Posts from — April 2011

Time Sensitive – Bylaw Changes

By Louise Negrave
Lantzville Urban Agriculture
Apr 26, 2011

Excerpt:

Council has placed themselves and the residents of Lantzville on a very tight timeline to deal with the issue of urban agriculture. Since neither council nor staff have the required expertise in this area, and we want a “made in Lantzville solution”, as council had initially proposed, I recommend we ask council to delay pushing through this bylaw until concerns of all parties can be adequately addressed.

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Famous Catherine Ferguson Academy may be closed – 13 arrested in heroic action

By Diane Bukowski
Apr 19, 2011
Voice of Detroit
(A sad story! Mike)

DETROIT – In an interview with VOD, Ashley Matthews, 17, described the heroic student-led occupation of her school, Catherine Ferguson Academy on April 15. She spoke of the wholehearted support the young mothers received from the community, as well as the vicious physical and verbal brutality police visited on them during their arrests.

She said two toddlers, there with their mothers, watched the events.

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David Tracey stands near the Eco Pavilion in Strathcona Community Garden. The Eco Pavilion, a house-like structure with solar panels, is located off Prior and Hawkes streets. Photograph by: Arlen Redekop, PNG, Vancouver Sun.

From garden city to farm city

By Steve Whysall
Vancouver Sun
April 29, 2011

Excerpt:

Imagine Vancouver in the not-too distant future. There are food gardens everywhere. Mini-farms. On rooftops. In parks. Next to gas stations. Filling empty lots.

And there are fruit and vegetable kiosks dotted here and there, selling fresh, organically grown produce that has been picked only a few hours earlier.

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Photo by Kimmo Kirvelä.

116 page publication in Estonian

söödav linn 1
Ülevaade Linnalabori 2008, aasta katuseaianduse katsest ning linnas toidu kasvatamise perspektiividest

“Edible City 1” is the first publication to introduce city agriculture into re-independent Estonia. It is based on a popular science test run by Linnalabor (Urban Lab) in 2008 where we measured the quantity of pollution in edible plants growing next to major roads. The experiment provided an opportunity to concentrate on the broad field of city gardening and to introduce it at public events and in the media.

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Edward Henry Potthast (1857 – 1927) was an American Impressionist painter.

He was born in Cincinnati, Ohio. From June 10, 1879 to March 9, 1881 he studied with Thomas Satterwhite Noble. He later studied at the Royal Academy in Munich with the American-born instructor Carl Marr.

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Kurt Lynn, Mohamed Hage, and Yahya Badran of Lufa Farms. Photo by Craig Silverman.

“There’s a lot the city can do to make this process much simpler.”

By Brennan Neill
Open File
2011-04-28

Excerpt:

After two months of round-the-clock care, the first batch of vegetables at Lufa Farms is ready to be harvested. The eggplants and tomatoes that have been growing since February will soon be picked by a small staff of roughly ten people. Meanwhile, the cucumbers and bell peppers just a few rows over will continue to ripen in Lufa’s massive rooftop greenhouse, which sits on top of a two storey commercial building in Ahuntsic-Cartierville.

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Manuel Mercado Lapid , popularly known as Lito Lapid, (born October 25, 1955 in Porac, Pampanga) is a Filipino actor, politician and Senator of the Republic of the Philippines.

The bill also tasks the Department of Science and Technology to study vertical farming

Excerpt:

An Act promoting the use of urban agriculture and vertical farming in the country’s metropolitan areas to address food security concerns and regenerate ecosystem functions appropriating funds therefor and for other purpose.

Be it enacted by the Senate and the House of Representatives of the Philippines in Congress assembled:

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Farms for Growing Cities

By Linsey Davis
ABC News
April 27, 2011

Dickson Despommier discusses how to move food production to urban areas.

Brother Nature in North Corktown. Photo by Marvin Shaouni.

Detroit’s food system seems to get richer and more complex everyday.

Patrick Crouch
Model D Media
Apr. 26, 2011

Excerpt:

Detroit’s current vibrant urban agriculture movement attracts people to this work for multiple reasons.

For some it’s the political act of increased food sovereignty for peoples in the city of Detroit, exhibited by groups like Feedom Freedom, the Detroit Black Food Community Security Network, and the Capuchin Soup Kitchen’s Earthworks Urban Farm.

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Photo by Marvin Shaouni. See photos/video of the event here.

17 chickens entered in the race were there to battle it out for charity

Marvin Shaouni Photography Blog
Aug 3, 2010

Excerpt:

Along the Cass Corridor, on a graveled vacant lot shadowed by the Masonic Temple, between the Temple Bar and an old renovated fire station, the first ever Detroit Chicken Race was held. The event would see a flux of about 150 people over the course of an early Sunday evening, rolling into dusk.

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Dr Robert Biel in Brixton Community Garden in South London. Photo by Julian Jackson.

Dr. Biel is the author of “The Entropy of Capitalism”

By Julian Jackson – Environment and Technology Correspondent
Earth Times
26 Apr 2011

Together with Yves Cabannes, Robert Biel leads the University College London’s Development Planning Unit’s Urban Agriculture research unit, which undertakes a wider range of funded research, consultancy and teaching.

