New Stories From 'Urban Agriculture Notes'

Seattle’s P-Patch garden management system, which oversees 73 P-Patches distributed throughout the city, equals approximately 23 acres and serves about 2,000 households.

Urban farming entrepreneurs spread their seeds

By Ashley Deforest
Sustainable Industries
Sept. 1, 2010
Ashley Deforest is Community Relations Planner at King County Department of Transportation and a Director at Woonerfs Consulting.

Excerpt:

Skeptics are quick to note that, in the current economic climate, where many developable properties remain fallow, urban agriculture presents itself as an attractive interim use. But, as Kalin of Virtually Green notes, as the economy improves urban farms may be dislocated and left to the wayside unless the green building movement can absorb these farms and produce a similar level of food.

Kalin is putting his energy toward what he considers a more sustainable solution. In nearby Concord, Calif., a city of about 125,000 people located just 31 miles east of San Francisco, Kalin, through the Sustainable Commercial Urban Farm Incubator (SCUFI), is trying to create a commercially viable urban farm model that can be replicated elsewhere.

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Sara Mullin waters the vegetable garden she and her fellow tenants at a Quebec Street apartment building set up in the rear parking lot — despite the protestations of their landlord.
Photo by Jessica Barrett

Renters and condo dwellers also want to be city farmers

By Jessica Barrett
West Ender – WE
09/01/2010

Excerpts:

I can’t help but laugh watching Sara Mullin water her crop of just-planted winter vegetables — beets, parsnips, and kale — in the parking-lot-turned-garden behind her Quebec Street apartment building, Quebec Mansions. Garden hose in one hand, iPhone in the other, the ringletted, Western-shirt-wearing 27-year-old sprays her plants to an indie-rock soundtrack, only it isn’t a recorded accompaniment — the local band Bend Sinister is practicing in one of the building’s suites.

It’s this classic East Van hipster cliché that makes me laugh, but I have to admit: I’m envious.

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Agropolis combines hydroponic, aeroponic and aquaponic farming

By Alyssa Danigelis
Discovery News
Sept. 1, 2010

Excerpt:

There’s a big push lately for eating local. Restaurants like to promote menus with ingredients harvested locally and grocery stores advertise produce grown on nearby farms.

A concept for a grocery store that actually grows its own fruits and vegetables on site is taking the “local” adage to an entirely new level.

The do-it-yourself grocery store concept called Agropolis combines hydroponic, aeroponic and aquaponic farming to grow vegetables without soil in an urban environment. Shoppers will come in and see all the produce growing on-site and point to what they want. Nutrients from fish in aquaculture tanks goes to feed the plants, and the whole place becomes an ecosystem. A restaurant there will also serve produce from the urban farm.

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Daina Mileris, of Chicago’s West Ridge neighborhood, picks dead leaves off a tomato vine at the garden at Peterson and Campbell avenues on Sunday. The vibrant urban garden is something of a historical monument in Chicago, having once been the site of a World War II victory garden. Photo by Heather Charles.

Project re-cultivates urban agriculture in West Ridge

By Robert Channick,
Chicago Tribune
September 2, 2010

Excerpt:

A vacant lot at Peterson and Campbell avenues in Chicago’s West Ridge neighborhood has blossomed this summer into a vibrant urban garden — and something of a living historical monument. Once the site of a World War II victory garden, the long-fallow property near the northern edge of the city is blooming again with everything from tomatoes to corn.

Reviving the nearly 70-year-old wartime campaign to replenish scarce produce, the Peterson Garden Project is true to its roots, but also reflective of a growing trend toward localized, community-based agriculture.

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Urban farming continues to grow across Mid-Michigan

Marc Jacobson
ABC 12 News
August 31, 2010

Excerpt:

GENESEE TOWNSHIP – Locally grown organic tomatoes, corn, potatoes and peppers are coming from the city, not the country.

Urban farming continues to grow across Mid-Michigan and as ABC12’s Marc Jacobson shows us, the recent national egg recall has resulted in a big business boost at King Karate’s Harvesting Earth Farm.

Go green and go natural. In recent weeks, Jacky and Dora King, with the help of their 20 free-range chickens, have been producing and selling organic eggs priced at $3.50 a dozen.

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New book on African urban agriculture

Gordon Prain, Diana Lee-Smith, Nancy Karanja
300 pages
Publisher: Springer
1st Edition. edition (August 24, 2010)

How much does urban agriculture help feed and support the billions of people living in the world’s towns and cities? How could it do this better? Crop cultivation and livestock- raising have long histories in urban Africa, as in other areas of the world, but broad awareness among researchers and policy makers of either the history or the contemporary facts of life in African urban development is much more recent. With a majority of the continent’s population expected to be classified as urban in about 20 years, and its urban population spending as much as 80 percent of their household budgets on food, this book seeks to answer the two timely questions above with practical proposals for technical interventions and policy support.

