI: Giving thrust to organic farming and self-reliance in vegetable cultivation, a terrace vegetable farming initiative was inaugurated here on Monday.

Jointly organized by the Ernakulam District Agricultural Society, Horticultural Society, Ernakulam District Resident Association’s apex council, residents association apex council and the Vegetable and Fruit Promotion Council Keralam ( VFPCK), the programme was inaugurated by district collector Sheikh Pareeth.

Nearly 2,50,000 seedlings were distributed in the city. The aim is to distribute seedlings to 500 families before Friday. The second phase, which aims to bring one lakh families under the programme, will be implemented in Tripunithura, Kakkanad, Maradu, Kalamassery and Thrikkakara.

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Urban farmer Jessica Rinks.

Purple Leaf ‘mini-farm’ will sell fresh produce, flowers at farmers market

By Jean Lotus
Forest Park Review
5/15/2012

Excerpt:

Jessica Rinks, president and founder of the Forest Park Community Garden, is turning over a new leaf. She’s also turning over 12,000 square feet of sod behind the Altenheim senior residence and creating a pesticide-free vegetable and flower garden this summer – to sell produce at the Forest Park Farmers Market.

Rinks contracted with the village to lease a 240-by-50-foot sliver of Altenheim land to grow fresh produce for the market. She’s calling her venture Purple Leaf Farms.

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Urban agriculture forms close to a fifth of the world’s food production. Image by Stephane Brelivet/IRIN.

“Developing urban agriculture is crucial, given demographic trends.” – FAO

IRIN – Integrated Regional Information Networks
Humanitarian news and analysis, a service of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs
BANGKOK, 16 May 2012

Excerpt:

A Geographical Information System (GIS) is being used to map vegetable production in the greater Bangkok region, seat of Thailand’s capital, to analyse how urban and peri-urban agriculture (UPA) contribute to food security in the city of more than 14 million.

“UPA produces around one-fifth of world’s food, with 800 million people involved in it. Our project aims at giving decision-makers more elements to harness this potential,” Yingyong Paisooksantivatana, the associate dean of the agriculture faculty at Kasetsart University in Bangkok, told IRIN.

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Meet your Urban Farmer – Vancouver BC

By Shaun Mavronicolas
Creative/Technical Director
Fire and Light Media Group

Meet Chris Thoreau of My Urban Farm in this second short film in our Meet your Urban Farmer series. This is the extended interview version.

Chris is a creator, papa, urban grower of sunflower, pea, and buckwheat shoots which are then cut and pedaled to you within hours of harvest, bike-powered. Chris likes soil, compost, and microgreens.

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15 beds, each 15 feet in length. In Portuguese.

A salada vem do telhado

Quer umas verduras? Vá buscar lá no telhado. O agrônomo Marcos Victorino, vem desenvolvendo projetos de hortas sobre telhas em espaços pouco valorizados da metrópole, como lajes, quintais e terrenos de imóveis comerciais e residenciais. As hortas foram plantadas em varios locais da cidade de São Paulo, como exemplo na foto acima, no campus da Faculdade Cantareira, no bairro do Belém-São Paulo Capital, sobre uma laje no telhado.

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Site for Vauxhall City Farm in 1978. Source: Vauxhall City Farm.

Urban farming is so much more than adorable animals and markets; it is a symbol of modern London’s approach to making sustainable food sources and community spaces.

By Idroma Montgomery
Sustainable Cities Collective
May 14, 2012
Idroma Montgomery is a freelance researcher and earned her M.A. in Culture, Globalisation and the City from Goldsmiths, University of London.

Excerpt:

Recently I’ve noticed that London embraces urban farming in a way I haven’t seen in other cities. Last month, I attended the Oxford-Cambridge Goat Race at Spitalfields City Farm in East London, a popular annual event that raises money for the farm. It is housed on a side street off the trendy and boisterous Brick Lane, and like many other city farms in London, offers a study in how to effectively utilize small amounts of urban space.

