Category — Articles

Shirlene Cote, who works full time at UBC, is excited by the prospect of being able to farm land that’s closer to home.

Sanatan Dharm Cultural Society, which hopes to eventually build a Hindu temple, is offering five-year leases on its land for agricultural use

By Randy Shore
Vancouver Sun
February 6, 2012

Excerpt:

A Burnaby-based religious group is negotiating with young urban farmers to put nearly three acres of unused agricultural land back under crops this spring.

The Sanatan Dharm Cultural Society is hoping to build a brand-new Hindu temple and seniors’ home amid the sprawling vegetable fields and industrial yards of south Burnaby, but that may not happen for years.

“I think we can start with a five-year lease [with the farmers] and then see,” said the group’s priest, Shiv Mishri. “We want to build a big temple here, but we are not ready to build.”

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Britain as a matter of urgency needs a million new farmers – about 10 times as many as it has now, which happens to be roughly the number of young people now out of work.

By Colin Tudge
The Guradian
6 February 2012

Excerpt:

So now we plot and ponder in the village hall – and we are witnessing what I hope will prove to be a seismic shift in public mood, in the economy, and in the balance of power. For more and more people are beginning to feel that “development” shouldn’t mean more of the same – more city-bound jobs and city-sprawl. Instead what we need is an agrarian renaissance: small-scale farming, including horticulture, integrated with the city, and of a kind that employs lots of people, preferably skilled, and often part-time.

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Credit: Salon, Mignon Khargie / Chee-Onn Leong via Shutterstock.

It’s easy to make fun of, but as more and more farming moves downtown, eating local is taking on a new flavor

By Will Doig
Salon
Jan 21, 2012

Excerpt:

With penny-farthings, handlebar mustaches and four-pocket vests back in fashion, the rise of urban farming should just about complete our fetish for the late 1800s. Today, you can find chicken coops on rooftops in Brooklyn, N.Y., goats in San Francisco backyards, and rows of crops sprouting across empty lots in Cleveland.

That it fits so snugly into the hipster-steampunk throwback trend is what makes urban farming ripe for ridicule. (“Portlandia” has taken a crack or two at it.) But could city-based agriculture ever make the leap from precious pastime to serious player in our cities’ food systems — not just for novelty seekers and committed locavores, but for the Safeway-shopping masses?

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Winter greens in raised boxes. Downtown Montgomery is off to the left of this picture. Photo by Caroline Nabors Rosen.

Growing a Better Future

By Brent Rosen
OKRA Southern Food and Beverage Museum
Jan 18, 2012
Brent Rosen is a raconteur and pontoon boat captain on Lake Martin Alabama. He is interested in Southern food and Southern culture.

Excerpt:

Urban farming operations exist throughout the South, but their stories often go unreported. I’ve read newspaper articles about Brooklynites whose roosters annoy their neighbors, and I’ve read about Berkleyites who have dinner parties using only ingredients grown locally by the attendees, but local agriculture in the South does not make headlines. If I tell you people are growing things in Alabama, you’ll likely shrug, knowing that melons and peaches grow just as easily as peanuts and cotton, that greens thrive in our mild winters, that pecan trees are as commonplace in backyards as Labrador retrievers. Even in Birmingham, Alabama’s largest urban area, you need only drive 15 minutes in any direction to be surrounded by farm and field. Agriculture is everywhere, so it seems unnecessary to focus on the agriculture that now exists within city limits.

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Damien Forshe is holding a single tilapia grabbed out of the pond behind him inside the greenhouses at Rid-All Greenhouses, an urban farm in the Kinsman neighborhood of Cleveland.

The city is going country — 215 community gardens, 36 for-profit farms, and growing.

Editorial
January 14, 2012

Excerpt:

Cleveland is growing, and what it grows should gain it more attention.

The oft-maligned buckle of the rust belt is becoming a green belt, as weed-spiked wastelands are turned into verdant community gardens.

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Todmorden resident Estelle Brown, a former interior designer, with a basket of home-grown veg.

‘There’s a nobility to growing food and allowing people to share it. There’s a feeling we’re doing something significant rather than just moaning that the state can’t take care of us.

By Vincent Graff
The Daily Mail
10th December 2011

Excerpt:

Today, hundreds of townspeople who began by helping themselves to the communal veg are now well on the way to self-sufficiency.

But out on the street, what gets planted where? There’s kindness even in that.