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Ceasia Williams, 14, left, and Jayda Harden, 14, water newly planted seedlings in a raised bed for the Lots of Hope gardening project at The Pittsburgh Project on the North Side. Photo by Rebecca Droke/Post-Gazette.

“It helps people to have clarity about what’s allowed and what isn’t.”

By Rick Wills
Pittsburgh Tribune-Review
September 1, 2010

Excerpt:

Pittsburgh’s Planning Commission gave its final approval to legislation that would regulate small-scale, urban agriculture.

The proposed legislation, which goes to City Council for action, applies to honeybees, poultry and community gardens, for which no permitting has been required. The commission passed the proposal 6-1, with Commissioner Monte Rabner voting against.

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Sarah Nixon, whose floral service is called, appropriately, My Luscious Backyard. Photo by Aaron Harris.

Local bouquets offer rarer, pesticide-free blooms

By Katie Hewitt
Globe and Mail
Aug. 27, 2010

Excerpts:

In Vancouver, Megan Branson of Olla Urban Flower Project maintains at least three backyard flower farms, from which she and partner Dionne Finch source dahlias, rudbeckia, giant sunflowers and even winter blooms such as Christmas roses. Constantly on the lookout for beautiful material, they also sometimes knock on doors to acquire blooms, approaching gardeners with particularly fecund inner-city plots.

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Photo by Annie Novak

Each bird lays a distinctive egg

By Annie Novak
The Atlantic
Aug. 31, 2010
Annie Novak is the founder and director of Growing Chefs, a field-to-fork food education program; the children’s gardening program coordinator for the New York Botanical Gardens; and co-founder of Eagle Street Rooftop Farm in Brooklyn.

Excerpt:

The eggs from our hens are given to the Rooftop Farm’s community supported agriculture (CSA) shareholders. Each bird lays a distinctive egg. The most fancy bird (the Polish) lays the most innocuous white egg, while plain white-feathered Francis lays eggs of a very pale blue. Tiny Beebe lays petite and perfect eggs with a distinctly narrow top. Lila’s are medium-sized and off-white. Wren and Pecked, regular layers both, produce brown and white eggs of a more substantial size. Between the six hens, we get about four eggs on any given day. Right before the eggs comes out, they crow and fuss, vying with the buzz of biplanes circling in to land on the stretch of water south of the United Nations.

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Sustaining an Urban Fruit Gleaning Program. Photo by City Fruit.

So far this year, we’ve harvested 5,775 lbs. of fruit

By James
City Fruit
August 31, 2010

Excerpt:

One of the main reasons we started City Fruit was to develop ways  to become more financially sustainable, rather than depend on an ever-shrinking pool of grant money for funding.

As part of that, we’re experimenting with selling a small portion of the fruit we harvest – with a goal of selling no more than 20% of the usable fruit we harvest. So far this year, we’ve harvested 5,775 lbs. of fruit and have sold 448 lbs., so about 8%.

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The Farm at Long Island Shelter.

Mayor says: “Bawk, bawk, bawk.”

Excerpt:

The hens came at the mayor’s suggestion to the 2 1/2 acre Serving Ourselves Farm, which brimmed yesterday with collard greens, plump pumpkins, acorn squash, and tomatoes engorged after a summer of sunshine. The labor that seeds, waters, weeds, and harvests the organic farm comes entirely from the residents of the Long Island homeless shelter and young people who had trouble with the law but are in a city program to help right their lives.

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Gate by metal sculptor, Davide Pan.

Photo by Naomi Clement

Internationally acclaimed local metal sculptor, Davide Pan designed our gate. Pan welded together old gardening tools and bits of rusty metal to create the piece that locks down by night and lifts up above the garden by day. Creaking chains and “rocks in bondage” counterweights give medieval flair to the old-fashioned pulley system.

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Los Angeles rental of a goat herd to clear weeds and other unwanted growth from Angels Knoll in Bunker Hill. Photo by Curt Gibbs.

Agribiz apologists ascribe these trends to a plague they call “agrarian nostalgia”

By Kerry Trueman
Grist
30 August, 2010

Excerpt:

The first link in this brave new food chain? Land tenure, zoning issues, and other regulatory hurdles that city folks have to contend with in order to grow food to feed themselves or sell to others. They’re also working on how to collect and compost food waste instead of shipping it to the landfill; how to increase the percentage of locally sourced ingredients in schools, hospitals, prisons, and other publicly run institutions; how to facilitate local food production and ease distribution bottlenecks; and how to support all kinds of urban agriculture, from school and community gardens to rooftop farms, aquaculture, chicken keeping, and bee keeping.