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An urban agricultural design project

Jenna has designed an efficient, sub-irrigated system for growing energy-packed plants (microgreens) in small, urban spaces. Her aim: to provide healthy greens to extraordinary people with ordinary incomes.

As an urban agricultural design project, she envisions a way to grow food in an anthropogenic landscape for all strata of citizens, but as an art project, she hopes to facilitate conversations about different values: convenience vs creative effort, regenerables vs disposables, neighbors vs strangers.

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All coloured areas of this map (yellow, orange, red) show visiting countries where people are reading about urban agriculture.

‘City Farmer News’ is now averaging over 100,000 pages-views per month

Back in 1994 when City Farmer began publishing on the web, we were excited to find each new country viewing our site. The Internet was in its infancy and many countries had not hooked up. As the decade closed and we’d seen over 200 nations visit, we stopped watching these statistics.

But it’s interesting to see how things look today. The statistics on the following page, show page-views per country for the past two and a half months, from Feb 25 – May 13, 2012. The top countries visiting ‘City Farmer News’, with over 2000 views are: United States, Canada, United Kingdom, India, Australia, Netherlands, Germany, Philippines, France, Italy, Republic of Korea, South Africa and Singapore.

‘City Farmer News’ is now averaging 100,000 pages views per months, which shows the explosion of interest in city farming.

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The Little Gardeners.

With the same care and industry which you have bestowed upon your garden, cultivate your minds, and raise in them the lovely and unfading flowers of piety and virtue.

Published by S. Babcock
New Haven
1850

Excerpts:

Let me tell you, my dear young reader, about a happy little family of three brothers and three sisters, who lived in a pleasant home, not far from the great city of New-York.

They had a complete set of garden tools, just the right size for such little folks: spades, hoes, rakes, watering-pots, and a wheelbarrow. I assure you they did not let these tools lie idle. Their garden, which produced flowers of all kinds, and many varieties of fruit, always presented a neat and workman-like appearance. The boys usually took upon themselves the most laborious part of the work, such as digging, and hoeing, and raking, while their sisters planted and transplanted, and watered, and pruned and trimmed, as occasion required.

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Agriculture 2.0 designed by Appareil.

Evolo
May 2012

Excerpt:

It consists of a generative system for the design of the infrastructure for urban vertical farming, which can be used in any city of the world.

It is defined as a parametric model which necessitates three pieces of information as inputs to produce the local design for the vertical infrastructure:

The climatic conditions of the city in which it is to be inserted.
The area of the city, in m², to be covered in vegetable production.
The specific site on which the tower is to be constructed.

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Photo by Davide Forti.

From Patrizia Pozzi’s new book ‘Contemporary Landscape’

“Kitchengarden” Event in conjunction with the “Fuori Salone” Design Week in Milano (2006 and 2007)

An outdoor event held in Milan to accompany the Fuorisalone, “Kitchengarden” at the Vivaio Ingegnoli, was an installation by the architect Patrizia Pozzi with the scenografer Angelo Jelmini( Studio Aaahhhaaa) for the Villegiardini magazine, where the world of the garden connected with the world of the Kitchen.

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Forbes: The New Green Revolution: A Vision For Small-Scale Urban Farming

The Good Food Revolution: Growing Healthy Food, People, and Communities
Gotham Books
Publication Date: May 10, 2012

Excerpt from Forbes magazine:

On three city acres in the heart of an inner-city Milwaukee neighborhood, we grow enough food year-round in our greenhouses to feed ten thousand people. At our facility five blocks from Wisconsin’s largest public housing project, we are taking city waste that would otherwise end up in a landfill-beer mash, food waste, coffee grinds-and composting it to create healthy soil. We are feeding this compost to millions of worms, who create a natural fertilizer. We are using this rich soil to grow intensively more than 100 varieties of vegetables. We are also raising 100,000 fish in “aquaponics” systems that resemble natural streams.

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Hell’s Kitchen Rooftop Farm, Manhattan 2011. Photo by Rob Stephenson.

New York photographer Rob Stephenson spent last year documenting farms in New York City.

