Posts from — July 2011

An Urban Farm is more about the compilation of these various elements than a large space dedicated to growing food.

Written By Jay Rosenberg
Hayes Valley Farm
14 June 2011

Excerpt:

For a brief period of time, we have been granted the opportunity to research, educate and demonstrate what an Urban Farm could be. Recently, as the city has come to an agreement to sell a portion of the farm for development, we have been engaged in a series of meetings at City Hall to scout locations for future farms.

At the same time, the San Francisco Urban Agriculture Alliance realized a tremendous success when Mayor Ed Lee signed the “Salad Bill,” further advancing the city’s priority on urban agriculture. This has been a very exciting time!

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City Farm Spreads the Urban Farming Gospel

Photos and text by Frank Carini
ecoRI News staff
July 3, 2011

Excerpt:

PROVIDENCE — There’s an urban farming revolution underway in Rhode Island, and City Farm deserves much of the credit.

The three-quarter of an acre farm in the heart of South Providence has served as an outdoor classroom for three decades. Kids, college students and inspired backyard gardeners have visited this urban oasis for a food-growing education. Its bounty and beauty — cultivated for the past nine years by Rich Pederson — has inspired apprentices, interns and volunteers to grow fruits and vegetables in vacant lots, on porches and in backyards.

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The Philadelphia Horticultural Society (PHS) recently teamed up with a variety of local businesses, star chefs, academics, artists and urban farmers to create the PHS Pops Up, a temporary garden carved out of a once-gritty vacant lot at the corner of Market and 20th streets.

Pops Up Garden

By Kathy Metheson
Associated Press
July 04, 2011

Excerpt:

PHILADELPHIA — Now when some of the city’s best restaurants boast locally sourced food, they mean really local: a garden in the heart of downtown.

Bounded by two skyscrapers and another pair of high-rises, the Pops Up Garden has filled a long-vacant lot with plots of peppers, corn, quinoa and other crops, promising fresh produce for Philadelphia residents for the next few months.

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An Ad That Has London Buzzing.

The winter of 2009-2010 proved disastrous for registered beehives in London

News Release from: LIDA
21/06/2011

Excerpt:

Award-winning creative agency LIDA, part of M&C Saatchi, has redesigned original artwork by cult artist Magnus Muhr to highlight the plight of London’s bees. The eye-catching campaign images use dead bees and simple illustrative techniques to convey the situation of London’s bee population. These visuals will take the form of striking billboards appearing across the London Underground network from Friday June 17 and humorous video clips with a serious message, which are hoped to go viral across the internet.

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Martin Schreibman with a few of his tilapia friends in his Brooklyn lab. Photo by Brent Baughman /NPR.

“The people I spoke to seven or eight years ago — their eyes used to glaze over — are now hearing me speak again and they’re saying, ‘Oh, I get it now,’” he says.

By Brent Baughman
NPR
July 3, 2011

Excerpt:

His utopian city is one with Jacuzzi-sized fish tanks on every roof, giving locavore owners more than 100 pounds of fish a year.

Schreibman further sweetens the deal with something called hydroponics. By tweaking his filtration system to leave a certain amount of fish waste in the water, plants can be grown in the same tank.

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Photographed by Valentina Cattane.

Labib’s private rooftop in Mohandessin is going to serve as a pilot location for one of Cairo’s first permaculture – self-sustaining environmental systems.

By Steven Viney
Valentina Cattane
Al-Masry Al-Youm
04/07/2011

Excerpt:

In Cairo, urban agriculture is growing in popularity as more and more people strive to adopt more eco-friendly approaches to the environment and encourage the decentralization of the community’s reliance on farming corporations.

Many academics and supporters are championing methodologies by hosting workshops in which attendees can learn how to set up small urban gardens and make use of their personal spaces – rooftops, balconies and private gardens.

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June 1942 – House and Garden.

Britain need not be nine meals away from anarchy

Edward Platt
New Statesman
27 June 2011

Excerpt:

London is not the only city in the UK to invest in urban agriculture. For the past few years, Middlesbrough has been running an urban farming and community growing project, which has led to the creation of almost 20 community allotments. Last year, the scheme involved two-thirds of the town’s schools, dozens of community groups and approximately 4,000 people.

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Ultra Fresh Goat’s Milk from Growing Cities Movie on Vimeo.
Ultra Fresh Goat’s Milk: We met Jennie Grant, founder of the Goat Justice League in Seattle, WA. She fought to legalize keeping goats in backyards across the city and won. Today she has four goats in her backyard and taught us how to milk them…we even got some milk straight from the udder.

“Growing Cities” Movie

By Dan Susman, Director/Producer

Growing Cities is a feature-length documentary film about urban farming across America. It follows me, Dan, and my friend Andrew on our road trip across country learning about Urban Agriculture from city-dwellers who’ve made it their lives. Visiting urban centers from Los Angeles to New Orleans we discover a diverse, grass-roots movement that is building across our country—people growing food in cities to make a living, to learn and to teach, to provide safe and nutritious food for their children, and to build stronger and more vibrant communities.

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Megan Webb, director of the Oakland Animal Shelter, is now housing an additional 21 confiscated bunnies taken from a breeder who was raising them for their meat. The rabbits are available for adoption. Photo: Lance Iversen / The Chronicle.

On the heels of the urban faming craze, Oakland is embarking on a series of community meetings this summer to review its agriculture laws.

By Carolyn Jones
San Francisco Chronicle
June 30, 2011

Excerpt:

Oakland animal officials were scrambling Wednesday to find homes for 21 malnourished, deformed rabbits seized from a Lake Merritt area backyard, where they were being raised for food.

The bunny bust comes just as Oakland enters into the debate over urban agriculture regulations, deciding how to monitor livestock – its treatment and slaughter – in one of the country’s hotbeds of urban homesteading.

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