Posts from — February 2010

Farm on wheels

From Re:Farm’s Wiki:

Refarm the city are tools of open software and hardware for urban farmers. is a mix of a good meal (the crop, the friends, the seeds, …) , hardware (the urban farm, the composter, the electronics, the sensors, recycled materials, …), software (built a farm according to: your personal needs, local vegetables, local gastronomy, farm location, …) that will give you the tools to design, control and manage your farm during her life. We have divided this wiki on the steps you need to take to start a refarm.

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The City Compost process: Turning yard trimmings into high value compost. Yard and garden trimmings (grass, leaves, plant debris) are screened for metal using a magnet, ground up, and arranged in long piles called windrows. Over the next six months, the windrows are periodically turned to maintain optimum temperature, oxygen level and moisture content. The finished material is then screened for plastic and oversized pieces, before distribution as compost. Larger photo here.

Factsheet prepared by the City of Vancouver, 2010

Composting conserves landfill space, reduces greenhouse gas emissions and creates nutrient rich soil. The City of Vancouver engages residents to work toward these goals, offering educational programs, subsidized home composters, and a yard waste composting facility.

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Reach and teach more kids about healthy food on and off our urban farm. Urban Roots, a program of YouthLaunch

Urban Roots is looking to expand our reach beyond our farm interns to more students in the Austin. We will hire youth outreach specialists to work with Urban Roots staff to create and facilitate educational activities in schools and for after-school field trips to our farm. We will train these youth to lead interactive activities on the farm that teach students about healthy living.

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Airborne Vineyard by Soonil Kim

From the Architectural Association, School Of Architecture In London, Taught By Nannette Jackowski And Ricardo De Ostos.

From the blog Pruned, on Landscape Architecture and Related Fields. By Alexander Trevi.

Airborne Vineyard by Soonil Kim

Writes Kim:

Inspired by the urban grains especially the railway network from both St. Pancras and King’s Cross Station around the site, the design is a formal continuation of the topography while reinforcing the colonisation of air space by winery branches. The audacious structure, the winery and the vineyard for red wine grapes are connected by a suspended transport network enabling the use of ground space for a public park. With a capacity to produce 10,000 bottles of red wine annually the project re-articulates private and public space blending productive infrastructure with quality areas to Londoners and tourists.

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Farming on Film: Mitra Sticklen documents life on the urban farm

Film by Mitra Sticklen and Christine Nielsen
Article Written by: Robin Peterson
Chicago Weekly, June 4, 2009

“It’s not hard to make this stuff look good,” says filmmaker Mitra Sticklen, pausing in between shots of the bright green kale and collards on display on a stand at the 61st Street Farmers Market. “It’s beautiful stuff—beautiful footage.” The stand belongs to Windy City Harvest, an urban agriculture job training program of the Chicago Botanic Garden and West Side Technical Institute, whose participants Sticklen has been filming since last fall. With the working title “Growing Change,” the film was originally meant to be a ten-minute short documenting one season of the program.

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Clodagh and Dick Handscombe gardening authors living in Spain for 20 years.

Vegetables for the concrete jungle

Michelle Obama y Verónica Berlusconi convirtieron en tendencia las huertas urbanas. En Galicia ya están pegando fuerte y este mes nacerán dos asociaciones

By Alfonso Andrade
La voz de Galicia
6/2/2010 In Spanish

Es verdad que pocos privilegiados disponen en el hogar de un currunchiño de cien metros cuadrados para plantar sus lechugas como la hortelana Michelle en la Casa Blanca, pero tampoco es necesario. La primera dama americana, Verónica Berlusconi y otras celebridades han impulsado una moda absolutamente implantada en Canadá y el norte de Europa que llega ahora con fuerza a Galicia. El minifundio se estila también en las huertas urbanas que empiezan a poblar el paisaje gris de las principales ciudades para hacer realidad un viejo sueño del burgués: regresar al campo.

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Ordinance changes bother keepers of bees, chickens

By Diana Nelson Jones
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
February 08, 2010

Proposed changes to the city ordinance dealing with the keeping of agricultural animals on city properties has agitated bee and chicken keepers.

