Category — Articles

A quiet and distinctly non-violent revolution is underway, especially among our nation’s youth: The resurgence of small farms, local food movements and community gardens all across this land of ours are grass-roots attempts to reclaim some measure of control over the most essential things in our lives—food, health and community. I am now convinced that urban agriculture, in all its forms, is a vital player in this cause.

By Keith Stewart,
The Valley Table, Number 54
The Horticultural Society of New York
June 10, 2011

Excerpt:

IN MARCH OF THIS YEAR, I was invited to be a speaker and panelist at an Urban Agriculture Conference hosted by the Horticultural Society of New York. At first, I was hesitant to accept the invitation because I know very little about urban farming, and, to be honest, have never given it much thought. I’ve always thought of farming as something that goes on in the open fields and pastureland of the countryside, not in backyards behind Manhattan brownstones or on vacant lots in the Bronx.

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Historic postcard of sheep grazing in Franklin Park, via Union Park Press – Dorchester Historical Society

Will urban food production ruin our economy, change our climate, and make our world a more miserable place to live?

By Meg Muckenhoupt
Union Park Press
June 21, 2011

Excerpt:

It’s been days since Edward Glaeser published his urban farm-bashing piece in the Boston Globe, but I’m still annoyed. Glaeser, a professor of economics at Harvard University and director of the Rappaport Institute for Greater Boston, managed to argue against farms in a way that could extend to urban parks, gardens, zoos, swimming pools, and most sidewalks. He also ignored some intriguing trends in making urban farming more efficient, a.k.a. the Vertical Farm.

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Andrea Bellamy tends to her wheat crop in Vancouver. Photo by John Lehmann/The Globe and Mail.

Mayoral candidate Suzanne Anton calls the lawns-to-wheat-field project “goofy” and cites it as evidence of a council that pays more attention to chicken coops and wheat fields than city basics.

By Wendy Stueck
Globe and Mail
Jun. 25, 2011

Excerpt:

In terms of land use, turning lawns to wheat fields is a poor way to boost local food production and reduce land, fuel and other resources required to feed a city, says William Rees, the University of British Columbia professor who coined the “ecological footprint” term to describe how much productive land it takes to support a given population.

“The last thing you want to use what precious little land we have in the city for is grain production,” he said.

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Radio conversation: The future of urban agriculture initiatives in Detroit and Michigan

By Russ White
Mlive.com
June 16, 2011

From MSU Today on News/Talk 760 WJR: Michigan State University President Lou Anna K. Simon and MSU Athletic Director Mark Hollis talk with Michael Hamm – the C. S. Mott Professor of Sustainable Agriculture at MSU and head of the C.S. Mott Group for Sustainable Food Systems at MSU.

They discuss the state and future of urban agriculture initiatives in Detroit and Michigan. Hamm says transforming vacant lots into urban farms and community gardens could supply Detroit residents with the majority of their fruits and vegetables. And he says MSU is at the forefront of the urban agriculture movement.

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The Boston Globe staff illustration.

The locavore’s dilemma: Urban farms mean less people per acre which in turn means longer drives and more gasoline consumption.

By Edward L. Glaeser
OP-ED
Boston Globe
June 16, 2011|

Edward L. Glaeser, a professor of economics at Harvard University, is director of the Rappaport Institute for Greater Boston.

Excerpt:

But the most important environmental cost of metropolitan agriculture is that lower density levels mean more driving. Today, about 250 million Americans live on the 60 million acres of this country that are urban — which is about four people per acre. By contrast, America uses 442 million acres for cropland and 587 million acres for pastureland, which is about 1.4 and 1.9 acres per person respectively. If we allocated just 7.2 percent of this agricultural land into metropolitan area, we would halve metropolitan area densities.

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The Environmental Youth Alliance Society has 30 homeowners willing to uproot their turf to plant small-scale wheat fields. The group aims to educate schools about the origin and history of grain. Illustration Vancouver Sun.

Group seeks funding for ‘ Lawns to Loaves’ pilot project

By Jeff Lee
The Vancouver Sun
15 Jun 2011

Excerpt:

From chicken coops in backyards and vegetable plots at city hall, Vancouver is branching out into experimental wheat plots in place of lawns.

The idea of replacing turf with a waving patch of yellow grain is among a list of ideas the Vision Vancouver-led council is considering for this year’s Greenest City Neighbourhood grants allocations.

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The penitentiary at Leavenworth has its own garden that inmates maintain. Last year 4,597 families benefited from the fresh produce. Garlic grows outside the prison gate.

$96,856.57 – Estimated grocery store value of the produce given to the needy

By James A. Fussell
The Kansas City Star
June 7, 2011

Excerpt:

Prison food has never enjoyed a great reputation. But the quarter million pounds of produce grown annually by inmates at the United States Penitentiary at Leavenworth just might change that. It’s fresh, free, feeds the less fortunate and even has helped inmates get good jobs after being released — all without costing taxpayers a nickel.

