Posts from — October 2010

Ideally, vertical farms should be cheap to build, modular, durable, easily maintained, and safe to operate

By Dr. Dickson Despommier
Thomas Dunne Books
October 12, 2010
320 pages, plus four 8-page color photo inserts

When Columbia professor Dickson Despommier set out to solve America’s food, water, and energy crises, he didn’t just think big – he thought up. Despommier’s stroke of genius, The Vertical Farm, has excited scientists, architects, and politicians around the globe.

These farms, grown inside skyscrapers, would provide solutions to many of the serious problems we currently face, including: allowing year-round crop production; providing food to areas currently lacking arable land; immunity to weather-related crop failure; re-use of water collected by de-humidification of the indoor environment; new employment opportunities; no use of pesticides, fertilizers, or herbicides;

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Photograph by: Brett Gundlock/National Post, NP

“I am 111 per cent guilty of possession of chickens”

By Daryl Slade
Calgary Herald
September 16, 2010

Excerpt:

Mayoral candidate and urban chicken advocate Paul Hughes has officially made his constitutional challenge to the city’s bylaw banning backyard egg-laying hens.

Hughes filed his document, under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, following a pre-trial conference at provincial court on Wednesday.

“The city does not have the jurisdiction to regulate activity pertaining to household food security, in this case exemplified by backyard chickens,” Hughes wrote as his primary ground for the challenge.

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Needs funding to build dozens of micro gardens throughout the Strathcona neighbourhood and help turn this into the heart of the greenest city

Overview:

We propose to create 20 to 30 community micro-gardens throughout the Strathcona neighbourhood. The gardens would be installed on private properties adjacent to public spaces in highly visible, underutilized areas.

Depending on the nature and size of each location, the gardeners and the property owners would decide whether the plot should be a community garden, single-owner garden, or a living wall. Vegetation would consist of native perennials and edible plants.

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Survey question as part of larger study on backyard composting and grasscycling

By Mustel Group Market Research
for the City of Vancouver
May 2007

The City of Vancouver population is 630,000. Greater Vancouver, which comprise 22 member municipalities and one electoral area, has a population of over 2 million.

Do you grow any food in your yard?

1. About half of the target residents grow food in their yard.

2. Not surprisingly, those living in single detached dwellings are much more likely to grow food in their yard than duplex/townhouse dwellers (53% vs. 35%).

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Music videos celebrate urban agriculture – On a Good Day (Metropolis) by Above, Beyond & Gareth Emery

Beautiful videos! Mike
Tracklist:
1. Above & Beyond pres. OceanLab – On A Good Day (Above & Beyond Acoustic Mix) (pre-order on iTunes now)

“We all read about the Detroit Urban Farms project and saw the documentaries about it and it really moved us all. To see a community reclaiming the crumbling city blocks to grow the food they need is an incredible story in so many ways. It was moving, topical and also a beautiful and apt illustration of what the song is actually about – triumph over adversity. As a video concept, it was perfect from angles.” – Above & Beyond’s Tony McGuinness

See the longer video about making this video on the next page. Interviews.

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Fighting Back in an Age of Industrial Agriculture

By Mark Winne
Beacon Press
Publication Date: Oct 12, 2010

Winne challenges the reader to go beyond the popular rhetoric of “eat local” and instead become part of a larger movement to reclaim food sovereignty. Invoking the philosophies of great writers and thinkers including William Blake, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, Winne writes about the importance of nourishing the body and the soul. The best way to do that, he writes, is by becoming connected to your food source.

Winne is not a food-purist. “I eat meat,” he remarks, “because I have yet to find much in life that competes with a tender rib eye accompanied by a good bottle of zinfandel.” However, his message about how to eat is clear: it is good to eat local, it is better to know the land or the animal that your food comes from, and it is best to grow it yourself.

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Urban youths learn about gardening, nutrition and giving back at Devington Green Acres Farm

By Barb Berggoetz
The Indy Star
Oct. 2, 2010

Excerpt:

Denise Smith thrust the shovel into the dry, hardened earth, over and over again.

She gingerly chopped away the dirt from around the buried sweet potatoes.

Like many inner-city youth, the 19-year-old Arlington High School senior hasn’t had much chance to experience first-hand the wonders of growing a garden and seeing hard work produce wholesome, fresh vegetables from seeds.

“I didn’t even know sweet potatoes grew underground,” she said, smiling, after helping classmates to fill a small basket with them. “I thought they grew above ground.”

