Planting a salad mix in the middle of the bed, sunflowers toward the edge. Photo by FarmPlate.

Crop mob

By Emily Morgan
The Farm Plate Blog
04.16.2010

Excerpt:

I was a little nervous about what my Sunday afternoon would be like when I got a message on Facebook that included the instructions, “Eat a big breakfast, this ain’t your 9 to 5 desk job! We’ll be doing physical labor!”

I was gearing up for my first ever Crop Mob–a volunteer phenomenon that took off in the New York City area after a New York Times magazine article about the initiative ran in late February. The concept, as detailed on the Crop Mob website, is simple:

“Crop mob is primarily a group of young, landless and wannabe farmers who come together to build and empower communities by working side by side. Crop mob is also a group of experienced farmers and gardeners willing to share their knowledge with their peers and the next generation of agrarians. The membership is dynamic, changing and growing with each new mob event.”

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Urban farming should take root here in Detroit

By John Mogk and Sarah Kwiatkowski
John Mogk is a professor of law at Wayne State University. Sarah Kwiatkowski is survey editor of the Wayne Law Review.
Crain’s Detroit Business
Apr. 18, 2010

Detroit should aggressively promote urban agriculture for a large part of its nearly 50 square miles of vacant land.

The amount of Detroit’s vacant land is incomprehensible even to urban experts, and there is little or no market demand for new residential, commercial or industrial developments. The few recent projects have been small, scattered and required major subsidies.

Urban agriculture, on the other hand, does not rely upon subsidies and serves a local demand for wholesome, inexpensive food, while providing residents with jobs, a method for eliminating neighborhood blight and a greater feeling of self-worth.

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The success of urban farming might be in the details. Achieving a safe, environmentally healthy and socially acceptable kind of urban farming requires re-designing agriculture to address its current side effects. Some technologies, currently in development, could revolutionize agriculture

By Hala Chaoui
Innovative Science: Agriculture And Food Edition

Hala Chaoui is a research engineer and founder of Urban Farms Organic, an R&D start-up company incubated at the business incubator “Bioenterprise” in Guelph, Ontario Canada. Her research and development interests include the following topics: bioconversion of biodegradable materials into value-added products, and developing equipment for urban agriculture. She also advocates the development of innovative technologies for organic farming.

Excerpt:

Organic plant production is more likely than organic animal production within urban farming, but transportation costs might require animal production to become more common at the fringes of cities, and some animal husbandry, such as urban chicken coops, might occur within cities. City animals could be produced and trained as weeding crews that are hired by urban gardeners, or for dairy or egg production.

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Builder Emmanuel Cosgrove tending to his vegetables on his rooftop garden, at his eco-house on Avenue Du Parc in November 2007.
Photograph by Graham Hughes, The Gazette

Community groups get green thumbs

By Monique Beaudin
The Gazette
April 19, 2010

Bean stalks wending their way up a concrete wall at McGill University’s downtown campus, tomato plants growing next to a community centre in Notre Dame de Grâce, basil and chard in the back yard of a St. Laurent duplex.

They’re all part of a wave of urban agriculture sweeping the island of Montreal.

Montreal has always been a leader in the field, said Vikram Bhatt, an architecture professor at McGill University whose Minimum-Cost Housing Group at McGill has been involved in urban agriculture projects here and around the world since the 1970s.

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