Posts from — April 2010

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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Bill Bezuk, former manager at REI and Barnes & Noble, is opening The Eugene Backyard Farmer. Photo by Brian Davies/The Register-Guard

Chicken Revival

By Diane Dietz
The Register-Guard
Apr 18, 2010

Excerpt:

After 20 years in retail, Bill Bezuk didn’t need a market analysis to recognize a business opportunity.

Then-store manager at Barnes & Noble — after long management stints at The Sports Authority and REI — Bezuk was positioned to detect a topic of growing interest among his customers.

“It seems like every day or so we had people coming in and looking for books like The Backyard Farmer and how to raise chickens and organic gardening,” Bezuk said.

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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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Paige Hill is a founder of Urban Patchwork, an Austin organization that offers to turn property owners’ yards into vegetable patches. Photo by Larry Kolvoord.

Urban Patchwork currently farms four plots

By Asher Price
American-Statesman
April 16, 2010

Except:

Within the buzz of traffic from Koenig Lane and a view of a Texas Gas Service office and warehouse across the street, Dale Oliverio’s backyard isn’t obviously situated as a pastoral paradise.

Until recently, his yard was overrun with “weeds and nut grass, and very little real grass,” he said. “It was such a waste of space. I would mow it every week, just wasting gasoline.”

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Livia Marques, L, the director of the People’s Garden Initiative and her son Levon Cooper, 8, plant as USDA employees volunteer in the “People’s Garden”, an organic garden on the grounds of the USDA HQ building on April 9, 2010, in Washington, DC. (Photo by Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post)

USDA People’s Gardens

By Lyndsey Layton
Washington Post
April 13, 2010

Excerpt:

Most days, Ed Murtagh spends hours behind his desk in Suite 1028 of the south building at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, trying to figure out how to conserve energy, reduce waste and make other environmental improvements.

But starting this month, Murtagh will regularly get up from his desk, walk outside and literally make the department greener.
Murtagh is among 80 volunteers at the USDA who are lending their sweat and muscle to an organic garden created by Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack along the Mall, on the grounds of the agency’s headquarters at 14th Street and Independence Avenue SW.

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Tena Kebena, urban agriculture in Addis Ababa

In 1993 (Ethiopian Calendar, 2000 Gregorian Calendar) two youths named Alemayehu Akalu & Desalegn Firew established the Tena Kebena & Ginfle Cleaning Association (TKGCA). Their motivation for this project was seeing all of the problems, pollution, and rubbish in the local area. They also noticed there were no other youth organizations and they wanted to help. Soon the organization became 10 members who were all committed to helping the local community in various ways. Unfortunately, despite the wonderful intentions, the organization was forced to cease functioning after 3 years due to lack of resources and support.

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First Lady Michelle Obama, center, examines vegetables grown by Somali immgrant Khadija Musame, second from right, as interpreter Bilal Muya, right, farm coordinator Amy Lint, second from left, and Dr. Robert Ross, President and CEO of The California Endowment, look on Thursday April 15, 2010 in San Diego. Photo from Associated Press

Michelle Obama at the New Roots community garden

by The Associated Press

SAN DIEGO April 15, 2010, 10:08 pm ET
Returning from Mexico, Michelle Obama made a brief stop Thursday in San Diego to visit a community garden farmed by international refugees that she called a model for building healthy communities across the nation and around the world.

Obama toured the New Roots Community Farm to promote her “Let’s Move!” campaign against childhood obesity. The event kicked off a $1 billion project by The California Endowment to fund healthy living initiatives in 14 communities across the state, including the City Heights neighborhood of San Diego, where the community farm is located.

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Leaves of San Francisco: Peter Vaernet, Brooks Park Community Garden © Binh Danh, 2010. Digital photo collage with leaf print. Image courtesy of the artist and the San Francisco Arts Commission.

Artist Binh Danh’s photographic series, Leaves of San Francisco, introduces six local green thumbs and reveals what inspires them to garden.

