Convert blight to gardens

By: Stephen Clark
ABC 7
Sept. 6, 2010

Excerpt:

DETROIT (WXYZ) – It looks like a farm somewhere in the Midwest; row after row of tomatoes, peppers, broccoli and corn. Butterflies flit among the flowers. Somewhere a cricket chirps. But this isn’t Kansas; it’s the heart of Detroit.

An urban farm is carved into a row of empty lots at Linwood and Gladstone . It’s an island of green, red and orange in a sea of abandoned and burned out buildings.

“They got all kinds of vegetables, lettuce and tomatoes.” Andre McCullough tells us, “I mean what more could you ask for? We have fresh vegetables right at your hands.”

[Read more →]

“We need industrialization, not farming.”

By Michael Winter
USA Today
Sept. 7, 2010

With Detroit Mayor Dave Bing considering turning acres of abandoned land into vegetable gardens, the Rev. Jesse Jackson today spurned the idea of urban farming, calling it “cute but foolish.”

“The governor, a Democrat, brags about Michigan getting a battery plant, built north of Grand Rapids, as opposed to Detroit, the engine that drives the state,” Jackson told the city council, the Detroit News reports. “We need industrialization, not farming. Detroit needs the battery plant. Let farmers farm. … We are not offering a farming plan for Baghdad.”

[Read more →]

Naps Williams gets to grips with a pony at Butts Farm during a work experience day with the Young City Farmer programme. Photograph by Sam Frost.

Farmers for a fortnight

By Louise Tickle
The Guardian
7 September 2010

Excerpt:

The Royal Agricultural College (RAC) in the leafy Cotswolds isn’t where you’d expect to find urban youngsters from areas of disadvantage around the UK, but these are here for the RAC’s Young City Farmer two-week summer school .

Agricultural settings are dangerous places, Thomasin-Foster, a lecturer in farm mechanisation, explains. So, if an accident happens in the countryside, how long does the group reckon it’ll take for an ambulance to arrive?

[Read more →]

The Wealth of Waste – The economics of wastewater use in agriculture

Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations
Rome, 2010

Excerpt:

6 September 2010, Stockholm/Rome – Recycling urban wastewater and using it to grow food crops can help mitigate water scarcity problems and reduce water pollution, but the practice is not being as widely implemented as it should, according to a new FAO report.

Use of reclaimed wastewater in agriculture has been reported in around 50 countries on what amounts to 10 percent of the world’s irrigated land, according to “The Wealth of Waste: The Economics of Wastewater Use in Agriculture,” published today at the start of World Water Week (Stockholm, 5-11 September).

[Read more →]