At work in an Alleycat Acres garden. Photo by Alleycat Acres.

Farming in the City: Joys of Growing Food

by Ann Dornfeld
This is the VOA Special English Agriculture Report
July 5, 2010

The Voice of America, which first went on the air in 1942, is a multimedia international broadcasting service funded by the U.S. Government through the Broadcasting Board of Governors. VOA broadcasts approximately 1,500 hours of news, information, educational, and cultural programming every week to an estimated worldwide audience of 125 million people.

The short article is about Seattle’s Alleycat Acres. Sean Conroe and Amber Banks are interviewed. Following the story, 42 people from around the world used their limited English to comment on the story and speak about urban agriculture.

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Symposium – September 24th & 25th, 2010

Truro and Halifax, Nova Scotia
Symposium and Discussion Forum is sponsored by the NSAC Department of Engineering, NSAC Research and Graduate Studies, AgraPoint and Dalhousie University School of Planning.

The purposes of the present symposium and discussion forum are to:

Bring together the leading scholars and published practitioners of urban agricultural systems for the first time in eastern Canada to synthesize and discuss the precedents, practices and prospects of this rapidly developing field.

Provide an opportunity for participants from municipal and provincial governments, citizen organizations, farmers’ markets, NGOs, and universities to share ideas and interact with the guest scholars during breakout sessions.

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Logo for Video Blog “The Urban Farming Guys”

Budget \ Reward: $250

What text should be included in the main part of the logo? A Graphic and Text: “The Urban Farming Guys” The Logo is for our Video Blog “The Urban Farming Guys” This video blog will be very entertaining, educational around the many topics surrounding urban farming. The logo should hit one or many of the following themes “urban” “self sustainability, “innovative farming techniques in urban environments”, “sustainability” maybe something with city-scape, or tall buildings, maybe not.

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The urban economy we’ve known fell apart, spectacularly, when Lehman Brothers fell

Alec Appelbaum
Faster Times
July 8, 2010

Excerpt:

So there’s room for a whole new kind of urban economy. And farming looks like a robust candidate.

Farmers in America today specialize like fashion houses in Milan- zebra eggplant, heirloom tomatoes, yada yada. Urban greenhouses and small plots can produce specialty crops, and urban farmers can use mass transit (and bike networks) to sell those crops locally around their neighborhoods.

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Boatanic – all green hands on deck!

By Damian O’Sullivan
Rotterdam (NL) 2010

The Boatanic (boat + botanic) is a novel concept that combines existing know-how to create an unprecedented solution for growing food within the inner city. Its aim is to reduce the environmental impact of our food which, today, still has to travel large distances before it hits our plates.

The concept is to simply convert discarded tourist boats into floating greenhouses as these are ideally suited due to their large glass windows. The idea dawned on Damian O’Sullivan as he was walking around Amsterdam and realised that the typical tourist boat actually resembled a greenhouse. ‘What if you replaced tourists with thyme or tomatoes?’ he asked himself – the Boatanic was born!

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Sisters Soleil Murray (left) and Raven Murray (R) inside their family’s Vancouver urban chicken coop. The family has four chickens for their four-person family. Photograph by: Ward Perrin, Vancouver Sun

Only seven people have applied to register their backyard flocks

By Randy Shore
Vancouver Sun
July 8, 2010

Excerpt:

Vancouver — People are flocking to classes in backyard hens care in Vancouver, but nearly all of the new coops remain quietly covert.

Has the city’s chicken registry laid an egg? Only seven people have applied to register their backyard flocks as required under a June bylaw amendment, though many times that number have acquired laying hens and sought instruction on their care in the past couple of months.

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