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Backhaus estimates that Podponics will turn out 40-50 tons of green per year

By Sara Rich
The Atlantic
Oct 26, 2011

Excerpts:

The six containers, or “pods,” represent a trial-and-error process through which Podponics found their way to a cost-effective means of production. They’re still iterating toward a better way to enter the boxes without disrupting the interior environment. For now, Backhaus pulls open the door they same way a dock worker would, and we stand in an aisle between floor-to-ceiling rows of lettuce, growing through holes in white PVC pipe. The hydroponic lights illuminate the greens like a food styling set.

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Overall winner Reg Curnock.

“He’s an inspiration, but even though he is 75 he can still out-dig us any day.”

By Debbie Waite
Oxford Times
20th October 2011

Excerpt:

The former Pressed Steel worker, from Brambling Way, Blackbird Leys, said: “I’ve had an allotment for more than 40 years. It’s lovely to know my grandchildren who live locally are all enjoying fresh veg.

“Keeping an allotment is hard work and commitment is key, but without this patch of ground and my vegetables I would just be sitting indoors, watching TV. This keeps me fit and in the fresh air and I can deliver fresh fruit and veg to the family every week.”

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Robin Kort: “I grew up in Vancouver, so I’ve been foraging for mushrooms all my life with my dad and my grampa.”
Photograph by Vancouver Sun.

“Nibble on a begonia petal and it will blow your mind, they are so delicious,” Kort raved.

By Randy Shore
Vancouver Sun
October 21, 2011

Excerpt:

Foraging is becoming popular with local young chefs as a way to find unique and truly seasonal ingredients for their diners, Kort said, rattling off the names of a half dozen chefs-slash-friends who like a free meal as much as she does.

Her backyard in East Vancouver is planted with indigenous berries and herbs, from Saskatoon and salmon berries to huckleberries and sorrel.

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Working on the food chain

By Jason Mark
Gastronomica via Utne Reader
10/21/11

Excerpt:

The new agrarians are seeking a way to refashion the relationships—ecological, emotional—that have been eroded by work without meaning and food without substance. They are trying to accomplish a kind of restoration of the world…. The farm’s gift is the confirmation of our common need for sustenance, for cooperation, achievement, and creativity, and for a visceral connection to the biological systems on which we depend. The farm reminds us of how, when we join together in the spirit of collective action, we fulfill our individual selves.

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Greg Willerer (right) has a business that provides produce to 27 families through his community supported agriculture co-op in Detroit.

“I hope what I’m doing makes the neighborhood more attractive.”

By Jon Kalish
NPR
Oct 2, 2011

Excerpt:

“I farm about 10 acres in the city, and alfalfa’s my thing. I bale about a thousand bales a year,” he says.

That’s alfalfa grown within Detroit city limits. The 58-year-old public school teacher lives alone in a single-family house in the Farnsworth neighborhood.

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Gardeners at Boone Street urban farm and community garden. See more photos at The Baltimore DIY Squad here.

“It has brought the community together for something positive.”

By Alison Kitchens
Capital News Service
Sept 29, 2011

Excerpt:

In Baltimore, urban agriculture has the potential to help improve conditions in some of the city’s “food deserts,” said Anne Palmer, program director of Eating for the Future at the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future.

The center defines “food deserts” as areas in cities where residents are below the poverty level and do not have easy access to healthy foods at supermarkets within walking distance, about a quarter of a mile.

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Ed McColly and Liberty Merill coordinate the Iron Roots Urban Farm program.

“We value the importance of neighborhood revitalization”

By Maraline Kubik
Business Journal Daily
Sept. 29, 2011

Excerpt:

YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio — Youngstown Neighborhood Development Corp. showcased its latest project — an urban farm and training center on the city’s southwest side — Wednesday morning during an unveiling ceremony for the new venture’s logo.

Iron Roots Urban Farm is located on a 2.5-acre homestead at the corner of Canfield Road and Reel Avenue on the city’s southwest side that had been vacant for years. By next spring, it will be transformed into a fully operational urban farm and training site for YNDC’s market gardener and green jobs training programs, reported Presley L. Gillespie, YNDC executive director.

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Dan Heryer, Brooke Salvaggio and son Percy have had a busy season. From Facebook: Badseed.

Four questions

By Jonathan Bender
Pitch
Sep 28, 2011

Excerpt:

What’s in store for the season and the future of the farm?

