This is probably one of the most important messages in my campaign: that there is ground all around that needs to be broken. It’s in empty city lots, on rooftops and in window boxes. Urban farming is important and certainly part of our future.

Joe Wirtheim prints

Victory Garden of Tomorrow is an art project posing as a propaganda campaign for new, American home-front values. The style draws from American mid-century home-front propaganda, and the 21st century messages are inspired by the sustainability movement.

The resulting artwork is a series of propaganda-style images, that are either hand screenprinted, painted, or giclee printed.

Joe Wirtheim lives and works in Portland, Oregon.

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People are ditching the city life to pick up organic farming

By Carol Costello
CNN
July 23, 2010

(CNN) – Every week, at the University Farmers Market in Baltimore, Maryland, 28-year old Roy Skeen sells greens, squash and other vegetables. All of his produce came from his small, urban farm. He planted the vegetables, picked them, and hauled them on his bike to University Market.

It’s not the kind of life he had in mind for himself when he graduated from Yale University in 2004. He majored in History and thought he’d land a job in a minute. He didn’t.

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Urban agriculture in Marina District

By Erica Shaffer
WTOL
July 22, 2010

TOLEDO, OH (WTOL) – Councilman Joe McNamara and Mike Craig are asking the city to consider opening the marina district to urban agriculture. McNamara says, “I see amazing potential, to be honest with you, because this is riverfront property. And God isn’t making anymore riverfront property with an amazing view of the skyline of Toledo.”

The councilmen are asking the city to take requests for qualifications to see what type of ideas flow in. City leaders says they’re willing to consider the project as long as it doesn’t cost too much or create a liability issue for the city.

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Researchers Mary Gardiner, Scott Prajzner and Kojo Quaye, from left, lay out traps to collect bug species in a garden in downtown Cleveland. Photo by Will Figg.

“People are really curious about what the heck we could possibly be doing”

By Mark Ferenchik
The Columbus Dispatch
July 18, 2010

Excerpt:

CLEVELAND – Insects are everywhere. In the country and the city. In your mulch bed and your garden.

And they’re all over the sticky pads Mary Gardiner and her team have placed in community gardens and vacant lots in what was once Ohio’s largest city.

Gardiner, an entomologist at Ohio State University’s Agricultural Research and Development Center in Wooster, is leading a team trying to determine the best uses for land that thousands of people once called home.

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