SAN FRANCISCO, March 22, 2010 – Director of Cultural Affairs for the San Francisco Arts Commission Luis R. Cancel is pleased to announce a new Art on Market Street Kiosk Poster series by artist Binh Danh. Leaves of San Francisco is a series of photographic posters created in collaboration with six local gardeners from diverse backgrounds who participate in the Recreation & Parks Department’s Community Garden Program. Combining a portrait of the gardener tending to his/her garden, a “leaf print” and an inspirational quote, the posters reveal a range of motivations for tilling the earth, from family traditions to public service.

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This castle is a growth area

By Rosie Boycott
London Evening Standard
15.04.10

Excerpt:

During the war, the Luftwaffe repeatedly tried to destroy The Castle as it was the main source of London’s water. They failed to score a direct hit but razed most of the surrounding area, now the site of concrete estates.

After the war, The Castle was taken out of use and remained empty until the early Nineties, when Steve Taylor acquired the building and constructed a vast and complex system of indoor climbing walls which can cater to 600 climbers (mostly kids) at a time.

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Blind Victory Gardener – Hats Off! 1940

Note: The commentator says Mr Sharper has won the ‘Dig For Victory’ Diploma.

Several M/S’s of elderly gentleman Mr Sharper kneeling down picking potatoes from his allotment in Manchester. The commentator says that he is actually blind. M/S’s of the man wheeling a barrow round his garden.

See the video here.

See more films on the next page.

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Photo by Steve Kinderman. McKenzie Knight, seated with sign, a sophomore FFA member at Eau Claire Memorial, gave third-graders from Roosevelt Elementary School an up-close look at a large farm tractor on display at the high school.

Wisconsin schools look at urban farming

By Janie Boschma
Leader-Telegram
April 15, 2010

Farming isn’t confined to farms anymore. Growing food, and in some cases raising animals, is becoming increasingly popular in urban areas, including the city of Eau Claire, as evidenced by a recent proposal to allow city residents to raise chickens.

The National FFA Organization is an American youth organization known as a Career and Technical Student Organization, based on middle and high school classes that promote and support agricultural education. The organization, founded in 1928 as Future Farmers of America.

More photos here.

Urban garden operation grows

Marc Jacobson
ABC 12 News
04/14/10

MOUNT MORRIS TOWNSHIP — Raising chickens and growing tomatoes sounds like country life, but it’s all happening in the Flint area.

King Karate’s urban farming program for teens is getting ready for another big summer, but they need your help.

Urban farming continues to grow in Mid-Michigan. Jacky and Dora King’s Harvesting Earth Farm is preparing for its third summer season.
“It’s getting bigger and bigger, and it’s spreading throughout Genesee County,” Jacky said.

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Terreform, a nonprofit architecture collective transforms the rooftop of a building in downtown Brooklyn into a shelter and farm for urban refugees- people displaced by the mortgage crisis. Their two-week project, called Terrefarm, used only materials found in the building, and involved students and teachers from around the world.

TerreFarm 2010

TerreFarm Lab runs from:
July 12th – 30th, 2010

Summer Lab for students, architects, scientists, artists, and individuals of all backgrounds to explore the larger framework of urban agriculture and its effects on the architecture and urban design of NYC.

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Union Baptist Church garden

By Dawn Baumgartner Vaughan
The Herald Sun
Apr 14, 2010

DURHAM — A new urban farm has been planted in a vacant lot in Durham as the community garden trend spreads throughout the city. Triscuit crackers, the nonprofit Urban Farming and Union Baptist Church joined together Tuesday morning to break ground on a vegetable and herb garden next to the church and its school on Corporation Street.

Funded by Triscuit, Urban Farming is helping to plant 50 urban farms across the country. Urban Farming founder Taja Sevelle said she uses the word “farming” rather than “garden” to foster the feeling of being down home and getting back to the days of people growing their own food. Gardening is more of a hobby, she said.

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