Posts from — July 2010

Photo by Brooklyn Grange.

Rooftop Farm Opens In Queens

By: Roger Clark
New York 1
07/07/2010

A ribbon-cutting ceremony today marked the opening of New York’s biggest rooftop farm.

The farm is run by the commercial farming business Brooklyn Grange and is located atop a building on Northern Boulevard in Long Island City, Queens.

“We lifted up the soil with a crane and we covered the entire roof with a green roof system,” explained head farmer Ben Flanner. “And there is over a million pounds of soil that we can grow vegetables in.”

“It’s wild that about six weeks ago there was nothing up here, and now there is all this,” said farmer Rob Lateiner.

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City Seeds Urban Farm

Gateway Greening was one of four non-profit finalists for What Do You Care About TODAY?, a contest sponsored by the NBC TODAY Show and the Pepsi Refresh Project. They granted each finalist $50,000! Funds will go towards City Seeds Urban Farm.

About the City Seeds Urban Farm

The City Seeds Urban Farm is a 2.5 acre vegetable farm located near Union Station in downtown St. Louis on land provided by the Missouri Department of Transportation. Tended by St. Patrick Center clients, these urban farmers seek to overcome homelessness, beat drug addiction and cope with mental illness. Mentored by Gateway Greening, the farmers take classes in horticulture while learning hands-on vegetable production and landscape maintenance.

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Customer Leslie Porto, of Snyder, watches as Janice and Mark Stevens, and their daughter Jerusha, 9, pull beets and onions at their urban farm. Photo by John Hickey / Buffalo News.

The Stevenses built a two-acre garden on city land last spring, and now they’re known across the East Side for their produce

By Maki Becker
Buffalo News
July 04, 2010

Excerpt:

Former farmers who had moved to the East Side from rural Wyoming County, the Stevenses and their seven children wanted their own farm to grow their own food without the use of pesticides and other chemicals while also providing fresh produce to their community.

City Hall initially was resistant, saying the land had been set aside to build new houses. City officials didn’t want to sell the land but were willing to lease it. However, the city wanted to maintain the right to sell the land with just 30 days notice.

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Geographical distribution of UA practitioners in South Africa, 2007

Assessing the Role of Urban Agriculture in Addressing Poverty in South Africa

By Phillippe Burger, JP Geldenhuys1, Jan Cloete, Lochner Marais and Alexander Thornton

GDN Working Paper Series
Working Paper No. 28
October 2009

Abstract

The overall aim of this report is to profile UA and to investigate what role urban agriculture plays in addressing poverty in South Africa. Methodologically, the paper is based on the annual South African household survey. Two approaches are followed. First, the profile of urban agriculturalists in 2007 was compared with the profile of urban agriculturalists in 2002. Second, a control group of urban agriculturalists with income of less than R10 000 has also been established in order to compare the results of agriculturalists and non-agriculturalists across a range of criteria. The paper is contextualized against the background of rising food prices in South Africa (also world-wide) and international literature on this topic.

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Victor and Rhonda Lavado tend to their garden at Szegda Farm in Columbia on Wednesday night. This is the second year they have planted vegetables in the community garden, which also features walking trails. Photo by John Woike, Hartford Courant

Come visit a place where a town has not only saved its land, but also its agricultural heritage as well. Columbia, CT.

By Peter Marteka
Hartford Courant
July 2, 2010

Excerpt:

Bravo, Columbia. You get it and you did it.

While dozens of open space parcels have been purchased across the state over the years, many sit unused with no parking areas or trails blazed through them. This is not the case with the 135-acre Szegda Farm in the heart of this northeast Connecticut town.

It has not one, but two large gravel parking areas. There is a community garden. An old-fashioned hand pump stands nearby — bringing back memories of a simpler time. There are two loop trails blazed by Eagle Scouts into the woodlands and across rock ledges, with plans for more in the future. A local farmer still cuts grass for hay in a nearby field.

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The Children’s Garden in Robert Leggett Park won a national urban design award last year. Photograph by: Wayne Cuddington, Ottawa Citizen

The popularity of community gardens hails back to the days when growing your own food was part of everyday life

By Phil Jenkins
Ottawa Citizen
July 5, 2010

Excerpt:

There are now almost 30 community gardens quilted across the city. The plots thicken, as it were, and each year the requests to City Hall propagate for startup training and financing. The gardens have been lined up in one row called the Community Garden Network, and that in turn is planted within the Just Food program (nice double entendre that), locatable on your computers and there they are listed and addressed, should you wish to visit a bed near you or contact them. In 2008, the city upped the money it had voted for community gardens from $5,000 to $80,000, seed money for new gardens, workshops, a co-ordinator and some maintenance.