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Aquaponics research at Chicago State University

By Hosea Sanders
ABC News
Sept 10, 2010

Excerpt:

Fish farming is making a splash with students at a South Side university. They are hoping it will inspire others in their community to eat locally grown, healthy foods.

Chicago State University is the newest home to an aquaponics facility. Administrators say it will not only provide a new teaching tool for students, but may also help ease the grip of a food desert on their South Side neighborhood.

Hundreds of tilapia are getting their daily feed at Chicago State University. The aquaponics facility features four 750-gallon tanks. There are also six hydroponic grow beds, where fruit, vegetables and herbs are planted in water instead of the ground.

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Launch of Farm School NYC

Just Food and an alliance of local horticultural and food justice organizations are pleased to announce the official launch of Farm School NYC: The New York City School of Urban Agriculture. The school will offer a unique, community-based certificate program with enrollment beginning in January 2011. The mission of the school is to provide comprehensive professional training in urban agriculture, while spurring positive local action on issues of food access and social, economic and racial justice.

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DeKalb County Code Enforcement officers cited Miller for growing too many vegetables

By M.S.
The Economist
Democracy in America
Oct. 3rd, 2010

Excerpt:

I tried to get out of writing about zoning and regulation, but they keep pulling me back in. It seems that DeKalb County, Georgia, enforces strict legal limits on how many vegetables you grow on your property. A gentleman named Steve Miller, who apparently has a suspicious fondness for broccoli, is facing a $5,000 fine from county officials, reports Sarah Parsons at Change.org.

“Back in January of this year, DeKalb County Code Enforcement officers cited Miller for growing too many vegetables and having unpermitted workers on his property. Apparently, according to city zoning laws, Miller broke the law when he started producing that many organic veggies on his land.

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More than 100 city plots have been set aside for urban gardening, but participants are required to test for soil contamination. See video report here.

Soil Safety Crucial In Urban Gardening

By Rafael Sanchez
ABC Indiana News
September 29, 2010

Excerpt:

Indianapolis has set aside more than 100 city plots for something not often found in a major metropolitan area: farming.

Indianapolis’ urban gardening initiative is intended to serve as a valuable way to promote local, sustainable agriculture, economic development and community building, 6News’ Rafael Sanchez reported.

As part of the program, six lots are currently being used to grow fruits and vegetables. People selected to be urban gardeners must commit to maintaining the city owned properties for five years.

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Photo by drippin_pitch.

The Financial Times has a combined print and online average daily readership of 1.9 million people worldwide

The Financial Times, one of the world’s leading business news organisations, is recognised internationally for its authority, integrity and accuracy. Providing essential news, comment, data and analysis for the global business community, the newspaper, printed at 24 print sites across the globe, has a daily circulation of 376,564 (ABC figures August 2010), while FT.com has over 2.7 million registered users and 149,047 digital subscribers. The FT’s combined print and paid digital circulation is 563,026 (Deloitte assured, July 2010) and it has a combined print and online average daily readership of 1.9 million people worldwide (PwC assured, November 2009)

See urban agriculture stories on multi-storey farms and Seattle’s Year of urban agriculture on next page.

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Boris Pasternak digging a potato patch at his dacha in Peredelkino, near Moscow, in the summer of 1958. From Sharashkin thesis, via LIFE magazine.

The Earth needs our help

By Leonid Sharashkin
PhD thesis
University of Missouri–Columbia
May, 2008
274 pages
(Exciting find! So much to read in this paper. Mike)
Excerpts:

Russia has 18.8 million acres of family gardens, which produce US$14 billion worth of products per year, equivalent to over 50% of Russia’s agricultural output, or 2.3% of the country’s GDP (Rosstat 2007b). The United States, on the other hand, have 27.6 million acres of lawn, which produce a US$30 billion per year lawn care industry (Bormann, Balmori, and Geballe 2001).

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Partners put down roots in the heart of the Bull City, North Carolina

By Elizabeth Shestak
The Durham News
Oct 2, 2010

Darko Urban Farm is another example of Durham ahead-of-the-foodie-curveness.

Approximating a bit over 2,000 square feet of crops ranging from fruit trees to herbs, asparagus to lettuces, the farm is located about a block from Little Five Points in the Cleveland Holloway neighborhood near downtown.

Urban farming has been gaining ground, or rooftop, in many cases, but Darko Urban Farm is the first official farmlet, as I like to call them, trying out a CSA program. (CSAs are community supported agriculture programs and usually entail customers making a seasonal payment to farmers in exchange for weekly produce deliveries.)

