Category — Book

Book by Andrea Gaynor
2006 - 264 pages

Drawing upon sources ranging from gardening books and magazines to statistics and oral history, Gaynor presents an environmental history of non-commercial suburban food production in Australia. Her narrative traces animal, fruit, and vegetable production from the close of the 19th century to the present day. Particular attention is paid to the effects of economic conditions on home food production. Gaynor teaches at the U. of Western Australia. The text is based upon her PhD thesis.

Ch. 1 Into the suburbs
Ch. 2 Fecund and fetid : 1880-1918
Ch. 3 ‘His own vine and fig tree’
Ch. 4 Prudence and preference : 1919-37
Ch. 5 Fear and pride : 1938-54
Ch. 6 The contemporary and the cautious : 1955-73
Ch. 7 Circles and cycles : 1974-2000
Ch. 8 Conclusion : a diverse harvest

Purchase at Amazon here.

By Robin Kortright, Master of Arts 2007, Department of Geography, University of Toronto (139 pages)

“Of the 125 people who were originally contacted, just over half (54%) grew food, meaning vegetables, fruit, nuts, or herbs. Of the people who grew food, almost three quarters grew herbs, nearly two thirds grew vegetables, and just over a quarter grew fruit. Almost everyone grew food only in their backyards, with just three people growing food in their front yard and two in a community garden.

“65 percent of Toronto households have a lawn or garden. Owning your home, gardening skills, and a sunny garden are important parts of being able to grow food in a back garden. There is far more land in home gardens than will likely be available for community gardens in the near future. Home food gardens are an important part of urban food systems. They would benefit from more support, such as information about and access to compost, mulch, rain gauges and soil testing resources.”

[Read more →]

“Dr. B. N. Vishwanath, a pioneer in promoting urban agriculture in India, said that the only way to counter the health hazards of chemical poisons in food is to take up organic terrace gardening.

“With the pressure on farmlands and its rising cost in the urbanisation process, there is hardly any space to have a garden. This is where terraces come into the picture, he says.

“Giving some alarming information, Indian Institute of Horticulture Research (IIHR) scientist Dr. M. Prabhakar says that vegetables grown in the peri-urban area around Bangalore contain higher chemical residues than what is accepted at the international level. Presence of sewage and heavy metal effluents in water used for irrigation purposes and chemical pesticides render the yield unfit for human consumption.”

[Read more →]

Every week Michael Olson produces a segment of his news-talk radio show called ‘The Food Chain’, which can be heard as a podcast. Michael is the author of the award-winning book MetroFarm, a 576-page guide to metropolitan agriculture.

This week, in his 579th show named “Farms in the City”, Michael talks with Milwaukee’s Grow Urban, New York City’s Make Brooklyn Bloom, TUAN’s Jac Smit, and urban livestock guru Jennifer Blecha. “Six decades ago, farms began leaving the city for greener pastures.

[Read more →]

“The Providence Urban Agriculture Task Force envisions doubling the amount of food being grown in and around Providence in the next ten years. This will be achieved by increasing the number of home gardeners, community gardeners, community gardens, commercial community agriculture projects, and urban agriculture businesses.

“In Providence, 59 food gardens were counted in about 5 hours of walking in 4 neighborhoods. Fifty-nine food gardens is an undercount, and only a very small part of the City’s 25 neighborhoods was surveyed.

[Read more →]

Along with the IDRC and the RUAF, Urban Harvest, headquartered in Lima, Peru, is a major centre for international urban agriculture development. This recent publication, 2007, is available for download as a 64 page PDF (3.2MB).

“Although many migrants move to cities in the
expectation of more and better-paid jobs than in the
country-side, we know that many cities have as much as
90% informal employment, meaning occasional and
precarious opportunities for earning income. Urban crop
production and livestock-keeping have been shown to be
complementary activities to casual non-farm work for
many families and improving their income-generating
potential can help them move out of poverty.

[Read more →]

Joe Nasr, one of the authors of the classic book ‘Urban Agriculture - Food Jobs and Sustainable Cities’, spoke about city farming on CBC’s ‘The Current’ today. The show can be heard as a podcast linked below. Joe Nasr, co-founder of the North American Urban and Peri-Urban Agriculture Alliance, teaches urban agriculture at Ryerson University in Toronto.

Hear the CBC show here (the second story).

[Read more →]

If you haven’t read this magazine, you can start right now because all issues are available on-line. It is the only scholarly magazine published on urban agriculture. Pictured above is the latest issue No. 19, dated December 2007. You are invited to contribute to the next issue No. 20 ‘Sustainable Use of Water in Urban Agriculture’ to be published July 2008.

All issues are on-line here.

“The RUAF (or in long form, Resource Centres on Urban Agriculture and Food Security) has functioned since 1999 as a global network of 6 regional organisations that share a common vision on urban development and poverty reduction and together implement an international programme focussed on urban agriculture and food security.”

[Read more →]

My unsung hero of urban agriculture is the Canadian organization, the IDRC (International Development Research Centre) based in Ottawa.

“Through more than 90 research projects in 40 countries over the past decade, IDRC has helped the cities in the South develop urban agriculture policies and methods that are increasing the food supply, raising income levels, and protecting health — and at the same time improving management of urban waste, water, and land.”

And my unsung urban agriculture hero within that organization is Luc Mougeot. From the early 1990’s, he and others in his department have created and funded innovative projects that have literally changed the world.

[Read more →]

First printed in 1975, this wonderful book inspired City Farmer to take action in 1978 and start our work promoting urban agriculture. The authors, Helga and William Olkowski, visited us in Vancouver in those early years and introduced Integrated Pest Management (IPM) to many people in the city. They also motivated one of our founding directors to get her Ph.D. in entomology.
[Read more →]