By Ariella Cohen
Next American City
05/10/2012

Excerpt:

Whether on a Manhattan rooftop or in an abandoned lot in the Bronx, these experiments in urban agriculture hold the power to change the way the city feeds itself. His lush, large-format photographs tell the story of this growing movement to farm the five boroughs. We interviewed Stephenson about his series, From Roof to Table,which is now on display at The Storefront for Urban Innovation.

Next American City: What inspired you to create this series?

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The city selected two abandoned lots in Dorchester, an ethnically diverse neighborhood known as a food desert.

By Noelle Swan
Seedstock
May 10, 2012

Excerpt:

Aside from a little referenced law dating back to the 19th century allowing public grazing for sheep and cattle on Boston Common, Boston zoning laws make no mention of agriculture. In absence of zoning permissions, most agricultural activities are in effect forbidden. “That’s not to say that the city is out there policing people with vegetable gardens,” says Tad Read, project manager of the Urban Agricultural Zoning at the Boston Redevelopment Authority. He adds that without a legal support to lean on, farmers can be penalized if neighbors file nuisance complaints, such as odors from compost and manure application, or squawking of hens laying eggs each morning.

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Photo by Les Bazso/Vancouver Sun.

Farm to grow organic produce on former Expo lands

By Zoe McKnight
Vancouver Sun
May 11, 2012

Excerpt:

We’re demonstrating this can in fact be considered a serious enterprise for urban areas. We’re not talking about community gardens any more. We’re taking it up a level,” said Ableman, who founded the Centre for Urban Agriculture in Santa Barbara, Calif., in 1981 and now farms on Saltspring Island.

After a half- million- dollar expansion this summer, Solefood will have five farm sites in Vancouver: an existing half- acre farm adjacent to the Astoria Hotel on East Hastings Street; three on property provided by the city — one on Main Street at Terminal Avenue, another at First Avenue and Clark Drive, one at the Olympic Village — and the new site.

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Photo: WWII Victory Garden, San Francisco. San Francisco Chronicle.

It’s been around since 3,500 BC when Mesopotamian farmers began setting aside plots in their growing cities

The Dirt Blog – American Society of Landscape Architects
05/09/2012
First in a series of posts about Food and The City, a symposium at Dumbarton Oaks.

Excerpt:

In Israel, the early Zionist settlers in the 1920s saw small urban farms as critical to the development of a new Israeli society. By 1942, there were more than 4,600 urban farms, most of which were between 1,000 and 1,999 square meters, said professor Tal Alon-Mozes, a professor at Technion, the Israeli Institute of Technology. She described how many of these communities were comprised of women’s settlers associations that were key to “women’s empowerment.” Out farming in virgin territory, the women experienced “a sense of self-fulfillment, personal regeneration, and new hope.”

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Reinventing urban agriculture

Editorial
News4Jax
May 10, 2012

Excerpt:

Owning a chicken requires a permit, which requires a fee. The fee for allowing farm animals was originally set for people who wanted to keep a horse. When the fee was set, the amount was created with a Horse and stable in mind. Since then, hens have become less and the only fee which allows them to be legally placed in your backyard is the old one set aside for horses.

That fee is $750 every year. That’s a hell of a lot of eggs to make up even slightly for the egregious amount that you have to spend.

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Urban agriculture in Caracas (Patriagrande).

President Hugo Chavez approved a further Bs 97.6 million (US$ 22.7 million) to support urban agriculture.

By Tamara Pearson
Venezuelanalysis.com
Mérida, May 9th 2012

Excerpts:

Venezuelan Vice-president and minister for land and agriculture, Elias Jaua, said over the weekend that the program is also aiming to create 21,000 more productive units dedicated to urban agriculture this year, as well as 125 greenhouses, 44 nurseries, 16 artisanal seed units for producing certified seeds, 6 organic fertiliser units, and 40 aquaculture (water farming) units. So far, 19,000 urban agriculture units have been constructed, and these include family, community, and school gardens.

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