Burgh Bees, a 375-member nonprofit, has put out a “call to action” via e-mail for attendance at a public hearing before the city planning commission at 2 p.m. Feb. 16 “to show how many beekeepers and beekeeper supporters there are” in the city. The hearing is at 200 Ross St., Downtown.

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Hear From Our Founder from AeroFarms on Vimeo.

Meet Ed Harwood, Founder & CEO of Aero Farm Systems

Aerofarms – The future of urban agriculture

From their website:

AeroFarms provides aeroponic technology and comprehensive business expertise to those pioneering the future of urban agriculture. The world’s current food system is unsustainable economically, environmentally and socially. Today’s rural and centralized food production uses a vast amount of resources—land, water, transportation fuel— which will become increasingly scarce and expensive as world populations grow and continue to urbanize. At the same time these resources diminish, demand for food will increase, requiring current food production levels to double by 2050 to support the world’s population. We need a better way.

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Urban Orchard

By Andrew Maynard Architects, a young Melbourne, Australian firm

Premise

A cities gardens can be more than a decorated landscape. Like the built environment, green spaces can work with us to make an integrated urban environment rather than isolated pockets of manicured greenery.
We propose a garden that contributes a SOCIAL space, creates a low impact and sustainable ECONOMIC model, beautifies the URBAN landscape and improves our urban areas impact on the ENVIRONMENT.

We propose that rather than only producing a beautiful, green rooftop space, we also create a greater, and achievable urban gesture. We propose a working garden that is wonderful to visit, great to have events at, while also producing food much like Cuba’s Market Gardens.

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The suburban farm project dovetails with other steps introduced by Cuban president Raul Castro. Photograph: Ismael Francisco/AFP/Getty images

Project launched to ring urban areas with thousands of small farms in bid to reverse agricultural decline

By Marc Frank in Camaguey
The Guardian
7 February 2010

Cuba has launched an ambitious project to ring urban areas with thousands of small farms in a bid to reverse the country’s agricultural decline and ease its chronic economic woes.

The five-year plan calls for growing fruits and vegetables and raising livestock in four mile-wide rings around 150 of Cuba’s cities and towns, with the exception of the capital Havana.

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Urban Roots – The industrial powerhouse of a lost American era has died, and the skeleton left behind is present-day Detroit.

URBAN ROOTS, directed by Detroit-native Mark McInnis is a documentary that tells the powerful story of a small group of unique individuals involved in Detroit’s urban agricultural movement.

But now, against all odds in the empty lots, in the old factory yards, and in-between the sad, sagging blocks of company housing, seeds of change are taking root. A small group of dedicated citizens, allied with environmental and academic groups, have started an urban environmental movement with the potential to transform not just a city after its collapse, but also a country after the end of its industrial age.

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Photo by Marta_9. Larger image here.

Crops for Clunkers [HD]

by Lou Karsen (videos)
18:01

New film by Lou Karsen about the transformation of a ’78 Mazda pickup truck into an edible garden by the Seattle Urban Farm Company for the 2010 NW Flower and Garden show.

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Tara Kolla examines a seedling container, amid other vegetable seedlings that will be planted this spring in the garden at her home in Los Angeles’ Silver Lake district Wednesday, Jan. 27, 2010. Like many eco-minded gardeners, Kolla planted seeds, only to find that her garden violated local zoning laws and alienated her neighbors. – AP Photo

Urban farmers fight nationwide to sow green biz

By Raquel Maria Dillon
Feb 5, 2010
Associated Press Writer

LOS ANGELES – Tara Kolla fancied herself a green thumb-turned-green businesswoman when she planted an organic flower plot in her yard and sold poppies, sweet peas and zinnias at the local farmers market. For her neighbors, it was an eyesore.

Where Kolla saw her efforts as creating a lush sanctuary, her neighbors witnessed dusty pots, steaming compost, flies and a funky aroma on their tiny cul-de-sac in Los Angeles. They complained to zoning officials — and prevailed.