Wait. A prison farm?

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Photo via Blogging Farmer.

The non-farm public does not understand the science behind operating a farm.

By Jo Ann Hustis
Morris Daily Herald
May 28, 2011

Excerpt:

Research has shown that non-farm consumers in the United States admit they do not know much about agriculture, and that their actual experience with farmers and farming is limited.

“Farmers in general are finding out it’s more important than ever to tell what’s happening on our farms. City people have different ideas of what we’re doing,” she said of the FOOD research program initiated by a coalition of farm leaders who represent the five largest Illinois farm groups.

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The city has forbidden Jacob de Raadt from gardening in a plot beside Nicomekl Elementary. Photograph by: Les Bazso, The Province.

Red tape trips up green thumb in Langley, BC

By Cheryl Chan
The Province
May 25, 2011

Excerpt:

All Jacob de Raadt wants to do is plant some vegetables.

Instead, the 68-year-old Langley gardener’s visions of a bountiful harvest are getting nipped in the bud by what he calls “absurd” bureaucratic requirements.

When de Raadt and his wife Lydia paid $15 for a community garden plot beside Nicomekl Elementary near their townhouse in March they were told they had to undergo a criminal record check for the last five years.

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Based on the history of urban agriculture in North America, it would appear not.

By Joel Thibert
Spacing Montreal
May 20, 2011

Excerpt:

That said, it seems to me there is a more fundamental issue at stake here, and that is: the cultural contradiction that is inherent in the expression “urban agriculture”. Again, this could be (and should be) the subject of its own essay, but let me summarize my thoughts in the following manner: the “urban” has been culturally defined in the Anglo-American world as “that-which-is-not-rural” (as per the writings of Ebenezer Howard, Patrick Abercrombie, Benton MacKaye, Lewis Mumford and their descendants) and agriculture associated with the “rural life”. The expression “urban agriculture”, therefore, is inherently subversive (much more so than “urban gardening”, for example, which we can more easily conceive of) as it calls into question the very notions of “urban” and “rural”.

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Seeds of self-sufficiency

By Monique Beadin
Montreal Gazette Environment Reporter
May 20, 2011

Excerpt:

MONTREAL – On the sidewalk in front of Marci Babineau’s house, I craned my neck to see if I could spot the birds.

In the backyard, just beyond her root-vegetable garden and several fruit trees, a chicken stretched out a wing, then ruffled her black feathers back into place.

Not exactly what a passerby would expect to see on a quiet, tree-lined street minutes from downtown Montreal (I can’t say exactly where; more about that later).

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There are a lot of skirmishes still to be fought within the urban ag war

By Kelly McCartney (writer-chef)
The Kelword
April 27th, 2011

Excerpt:

Although we may have a long row yet to hoe on the matter, urban agriculture has really started to take root in just a few short years as quite a few cities have passed legislation that make it a lot easier to grow food in an urban environment. In 2009, Seattle passed a bill that allows curbside areas to be planted without requiring a permit. Hardscaping – using rocks or raised beds – still requires permission, but not a fee.

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Photo shoot at FarmTina for the New York Post. Photo by Martina Fugazzotto

More city folk than ever are turning their homes into farms. But is living off the land as virtuous as it sounds?

By Sara Stewart
New York Post
April 6, 2011

Excerpt:

“Last time I was in Brooklyn, it looked like every guy there was about to ship out for the Civil War,” says Christian Lander, creator of the blog Stuff White People Like and recent author of “Whiter Shades of Pale.”

He sees the current farming craze as the latest incarnation of the hipster quest for ultimate old-timeyness. “We have this amazing thing of wanting to live in this time that never existed,” Lander says, “where everything is old-fashioned but there are still iPhones.”

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City farms offer urban dwellers fresh local produce and the chance to connect with their inner farmer.

By Susan Cosier
Audubon Magazine
March April 2011

Excerpt:

In Detroit, a city ravaged by the economic decline, the trend is proving vital to the city’s slow recovery. Ashley Atkinson, director of project development and urban agriculture for The Greening of Detroit, a nonprofit, supports the growing network of farms in the city, where 30 percent to 40 percent of the land lies vacant. The Garden Resource Program (GRP), coordinated by The Greening of Detroit and in collaboration with hundreds of residents and community-based organizations, began in 2003 with 80 gardens. Now the GRP partners with 1,234 family, community, school, and market gardens and farms, and it grew 41 percent last year. The Greening of Detroit’s urban agriculture department connects landowners with aspiring gardeners—including many former autoworkers—and teaches them how to plant and grow produce. Participants also have the option of selling their harvest directly at farmers’ markets. About 10 percent of the crops overall are sold there or to restaurants.

