Carlton is co-founder of Tunnel Vision Hoops LLC

By John Reinhardt
Grown in the City
March 31st, 2011

Excerpt:

This is not your usual start-up story. Tunnel Vision Hoops LLC is a partnership of myself, Todd Alexander & Michael Walton. All three of us have been working in and around sustainable issues for years in different capacities advocating for local food and urban agriculture. Todd and Michael each operate urban farms in Cleveland. The three of us met for the first time at the 2009 Sustainable Cleveland 2019 Conference in the Local Food Task Force and became instant friends.

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The Ohio City Fresh Food Collaborative is a 6 acre urban farm incubator on the west side of Cleveland. Located near the West Side Market and a cluster of restaurants that support local farmers, the farm incubator provides garden plots for Cleveland Metropolitan Housing Authority residents, a market garden for Central Roots urban farm, and the Refugee Response/REAP program which provides market garden plots for refugees. Shot and edited by Brad Masi.

“Over the next three to five years we want to have about 10 farms going, and we want to employ about 100 people.”

By Christopher Johnston
Fresh Water
Mar. 31, 2011

Excerpt:

By shifting one quarter of Northeast Ohio’s food-buying needs from out-of-state sources to local food producers — a paradigm known as “the 25-percent shift” — we can put one out of eight unemployed people in the region back to work. That’s 27,664 new jobs, an increase in annual regional output by $4.2 billion, and $126 million in added state and local tax collections.

Granted, that “shift” is no simple nudge. It requires overcoming numerous obstacles, from increasing available credit to motivating more consumers to buy local.

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Nature – Agriculture – City

Via Evolo – Architecture Magazine
March 30, 2011

Finalist, 2011 Skyscraper Competition
Michael Leef, Tahel Shaar
Israel

Excerpt:

The Towers: This system grows vertically, to create new housing towers in a new way.

The towers that we designed have a vertical and continuous system of agricultural fields on the southern facade. They provide the central cores of each of the three buildings that rise above. These cores are where systems such as water and filtering run through.

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Cross-section of Dixville Urban and Peri-urban Farmers.

German-Agro Action Manager Urges Mutual Aid to Farmer Groups

By Edwin M. Fayia III
Liberian Observer
March 31, 2011

Excerpt:

An international non-governmental organization working in Liberia’s agriculture sector, has begun encouraging farmers to choose their leaders through the democratic process.

Welthungerhilfe, (formerly German Agro-Action) from March 25- 28, 2011, worked with forty two Urban Farmer Associations to elect their leaders in Dixville, Montserrado County and Tubmanburg, Bomi County.

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A CNN video report

March 24, 2011

Vertical farming is a revolutionary idea that would enable cities to feed themselves.
Note (Mike): See a 15,000 sq. ft. rooftop greenhouse under construction in New York City by Gotham Greens. Viraj Puri describes the project.