Excerpt:

Dr Robert Biel is an author and academic, who works for University College London and has written about sustainable agriculture. More than that, he practices what he calls ”experimental agriculture” in his own allotment and with his students. Biel believes that we are coming to a crisis of agricultural production, and we need to have more ‘Food Sovereignty’, which he defines as greater autonomy over our own food production.

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Agrihood by Perkins and Will, from Vancouver, Canada.

Five teams were short listed

The City Centre Redevelopment project is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. We can create a new community in the heart of the city that will bring Edmonton to the forefront of the world stage in sustainable community development.

In 2010, five teams were short listed from 33 international submissions to provide their proposals for our new community. Representatives from the five finalists, from Europe and North America, visited our city and were excited to participate in the City’s vision to redevelop this large, centrally-located piece of land (217 hectares or the equivalent of 266 Canadian football fields, including end zones.)

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CNN Video: A new farming method can condense an acre’s worth of food into one single pod. Photojournalist Greg Kilday explains.

Podponics is a new hydroponics growing system designed to decrease the energy consumption and expenses of traditional indoor growing.

Created by technology veteran Matt Liotta, the produce is grown within used shipping containers called pods in a traditional nutrient solution. Each pod utilizes a computer and a HVAC system to control the container’s environmental factors, which are regulated based on the plant’s varying needs throughout its life cycle.

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See the video here.

More garden space needed

By Lisa Johnson
CBC News, BC, Canada,
April 21, 2011

Despite a tripling of community gardens in Vancouver, the supply has not kept up with the growing demand, the CBC’s Lisa Johnson reports.

See the video here.

Apr. 21, 2011. New York photojournalist Rick Hall shows us how the bricks of Bushwick laid the ground for a garden sensation.

Roberta’s in Brooklyn

From a review:

Think I’ve found the definitive meal of this trip in obscure, industrial Bushwick. Amid shuttered warehouses, graffiti and empty streets, in an old garage with a cinder block facade rehabbed into a pizzeria, bakery, beer garden (edible) and borough’s slacker-organic-locavore HQ.

Chef brought the first taste from kitchen just as we got our bevies-poached egg w/ trout roe & breadcrumbs-smoky, creamy, salty, wow. Next up, braised mackerel w/ lemon jelly on levain bread. Hoyy … now this is how you do amuse!

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Winter cover crops contribute to healthy gardens.

A Horticulture Project at Cornell University

Our goals are:

To document the roles of community gardens in providing healthy food, green space, and environmental education, in order to build support for community gardening in urban policy and planning.

To develop environmentally friendly vegetable gardening practices like cover cropping, with and for urban gardeners.

To enhance educational programs in urban gardening by incorporating collaborative, discovery-based learning methods that increases gardeners’ understanding of ecology.

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Photo by Brian Krista.

“The demand for our produce right now is much more than we can yield.”

By Anthony Fair
Baltimore Sun
Apr 22, 2011

Excerpt:

Another urban farmer, Tyler Brown, 26, combined his education in politics with a passion for better produce in urban communities. The result is Real Food Farms, a project of Civic Works, an AmeriCorps program. Brown and co-creator Steve Blaes developed the farm in fall 2009. Their six acres utilizes farmable land near Lake Clifton Eastern High School.

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Greenpeace radiation team experts Teule and Westwood check crops for contamination at a garden in Fukushima City.

The problem for Fukushima’s fishermen and farmers – and indeed, for many more people both inside and outside Japan – is that little is known what these contamination levels mean for food safety.

By Krista Mahr
Time Magazine blog
Apr 22, 2011

Excerpts:

By a road leading out of Iwaki, two elderly women sit on the ground in a verdant vegetable garden, eating dried fruit and enjoying one of the first warm days of spring. Behind them, a row of cherry trees is in bloom; in front of them, well-groomed rows of leafy napa cabbage and daikon soak up the sun. “We’re throwing everything away. We don’t even eat it ourselves.” says one of the women, a farmer wearing a green bonnet who declines to give her name but gamely admits she clocks in somewhere over 70.

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The plan calls for sustainable agriculture on vacant lots.

Their green masterplan could serve as a model for generating place-specific, sustainable infrastructure citywide

The Architects Newspaper
04.21.2011

Excerpts:

Residents and shoppers in Chicago’s Lake View neighborhood may some day be able to walk under the Brown Line L tracks along a planted path connecting the area’s two commercial corridors. This proposed “Low-line” is one of the highlights of the Lake View master plan by Moss Design and Place Consulting, commissioned by the neighborhood’s chamber of commerce.

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Mayor Ed Lee signs new legislation allowing for the sale, pick- up and donation of fresh food and horticultural products. Photo: Michael Macor / The Chronicle.

“We’re going to make this legal!”

By John Coté, Michael Cabanatuan, Heather Knight, Will Kane
San Francisco Chronicle
April 21, 2011

Excerpt:

It’s no longer illegal to grow Swiss chard in your backyard and sell it to the corner restaurant.

Mayor Ed Lee on Wednesday signed legislation that allows for “urban agriculture” throughout the city, including the sale of garden produce.

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