This incredibly challenging season is wrapping up with a bang. We are currently laying out more vegetable plots and will begin the laborious construction of a deer fence in several weeks. The deer have destroyed an estimated $13,000 worth of crops this year.

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Malik Yakini. D-Town is a two acre farm operated by the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network.

“We would encourage everyone to start growing something”

By Bankole Thompson
Michigan Chronicle
28 September 2011

Excerpt:

Is urban farming the answer to an economy in Detroit that has left some jobless, homeless and others with no other means to make a living for their families?

Malik Yakini, a longtime Detroit advocate, entrepreneur, educator and pioneer of Africancentered education, said while urban farming is not the whole answer because “the situation we face is a very complex situation, it is part of the answer for the economy we are dealing with.”

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Andrée Collier Zaleska, an urban farmer in Jamaica Plain, Mass. Photo by Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff.

The rise of urban farming

By Kendra Nordin
The Christian Science Monitor
September 21, 2011

Excerpt:

Meet the urban homesteader. Slowly, across the past decade, more Americans like Peterson have been proving that growing and preserving food is possible in all kinds of populated settings. City dwellers are practicing sustainable living at new levels beyond shopping for organic carrots and recycling bottles. Whether it is a tilapia farm in garden tubs in Kansas City, Mo., beekeeping in Chicago, or jars of homemade pickles in an apartment pantry in Austin, Texas, urban homesteaders are rebelling against the industrial food system by shouldering more of the responsibility for producing their own food.

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“The people who live here loved it,” Score says. “It was proof that this can be done in a way the city is proud of.”

By Sarah Schmid
Editor of Xconomy Detroit
9/19/11

Excerpt

The initial parcel will be 200 acres just east of the Indian Village neighborhood, with the company working to acquire an additional 300 concurrent acres. During that interim period, Hantz Farms says it would work with local businesses on a site plan. Score says the company would clear the land of brush and trash and get the farm planted within a year. Hantz plans to farm around infrastructure: sidewalks, plumbing, and homes.

Part of the deal, Score says, is that city would use federal dollars to demolish vacant structures, and they would have to do it in a certain timeframe.

“We’re bringing global industry to Detroit to get a new infusion of economic development into the city, but the city has to be willing to deal with dangerous infrastructure issues,” Score says.

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Adam Guerrero’s Garden.

Seeds of Discontent

By Hannah Sayle
Memphis Flyer
Sept 15, 2011

Excerpt:

Adam Guerrero and three kids from his neighborhood, Jovantae, Jarvis, and Shaquielle, hardly seem like lawbreakers as they turn over soil at Guerrero’s Nutbush home.

But the city’s code enforcement department has deemed their urban garden a nuisance, and a judge has ordered them to remove the small ecosystem they’ve been working on for the last two years.

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Detroit public school teacher and urban farmer Paul Weertz with his working 50 year-old Ford tractor in the back of his house on Farnsworth Street.

Weertz has been buying up abandoned homes and vacant parcels of land in his neighborhood for years.

By Jon Kalish
Make Magazine
September, 2011

Excerpt:

I’ve seen terrible urban ghettos in my time, but nothing prepared me for the shock of driving through Detroit neighborhoods where so many houses were crumbling, boarded up or missing altogether. In the midst of that depressing landscape I met Paul Weertz, who lives alone in the Farnsworth neighborhood.

Well, not totally alone. The 58 year-old public school teacher has a dozen chickens and ten beehives that belong to a neighborhood “honey co-op.” He has about an acre of fruit trees and veggies growing on ten vacant lots behind his house. The day I came by, his working 1960 Ford tractor was parked a few paces away from a huge pungent patch of basil. Weertz’s sister was about to go pick peaches. The slim urban farmer walked over to his tractor and looked at a gauge that reported more than 2,000 hours of use since Weertz bought it 20 years ago.

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Rebecca Frazier, a teacher, said she had cut her food bill in half by growing her own and preserving and by buying in bulk from local farmers. She recently paid $10 for 40 pounds of sweet potatoes, a fraction of the store price. Credit: Luke Sharrett for The New York Times.

“When I go to my cellar and get my own green beans and potatoes, I know I won’t go hungry.”

By Sabrina Tavernise
New York Times
September 8, 2011

Excerpt:

“You see a lot more people turning up ground,” said Wanda Hamilton, 61, a lifelong gardener who sells her surplus vegetables at the farmers’ market in West Liberty, a small town in the Appalachian foothills. “It’s the economy. You just can’t afford to shop at the store anymore.”

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