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Russian Dacha.

The case studies investigate: St. Petersburg dachas, America’s Milwaukee Growing Power farm and Havana permaculture.

By Ailbhe Gerrard
Version Sept. 23, 2010
Innovation and Sustainable Development in Agriculture and Food
Montpellier, France
June 28-30, 2010

Abstract

Diversity of urban agriculture (UA) in Britain could reduce food security impacts if a crisis occured in industrial food production systems. Industrial agriculture (IA) both causes and suffers from a lack of resilience: environmental, financial and structural. In Britain, the allotment system, previously an important form of UA, now grossly insufficient to replace the output of industrial agriculture, particularly in London. With these points identified, the relationship between diversity and resilience takes on a new clarity. Systems theory shows that diversity in any system is key to resilience.

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CNN’s Richard Roth reports on a New York restaurant with its own farm on the roof.

CNN Eatocracy
September 29th, 2010

Chef John Mooney’s new 80-seat restaurant, Bell Book & Candle, is the latest in rooftop farming ventures. Roth grows the majority of the restaurant’s produce above terra firma with the help of hydroponics and vertical towers – no soil required.

“I believe in an urban setting, this is the wave of the future,” said Mooney. For that – things really are looking up. Link here.

Maialino Executive Chef Nick Anderer, sous chef Dan Dilworth and manager Kevin Denton banded together to grow their restaurant’s vegetables, high above the streets of Manhattan.

High above Manhattan, a vegetable garden grows

CNN – Eatocracy
August 11th, 2010

Excerpt:

“Kevin, wake up! We have a radish.”

As the Gramercy Park Hotel’s rooftop vegetables were first coming into flower, its three principal gardeners made no bones about delivering midnight progress reports on their crop. A lot can go wrong for novices on standard terrain – let alone those attempting to cultivate lovage, patty pan squash and chiogga beets many stories above the streets of Manhattan – so the trio make a point of sharing their triumphs as well as the losses.

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Children’s writer Michael Morpurgo and his wife Clare founded farms for city children in 1976 at Nethercott, deep in Devon river country. They now operate three working farms: Treginnis Isaf on the Pembrokeshire coast opened twenty years ago and Wick Court in Gloucestershire opened in 1997. They aim to expand the horizons of children from towns and cities all over the country by offering them a week in the countryside living together on one of their farms. Illustration by Brian Gallagher.

Once upon a life

By Michael Morpurgo
The Observer
11 July, 2010

Michael Morpurgo and his wife were determined to change the lives of inner-city children by giving them an experience they’d never forget. The poet and author recalls how they started their first kids’ farm in Devon – and how one of the visiting children inspired his greatest literary work.

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Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds. Photo by phatpuppycreations. See link to site here.

Agriculture on the edge: strategies to abate urban encroachment onto agricultural lands by promoting viable human-scale agriculture as an integral element of urbanization
By Patrick M. Condon, Kent Mullinix, Arthur Fallick and Mike Harcourt
International Journal of Agricultural Sustainability 8 (1&2) 2010
Link here.

Agriculture on the Edge – The urgent need to abate urban encroachment on agricultural lands by promoting viable agriculture as an integral element of urbanization.
By Patrick M. Condon and Kent Mullinix
Discussion Paper – Revised Feb 25, 2009
Link here.

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Cambridgeport School students show their dirtied hands from planting colorful chard, peppers, cabbages and rosemary into a 7-foot growing frame for the school’s display on living edible walls at the CitySprouts School Garden Celebration, to be held Saturday at the Tobin School. Photo by Kristen Emack.

Cambridgeport kids bring ‘edible walls’ to CitySprouts celebration Saturday

By Monica Velgos
Cambridge Day
October 1, 2010
Monica Velgos is a parent at Cambridgeport School, a member of its garden committee and a contributing editor to Food Arts magazine

Excerpt;

One of Cambridgeport School’s greatest assets is how snugly it fits in its Area IV neighborhood, surrounded so closely by the homes of many of its 300 students. But last spring, when the school’s garden committee sought space on the grounds to grow vegetables, that closeness presented a monumental challenge.

Spots large enough had too much building shade, spots filled with light were too close to play equipment. A few parents who supported Walk/Ride initiatives protested any bike racks being moved, and teachers couldn’t spare even one sunny parking space, given the extreme parking problems they already faced. The only choice seemed to be up, but not on the roof. On the walls.

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