Healthier Rivers Through Urban Agriculture

A few of the steps urban farmers can take to protect the health and quality of our urban watershed

By Daniel Dermitzel
Mother Earth News
4/13/2011

Excerpt:

The growing popularity of urban agriculture presents an opportunity to reduce the amount of water and pollutants entering our combined sewer systems. Urban farmers and our community as a whole have much to gain from implementing a few simple techniques to reduce runoff and pollution of our urban watershed. Our productive urban landscapes (i.e., farms and gardens) have the potential to be more environmentally friendly than the many chemically treated lawns and unproductive green spaces we currently see throughout our city.

Converting a lawn to an organically managed agricultural landscape can promote a healthy environment and capture ecosystem services (such as food production) which were previously underutilized. But to realize these benefits, it is important that we keep several key design principles in mind as we build our urban farms and gardens.

Read the complete article here.