CSA farm feeds 100 families.

By Amanda Congdon
Sometimes Daily

Erin’s family has farmed and ranched in Texas for six generations and Skip’s boyhood was spent on a magnificent farm in Pennsylvania that got its start in the 1700s. 

These family ties, and our work in public health, is what led us to create Green Gate Farms.  While Skip wrote speeches and materials for Centers for Disease Control, Erin directed communications at the American Cancer Society.  Through this work we became keenly aware that America’s factory food system is at the heart of a myriad of health and environmental issues.

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California Country TV is a 30-minute weekly tour of the state’s dynamic food industry. We feature stories on the people, places and lifestyles that have made California the nation’s largest food-producing state.

Alemany Farm – Volunteers transform a dumping ground into an urban oasis.

San Francisco is a world-renowned hot spot for great restaurants, food and chefs. But now the city is gaining notoriety for something else. Community gardens are sprouting up everywhere you look, including the Alemany Farm in Bernal Heights.

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Student Melanie Christion, 17, tends to the fish farm at Chicago High School of Agricultural Science, which is raising 1,000 tilapia. The school’s farm operates at commercial grade, but not on a commercial scale. Photo by Zbigniew Bzdak, Chicago Tribune

Raising fish in an urban areas

By Lisa Pevtzow,
Chicago Tribune
April 16, 2010

Excerpt:

The idea of a fish farm in the middle of the city can seem quirky. Sometimes when 6th Ward Ald. Freddrenna Lyle brings up the subject, “people look at me as if they thought I had two heads,” she said.

But raising fish in an urban area is a clean, organic way to grow food, proponents say. It puts vacant lots and old industrial buildings to good use, which is why another alderman has become a proponent, and creates jobs. If done right, advocates say, there’s no smell and no pollution, since the fish wastewater is recirculated to irrigate vegetables and herbs.

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Comedian Timmy Williams, right, and wife Kristin prepare for a photograph with some of their laying hens in Portland, Ore. One of the newest urban farmers in the area, Williams, 28, is one-fifth of The Whitest Kids U’Know, a New York-based comedy troupe he joined as a college student in 2001. Photo by Ross William Hamilton / The Oregonian

I want to be a comedian-farmer

By Peter Ames Carlin
The Associated Press
4/17/2010

Excerpt:

(AP) — PORTLAND, Ore. – Timmy Williams has a glass-front chicken brooder in one corner of his living room and a rabbit in a cage in another. The guest room is dominated by a table full of just-sprouted lettuce, broccoli, spinach and kale soaking up grow-light. And the fridge in the step-in kitchen holds his own home-brewed ginger beer, along with a freshly made pumpkin pie. He’s particularly proud of the pie.

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