Hanayui’ by Takaya Hanayuishi is Eccentrically Grandiose

By Ana Lo
Trend Hunter
Nov 14, 2011

Eccentric headwear is never out of style, especially if this fashion is eco-friendly like the pieces from the collection titled ‘Hanayui’ by Takaya Hanayuishi. The Japanese artist Takaya Harayuishi used flowers and raw fruits to create beautiful adornments for the head.

Link to story.

Link to Takaya Hanayuishi’s website.

See the book here.

By Barbara Damrosch
The Washington Post
November 9, 2011

Writers Barbara Damrosch and Eliot Coleman own and operate Four Season Farm, an experimental market garden in Harborside, Maine. The farm produces vegetables year-round and has become a nationally recognized model of small-scale sustainable agriculture.

Excerpt:

Roger Doiron, founder of Kitchen Gardeners International, proposed “using the federal tax code to promote gardening through a $1,000/household garden stimulus package.” My own two cents’ worth came in an address at Maine’s Common Ground Country Fair titled “It’s a Cute Little Movement, but Can It Feed the World?” I’d been provoked by a flood of articles declaring that only large-scale, industrial, biotech farms can save our increasingly overpopulated planet. That small farms and gardens cannot do that has become a mantra, self-replicating its merry way to pseudo-truth.

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Illustration by John Roman.

Can Dickson Despommier’s radical vision for urban agriculture take root in the United States

By David J. Craig
Columbia Magazine
Fall 2011

Excerpts:

Planning officials from a dozen American cities, including Chicago, New York, San Francisco, Seattle, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Newark, and Jersey City, have asked Despommier to advise them on how to create vertical farms. But the only major U.S. projects to have moved past the discussion stage are the one in Seattle, which is operated by the young company Civesca, and the farm in Chicago, run by the start-up 312 Aquaponics.

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Community organizations partner to construct an urban vegetable garden in Ft. Myers, Florida. Photo credit: Gabriel Kamener. Used under Creative Commons license.

The Sustainable Economies Law Center has created an Urban Ag Legal Resource Library

By SELC
The Sustainable Economies Law Center
12.01.11

Excerpt:

Here are a few suggestions for ways that cities can adopt policies to facilitate the growth of urban agriculture and community food growing spaces:

Offer property tax incentives for vacant private lots that are used for urban farming: Cities should offer private land owners a property tax discount during years when an otherwise empty lot is used for food growing. The Williamson Act in California already provides property tax incentives to preserve land as agricultural in rural areas, and a similar policy should be applied in urban areas. Generally, land has higher income earning potential when it is built up with strip malls and housing developments. But it doesn’t always make sense to assess a property based on this potential value when the land is actually being used for a more modest activity, like agriculture. Even if a piece of land will eventually be developed, landowners should be rewarded for putting it to productive agricultural use in the meantime. Such a tax incentive could dramatically multiply the amount of available land for community gardening and urban farming.

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