Amy Smart, Matthew Rhys, Beau Garrett and Malin Akerman attend the Environmental Media Association’s Second Annual School Gardens Luncheon. The School Garden Program sponsors and supports the building of gardens in urban schools across the country. Behind them is a garden that is currently being built at University High School in Los Angeles. Photo credit: Maury Phillips from Wireimage.

Environmental Media Association’s Young Hollywood Board and their School Gardens Program

The Impact of the Young Hollywood Board

Young actors and actresses serve as role models to millions of people, especially youth. Through their actions, celebrities can inspire youth in their formative years, and EMA has recruited celebrities to the program to mentor and actively engage the students in the garden programs.

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New Roots sign. Photo by by MadPainter.

Whereas community gardens are more about feeding individuals or families, urban farms feed the larger community.

By Madalyn Painter
St. Louis Public Radio
July 30, 2011

Excerpt:

The next stop was a visit to the first urban farm in St. Louis, New Roots Urban Farm, a farming collective located in the St. Louis Place neighborhood north of downtown St. Louis.

At the corner of Sarah Street and Martin Luther King Drive we found the Bee Sweet Urban Orchard, the site of several half-century-old fruit trees and now the home to 48 fruit trees and a vegetable garden. The site serves as a component of Mark Twain Community Resource Center’s Hip-Hop Health program for kids.

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Brooke Budner, 30, co-founder of Little City Gardens, San Francisco’s first urban commercial farm, harvests chard for weekly customers. Photo by Lee Romney, Los Angeles Times

Cities are changing ordinances to permit sales of home-grown produce as residents demand access to high-quality food and greater connection to the source.

By Lee Romney
Los Angeles Times
July 31, 2011

Excerpt:

The urban farming movement is driven by people’s craving for a connection to their food source and for more affordable organic fare, said San Francisco Urban Agriculture Alliance co-coordinator Eli Zigas, and it “is forcing cities to think about how to bring back activities that we pushed out of cities a long time ago.”

Across the Bay, Esperanza Pallana is party to what may be a broader set of changes. Her compact yard abuts a gas station in Oakland’s Lake Merritt neighborhood and overflows with hops for beer, kale, peanuts, dwarf pears, bees, hens and Vienna Blue rabbits — first cultivated for meat in the early 20th century.

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GrowHaus – An interactive urban farm and marketplace

CBS4 Denver
July 29, 2011

From the farm website:

Our growing operations are separated into two spaces: the Hydrofarm is a commercial facility designed to maximize yield for our neighbors and generate earned income, while Growasis is a demonstration farm for education and food security.

Growasis

Growasis is our hands-on demonstration farm where we host year-round public workshops, service learning events, and community programming. Growasis currently consists of 1,000 square feet in a corner of our greenhouse, where we have been able to perform basic renovations. It contains the following elements:

Two aquaponics systems, where we raise fish and plants together in a recirculating high-yield setup

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