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Photo by Chris Martin

Hayes Valley Farm – San Francisco

Our Vision

Hayes Valley Farm (HVF) is an education and research project with a focus on urban agriculture. Situated on the city-owned lots bordered by Oak, Fell, Laguna, and Octavia streets, the project is organized by an alliance of urban farmers, educators, and designers that comprise the HVF Project Team. HVF is a Parks Partner, a fiscally sponsored project of the San Francisco Parks Trust.

The project is founded on an interim use agreement between Hayes Valley Farm and the City’s Office of Economic and Workforce Development- a two to five year time frame – until which time the City moves forward with other development plans for the site.

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Grow food, health, jobs and justice at an Urban Farm in S Central LA. Community Services Unlimited Inc. (CSU)

Overview

The Community Food Village Urban Farm project will transform an under utilized 1 acre garden into a highly productive urban farm that will supply S Central LA with fresh, local, organic produce. The farm will grow more than just food. It will employ local youth who will learn job, life, and entrepreneurial skills while helping to grow and market produce in the neighborhood. It will empower residents to eat healthy and to participate in transforming their community into a healthy and beautiful place to live.

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Photo of Naomi’s Organic Farm Supply

The Chicks Are Coming! local resources for urban chicken farmers

by Kate Bryant
Feb 03, 2010
Portland Monthly

Ten years ago, when I first kept chickens, there were few places in Portland to buy supplies. Driving out to Foster Feed on Southeast Foster & 103rd (Tel: 503-777-2967) was something of a pilgrimage from the city — there weren’t many of us with chickens yet then – and I’d often ride out with one of the few other chicken-o-philes I knew so we could pool resources and buy big sacks of grit and oyster shell, feed (there was no organic feed available then) or bedding. We chicken people stuck together.

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For the Greener Good: “Urban Agriculture” from National Building Museum on Vimeo.

Presenter(s): Josh Viertel, Liz Falk, Steve Cohen, Allison Arieff (moderator)
Date Recorded: January 26, 2010
Duration: 01:26:11

Listen to a panel of experts discuss the ecological impact of how we grow our food and how urban agriculture has the potential to reclaim unused land in cities. The panel included Josh Viertel, president, Slow Food USA; Liz Falk, director and co-Founder, Washington D.C. based Common Good City Farm; Steve Cohen, food policy and programs, Portland Oregon’s Bureau of Planning and Sustainability; and moderator Allison Arieff, Food and Shelter Ambassador, GOOD and “By Design” columnist, The New York Times.

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Best Practices in Urban and Peri-Urban Agriculture Development

To be included in JAFSCD Vol. 1 Issue 2
Deadline: June 5, 2010

JAFSCD welcomes research or policy briefs, and case studies (up to 2,500 words) and full articles (up to 8,500 words) on best community-development practices related to:

Urban livestock management and regulation
Urban market gardening and backyard gardening
Marketing and value-adding
Waste management and reuse
Urban farming by immigrant or other special populations
Farming on the fringe

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By Russ White
February 02, 2010
Written by Lauren Talley
Michigan Live

Hamm is the CS Mott Chair for Sustainable Agriculture and leads the CS Mott Group for Sustainable Food Systems at Michigan State University. He’s been working on a way to use that land to develop an urban agriculture system in Detroit.

Excerpts:

Hamm works with Kathryn Colasanti, a graduate student who analyzed Detroit’s publically-owned space. Colasanti’s study focused on open land where buildings had already been torn down. She didn’t include parks or right of ways.

Colasanti discovered about nine square miles of empty available land within the city limits. If her study included land with abandoned buildings, that space would be doubled or tripled, Hamm said. Hamm and Colasanti determined with just 2,000 acres Detroit could produce up to 75 percent of the vegetables needs and about 50 percent of the fruit needs for 900,000 people.

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Promoting community agriculture efforts and increased access to locally grown food

“2010: The Year of Urban Agriculture” was organized by Seattle Department of Neighborhoods, Department of Planning and Development, and the Seattle City Council.

The site includes:

City Initiatives & Programs:

Street Use Permits: Gardening in Planting Strips
Seattle’s P-Patch Program
What’s new at P-Patch
P-Patch Program Evaluation (2009)
Seattle’s Market Gardening program

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