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I Am An Urban Homesteader, Nyah Nyah

By Erica
Northwest Edible Life
Feb 16, 2011

Excerpt:

Today a veritable shitstorm of anger blew flew through the urban homesteading community. The Dervaes are an urban homesteading family (or institute, or church, depending on how they are defining themselves at any particular moment) that have been building their own mini-farm for over 25 years in Pasadena, California. Recently they trademarked the phrases “Urban Homesteading”, “Urban Homesteader” and over a dozen other terms. Yesterday the family began sending “cease and desist” letters to bloggers, libraries (!) and organizations using the now-tradmarked terms. Facebook pages using the term “Urban Homesteading” were yanked.

My community’s reaction to all this? Well, let’s just say I’ve never seen a bunch of greeny hippies more armed for bear and ready for blood. Pretty universally, the Dervaes’ attempted enforcement of their iffy trademark claim was seen as a betrayal of the community, a forsaking of the values of modern urban homesteading and a push beyond the reasonable.

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Isaiah Rambert (left) and Wil Bullock examine vegetables at the Powisset Farm in Dover. The City Harvest program will move from the Dover farm to the Bradley Estate in Canton.

“We bring in kids from the Boys and Girls Clubs and we teach them about the outdoors.”

By Kate Shively
GateHouse News Service
Feb 15, 2011

Excerpt:

RANDOLPH — What do inner city teenagers and farming have in common? Wil Bullock, a Randolph environmentalist and farm educator, has made it his personal mission to strengthen the connection between the two.

Bullock, 29, was awarded a $10,000 TogetherGreen Fellowship to expand his City Harvest Youth Corps, a program that hires teenagers from inner city communities to teach them about local agriculture.

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Find a place, do some work, grow some stuff: it ain’t rocket science. Photo by Tracie Lee.

“You don’t have to reinvent the wheel to grow food in the city”

By Broke-Ass Grouch
Grist
8 Feb. 2011

Excerpt:

Just last summer, Broke-Ass was invited to speak on a panel at the New York Horticultural Society with such luminaries of the environmental architectural movement as Amale Andraos and Dan Wood of WORK Architecture Co.; Fritz Haeg, artist, Edible Estates; and the esteemed James Wines of SITE. Broke-Ass was supposed to be there to make intellectual distinctions between Baby Boomers’ self-aggrandizing revolutions and Generation X’s more practical, local movements, since this is thought to be one of her areas of expertise.

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A farmer, eh? Master of your own time, down to the city for a spree. Y’know, I’ve always wanted to break away and have a little farm in the country.”

[This article first appeared in American Mercury (November 1937).

I used to be a timid, thin man. I never got on very well in the city. When I was talking to people, they tended to drift away, or they turned to someone else and said: "Having nice weather, aren't we?" I didn't see in my job any of the heroic aspects my superiors were always glorying in, so probably I wasn't very good at it.

For a while I turned to poetry and wrote a beauty about the song of the hermit thrush, but everybody in the office thought it was la-di-da. I didn't like noise or smoke or subways or hurrying or playing golf or getting drunk Saturday nights, so I began to think there must be something wrong.

I went to a psychoanalyst who told me I disliked everything too much. For this I took a great dislike to the psychoanalyst. I refused to pay five bucks for this new hate, and the psychoanalyst ended by hating me. So I decided to "get away from it all" — to move from the city to the great quiet of the country and simplify my life. I bought a farm far up in New England, and I bought a cow, too. I had always wanted to own a cow and watch it cropping my grass while I dreamed the days away.

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Last years Growing Green Awards winners.

Huffington Post a big supporter of City Farming

By Jonathan Kaplan
Senior policy specialist, Natural Resources Defense Council
Huffington Post
February 5, 2011

Excerpts:

Based on the entries for this year’s Growing Green Awards — NRDC’s annual award series for sustainable food leaders — the victory garden may be making a comeback. When we created the awards in 2009, we received a single nomination for a rooftop farm. Now in our third awards cycle, the application pile is teeming with up-and-coming urban farmers.

The job of selecting NRDC’s 2011 Growing Green Awards winners is looking harder than ever, given so many impressive nominations. This year we received 265 applicants in our categories of Food Producer, Business Leader, Knowledge Leader and Young Food Leader. While there are only four awards, I can tell you that dozens of these food leaders are qualified to win.

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Hmong Farmer. Photo by Victor Bareng. Minority Farmers in America.

Before hipsters got rooftop gardens, my poor, refugee family ate that way because we had to. And we were ashamed.

By Pha Lo
Salon
Jan 6, 2011

Excerpt:

To me, the organic food movement has become dizzyingly, surreally chic. Farmers have become rock stars; the most exclusive restaurants name-check them so much you can almost see dirt on the menu. But before organic produce exploded into a $25 billion industry, before city gardening became cool, I grew up in a Hmong refugee community, living the urban organic lifestyle not because it was fashionable, but because we were poor. I couldn’t wait to leave it behind.

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