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Students from the Bancroft Elementary School weigh vegetables during the White House Kitchen Garden harvest party, on the South Lawn of the White House. Official White House Photo by Samantha Appleton.

Peoples’ Garden School Pilot Program

USDA Office of Communications
08/25/2010

WASHINGTON, Aug. 25, 2010 – Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack today announced that USDA will establish a Peoples’ Garden School Pilot Program to develop and run community gardens at eligible high-poverty schools; teach students involved in the gardens about agriculture production practices, diet, and nutrition; and evaluate the learning outcomes. This $1 million pilot program is authorized under the Richard B. Russell National School Lunch Act. A cooperative agreement will be awarded to implement a program in up to five States. To be eligible as project sites, schools must have 50 percent or more students qualifying for free or reduced-price school meals.

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A video survey of urban agriculture and community gardening in Atlanta. This story was featured on “This is Atlanta with Alicia Steele,” a Telly Award-winning and Emmy-nominated magazine show on PBA, Atlanta’s PBS Station. Produced by Jack Walsh. (Beautiful video. Mike)

City Gardens in Atlanta

This is Atlanta with Alicia Steele

At This Is Atlanta, we wanted to explore a kind of urban agriculture that brings people together — community gardens. A community garden can start out as simply as a few plots and some pooled resources, or they can grow to include classes, nature trails, and even chicken coops. Our story features these:

The Oakhurst Community Garden began as a grass-roots environmental education center and added gardening plots at the request of neighborhood residents.

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The main focus is the trees. Apple, pear, quince, apricot, cherry, blueberry, blackberry, strawberry

By Emma Townshend
The Independent
August 22, 2010

Excerpt:

Trundling along to buy a lunchtime sandwich the other day, admiring the floral bedding in my local park in Ealing, I spotted a little sign: “Pop-up Kitchen garden”. Now, we’ve heard of pop-up shops, restaurants and art galleries, but a pop-up vegetable garden? Exploring a little further, I found that a set of kitchen garden beds, neatly edged in wood, had materialised out of nowhere. It was a gorgeous surprise.

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Photo by Michael Klassen

Heavy subsidies for urban agriculture in the long run will do more harm than good

By Mike Klassen
City Caucus
Aug. 29, 2010

Excerpt:

I’ve listened to the arguments, I’ve watched Food Inc. a couple of times, and my thumb couldn’t get much greener than it currently is. However, I’m not convinced by arguments put forward by the eat local movement that we must invest more land, time and financial resources into urban agriculture. This is not to suggest that I think we should eradicate community garden programs, but that we fully consider the costs of “being green” and weigh them against other city priorities.

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Many of the “city farms” are in fact intended to be only cultivated at weekends

By William Andrews
Japan Trends
August 23, 2010

Excerpts:

J-Cast news is reporting that shimin noen (or farms located near cities) have increased threefold over the last 15 years, up to 3,382 sites for fiscal 2008, with local governments and NPOs inundated with applications for certain areas.

Around 70 per cent of these “farms” are 50 square meters, with the rental cost as little as 5,000 yen (about $58) for a year’s use. Many of these aspiring farmers are said to be middle-aged salarymen and retirees keen to get their fingers green.

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This farm will create green jobs and provide healthy food to the community

The Viet Village Urban Farm project represents an effort to reestablish the tradition of local farming in this community after Katrina. New Orleans East was one of the most damaged areas of the city New Orleans during the storms of 2005. In response to the devastation, the community has organized around the idea of creating an urban farm and market as the center of the community. The farm, located on 28-acres in the heart of the community, will be a combination of small-plot gardening for family consumption, larger commercial plots focused on providing food for local restaurants and grocery stores in New Orleans, and a livestock area for raising chickens and goats in the traditional Vietnamese way.

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Our School At Blair Grocery.

The Lower Nine urban farm concept is spreading

By Phil Blidner
Time Magazine
Aug. 27, 2010
Phil Bildner is Co-Executive Director of The NOLA Tree, a teen service organization.

Excerpt:

When the levee along the Industrial Canal failed back in 2005 and the wall of water drowned much of New Orleans’ Lower Nine, the area north of Claiborne Avenue — the poorest section of the neighborhood — was hardest hit. Not surprisingly, the stretch has been slowest to recover. Five years after the devastating hurricane, the area still does not have a supermarket or store that sells fresh produce. Today, where houses once stood, jungle-like growths have consumed the lands. Other homes, still abandoned, are slanted and Burtonesque.

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