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Green Billy Penn, © by Kenneth Thomas 2009

Urban Agriculture in Philadelphia: Lessons for Citizenship and Ecological Democracy

Katharine Travaline, M.S. and Christian Hunold, Ph.D. Drexel University Philadelphia, PA
Paper presented at the annual meeting of the WPSA ANNUAL MEETING “Ideas, Interests and Institutions”, Hyatt Regency Vancouver, BC Canada, Vancouver, BC, Canada, Mar 19, 2009

Abstract:

The conventional agri-food system has become increasingly concentrated and centralized, leaving little room for public participation in its decision-making processes. Urban governance today also tends to offer little space for city residents to be involved in their agri-food system for reasons including historical trends that have defined food as a rural issue; urban land-use economics that leave little room for food production in cities; and the failure of municipalities to sufficiently include the public in decision-making processes.

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Guerilla Gärtnerin in Aktion. Photo by Ella von der Haide.

Urbane partizipative Gartenaktivitäten in Munchen 2009 – Participatory Urban Garden Activities in Munich 2009

Places for social interaction, subsistence, participation and the experience of nature

A research paper by Dipl.-Ing. Ella von der Haide
2009. In German
See Ella’s documentary films about community gardens here.

Summary

The study is the first inventory of its kind documenting the variety of ‘Urban Participatory Agriculture’ in the City of Munich. The report describes a variety of traditional forms of gardening such as in school and allotment gardens, as well as new innovative forms such as intercultural community gardens and guerilla gardens.

The potential and challenges of the gardens and support for the gardens from an urban planning perspective are outlined.

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Growing citizen and political support for city-dwelling farmers

Jenn Prosser
Vue Weekly
Jun. 30, 2010

Excerpt:

One of the most significant changes in the way the City of Edmonton and its bureaucracy could approach the issue is the newly developed municipal development plan, termed “The Way We Grow.” Having passed its third council reading, the plan is meant to incorporate more progressive attitudes towards urban living, including urban agriculture.

“The plan’s section on urban agriculture will provide a roadmap for moving forward on urban agriculture,” explains Wilson, “potentially with a food policy group who will meet with stakeholders and advise council.”

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Edible Landscape Tools

Minimum Cost Housing Greoup
McGill University, 2005
The project team was formed by the following McGill staff: Prof. Vikram Bhatt, Rune Kongshaug, Prof. Jeanne Wolfe, Francois Emond, Clara Murgueitio, and McGill students: Jingfeng Cai, Lorena Rodriguez, Amal Jamal, Faiza Moatasim, Felipe Ochoa, Shannon Pirie, Li Ran, Yalda Rastegar, Guy Villemure and Nicholas Vreeland.

Making the Edible Landscape is a three-city project with the core objective of integrating Urban Agriculture as a permanent element in low-cost housing settlements. These three participating cities are: Columbo, Sri Lanka; Kampala, Uganda; and Rosario, Argentina. From existing settlements upgrading to the new urban developments in the partner cities, the project intends on applying UA as a subsistence resource for personal consumption and income generation.

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Joseph Swain, right, operates Swainway Urban Farm on his Clintonville property. Sustainable Clintonville members recently toured the small farm.

“We call it food landscaping”

By Kevin Parks
ThisWeek
May 19, 2010

Excerpt:

In the opinion of Joseph Swain, fast food has had its day and it’s time for “slow food” to hold sway.

Swain is a farmer. He lives in Clintonville. On the Swainway Urban Farm.

If Swain had his way, most people would be, at least a little bit, farmers as well. And he’s willing to help people learn to start growing their own food “on whatever scale they want.”

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The Growing Places Indy Slow Food Garden at White River State Park

To introduce Growing Places Indy and the concept of developing the Culture of food and urban agriculture in the city of Indianapolis, our initial project is the Growing Places Indy Slow Food Garden at White River State Park. This 6,000 sq. ft. garden, located at the intersection of Washington St. and Old National Road at the foot of the State Museum Lawn, offers the visiting public the opportunity to see, read about and get hands-on experience in a working urban vegetable farm.

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