Poster advertising Urban Farms & Gardens Tour

By Janet Brown-Moss (excerpt from Urban Grown newsletter)

Food from the City for the City officially kicks off June 18, 2009, with a gathering of Kansas City’s leading practitioners and visionaries to talk about the area’s urban food production and how it is changing city neighborhoods and family diets. Join us at the Downtown KCMO Public Library at 6PM for an inspiring conversation preceded by a reception featuring local food and wine.

A couple days later, head over to the Ruiz Branch Library, KCMO, and learn about “Farm Animals in the City”, a topic that got quite some press recently here in Kansas City. Then check out the just-released documentary Mad City Chickens to be screened on June 23 at All Souls Unitarian Universalists Church. It is a sometimes wacky, sometimes serious look at the people who keep chickens in their urban backyards.

If you’re new to urban agriculture and just want to know how and where to find locally produced foods, check out the “How to eat local in KC” workshop held at libraries in Olathe and KCMO.

Or perhaps you want to get your family together to grow food in the yard or at a local community garden; maybe you’re a teacher wishing to learn how to start a school garden; or perhaps you’re an experienced hobby gardener who is interested in scaling up, in becoming an urban farmer and selling produce to your neighbors? Check out the all listings and find an event that’s right for you.

Finally, if you’re an architect, engineer or city planner, looking for reasons and ways to design tomorrow’s sustainable cities with urban agriculture in mind, “Building Edible Cities” on June 24 will get you there.

Then, on Tour Day (June 28), I will be having me some fun visiting as many of the 28 farms and gardens I can squeeze in between 10AM and 5PM. What a great opportunity to learn about and enjoy urban agriculture, live music, storytelling, cooking demos and much much more. Some children whose parents can’t make the tour will be with me that day, enjoying a virtual scavenger hunt at several participating farms.

See more about Kansas City events and schedule here.

Urban Grown Newsletter

Urban Grown is the newsletter of The Kansas City Center for Urban Agriculture. This well-written bimonthly publication was begun in 2006 and features both local Kansas City stories and ones of national and international interest.

Examples in their June 2009 issue include:

Intensive and Intelligent: Urban Agriculture in Ogawa-Machi, Japan

Potatoes and bunching onions are harvested from tiny plots between buildings, parking lots and roads.

(Excerpt) By Katherine Kelly

I just returned from a trip to Japan with nine other farmers, food activists and academics as part of a Japan-Kansas exchange looking at organic agriculture and food movements. The goal of the exchange is to share strategies for building a local organic food movement here and there.

We spent a week in the Saitama prefecture, northwest of Tokyo, visiting organic and urban farms and food businesses; in June, a group of ten Japanese visitors will come to Kansas, touring Lawrence area farms and coming into Kansas City for the Urban Farms & Gardens Tour.

During the planning phase of the trip, I wondered if there would be enough urban agriculture for my interests, since the descriptions of the farms on our itinerary seemed mostly “rural.” On the first day though, as we left the Tokyo airport by train, I realized that it was likely that all of the agriculture we were going to see fit my definition of “urban.” (If you can see homes and businesses while standing in your field, you are probably an urban farmer.)

See more here.

Urban Agriculture Draws Crowds at Annual Planners’ Conference

City farming said to promote resilience, build “belonging capital”

(Excerpt) By Marcia Caton Campbell, PhD

Urban agriculture was hotter than a habanero pepper at the recent national conference of the American Planning Association (APA). For five days in late April, 4,500 APA members–urban and regional planners, planning commissioners, and student (future) planners–convened in Minneapolis for the organization’s 101st annual conference, themed “Headwaters to the Delta.”

The conference featured 11 sessions and/or workshops related to urban and peri-urban agriculture, ranging from zoning for healthy food to public markets and street vendors and agricultural conservation easements. MetroAg: Alliance for Urban Agriculture (www.metroagalliance.org) offered a discussion session led by four MetroAg Associates: Joseph Nasr (Toronto), Ghalia Chahine (Montreal), Jennifer Blecha (Minneapolis), and myself. It was attended by some fifty participants–among them practicing planners, academic researchers, student planners, and local government officials–who talked over a variety of issues pertaining to urban agriculture such as brownfield cleanup & reuse, chicken and bee ordinances and the inclusion of urban agriculture in the new LEED-ND standards put out by the U.S. Green Building Council.

The next morning, more than 250 planners in a standing-room only crowd attended a presentation on the future of urban agriculture by Growing Power CEO and 2008 MacArthur Foundation Fellow Will Allen, Wayne Roberts (Toronto Food Policy Council), and Jerry Kaufman, Professor Emeritus of Urban & Regional Planning (UW-Madison). Using dozens of photographs, Will Allen illustrated the dramatic growth of Growing Power over the organization’s history. Growing Power now employs over 30 staff in Milwaukee and Chicago and is developing regional training centers to extend the organization’s reach in providing good, healthy food to everyone.

See more here.