From Muslimness
Feb 17, 2010

Excerpts:

Earlier this year I interviewed sister Asiila Rasool an Eco-Muslim from SE San Diego, about the community garden she and her locals successfully grew from scratch. Check out why Asiila was inspired to grow organic, how she roped her community in, and why home-grown produce is worth all that effort.

Whose idea was it to start a community garden?

Our community garden idea began as a jam’ah (congregational) effort of mostly mine and my two nieces during a homeschool project meeting.

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Grow Your Own

By Heather Gray and K. Rashid Nuri
Counterpunch – “America’s Best Political Newsletter”
Edited by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair
February 17, 2010

Excerpt:

It seems everyone is questioning the implications of the most recent economic downturn. Then, of course, we’ve seen corporate America reap the benefits of its own disgrace with our tax dollars and, therefore, at the expense of all of us. Corporate America along with government support just keeps hitting us over the head. It’s too much! While, there’s been criticism of Wall Street and huge bonuses to the likes of AIG, one sector that’s not been the focus of attention lately is corporate agribusiness and it also should be intensely scrutinized. It seems, however, we’ve gone through a transition economically but we’re beginning to see some changes locally that are encouraging, perhaps partly in response to all this. The interest in urban agriculture and more attention to food issues in America is a case in point and a counterpoint to corporate agribusiness.

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FFA member Cierra Fierce, 16, tends to plants in the greenhouse behind Clyde C. Miller Career Academy in St. Louis.

Founded in 1928, the National FFA Organization — it dropped “Future Farmers” from its name in 1988 — isn’t just for farm kids anymore. About 34% of its more than 500,000 members live in cities or suburbs.

By Judy Keen
USA TODAY
Feb 17, 2010

ST. LOUIS — Andre Hall lives in the city and has never plowed a field or fed a hog, but he proudly wears the blue jacket long associated with the organization once called Future Farmers of America.

Hall, 18, is among 30 high-school students who belong to the FFA chapter at Clyde C. Miller Career Academy here. FFA is part of the curriculum in the school’s biotechnology “pathway” that’s preparing him for a job in the agriculture industry.

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Sample Indicators from the map:

Local Foods

# Farms with direct sales
% Farms with direct sales
% Farm sales $ direct to consumer
$ Direct farm sales
$ Direct farm sales per capita
# Farmers’ markets
Farmers’ markets/1,000 pop
# Vegetable acres harvested
Vegetable acres harvested/1,000 pop
Farm to school program

Excerpt from the USDA Food Blog
Feb 12, 2010

USDA’s Your Food Environment Atlas is an online mapping tool that compares the food environment of U.S. counties—the mix of factors that together influence food choices, diet quality, and general fitness among residents.  The Atlas contains 90 food environment indicators—most at the county level—allowing Atlas users to visualize and compare on a map how counties fare on each of the indicators. This new online tool is designed to stimulate research and inform policymakers as they address the nexus between diet and public health.

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