Category — Entrepreneurs

We explore new themes like school lunch reform, aquaponics and urban gardening

Food Forward explores alternatives to our current industrial food system through the lives and passions of a vanguard of innovators; educators, scientists, farmers and chefs across America–food rebels who are fundamentally changing the way we eat.

We shot this self-funded pilot episode trailer on Biodynamics in the summer of 2009 at Cynthia Sandberg’s Love Apple Farm in Ben Lomond, CA.

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Erica Gillespie tends to lettuce growing in planter boxes at Mixt Greens in Los Angeles. (Mark Boster, Los Angeles Times)

Some are growing produce on site, buying from eco-conscious farmers, installing water filtration systems, recycling grease and more.

By Mary MacVean,
Los Angeles Times
March 9, 2010

Excerpt:

When Neal and Amy Knoll Fraser move their restaurant Grace downtown to the rectory of St. Vibiana’s later this year, diners will be hard-pressed to miss the earth-to-table connection.

Fraser intends to plant a garden — and not just a few containers of herbs, but 450 to 500 square feet, right outside, cater-corner from Los Angeles Police Department headquarters. It will be tended by the kitchen staff, and Fraser says it could yield as much as a quarter of the produce for his kitchen. He’s eyeing a parking lot for more garden space.

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Urban Farm Hub tries to answer the question

Urban Farm Hub is launching a series of articles addressing the long-term economic viability of urban agriculture. We know commercial agriculture enterprises pencil in shrinking midwest cities such as Detroit, Pittsburgh and Cleveland, but what about thriving metropolitan areas such as Seattle where there’s a shortage of developable land?

We’ll be interviewing small business owners, design professionals, urban farm entrepreneurs, and commercial developers in rapidly growing metropolitan areas to see what they have to say about reaping the green from urban agriculture.

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4 million cracker packages with seeds inside and a pledge to build 50 community-based home farms

Home Farming is about growing your own herbs and vegetables, no matter where you live. To help people on their path to Home Farming, four million packages of Original and Reduced-Fat Triscuit crackers will include cards with basil or dill herb seeds that can be planted directly into the ground.

A recent Triscuit survey found nearly two-thirds of Americans are interested in growing food in a backyard garden. And three out of four of those surveyed prefer to eat foods with a few, simple ingredients, reflecting a popular desire to get back to the simple joys in life. (The Triscuit Home Farming Study, fielded by StrategyOne, is a national telephone survey among a representative sample of 1,018 U.S. adults conducted January 14, 2009 and January 17, 2009.)

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Photos by Jami Scholl

Urban farming on the rise

By Carrol Krause
Herald-Times Homes
February 13, 2010

Excerpt:

Jami Scholl is a local garden designer who uses permaculture principles to create beautiful, edible landscapes that taste as good as they look. Jami is now taking her passion for “foodscaping” one step further; she has begun working with city government council members and planners in order to clarify the elements of urban agriculture that will be acceptable throughout Bloomington.

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Access to fresh produce such as that sold on this mobile farmers’ market is limited in some urban areas. See the video here.

The healthy approach to meals on wheels

By Philippa Thomas
9 February 2010
BBC News, Richmond, Virginia

America’s First Lady, Michelle Obama, has launched a campaign to improve the way families eat, encouraging Americans to face the fact that one in three children is overweight or obese.

As part of her initiative, she stressed the need to make healthy food more accessible. I met one couple who are trying to do just that, by running a mobile farmers’ market in Virginia.

It is a sight that makes people stop and stare.

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By designboom

Bacsac was born when french designer Godefroy de Virieu met landscapers Louis de Fleurieu and Virgile Desurmont. Together they searched for an alternative solution to avoid the constraints of creating a roof garden in town (taking into consideration difficulties of transport, excessive weight, etc).

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Farm on wheels

From Re:Farm’s Wiki:

Refarm the city are tools of open software and hardware for urban farmers. is a mix of a good meal (the crop, the friends, the seeds, …) , hardware (the urban farm, the composter, the electronics, the sensors, recycled materials, …), software (built a farm according to: your personal needs, local vegetables, local gastronomy, farm location, …) that will give you the tools to design, control and manage your farm during her life. We have divided this wiki on the steps you need to take to start a refarm.

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Hear From Our Founder from AeroFarms on Vimeo.

Meet Ed Harwood, Founder & CEO of Aero Farm Systems

Aerofarms – The future of urban agriculture

From their website:

AeroFarms provides aeroponic technology and comprehensive business expertise to those pioneering the future of urban agriculture. The world’s current food system is unsustainable economically, environmentally and socially. Today’s rural and centralized food production uses a vast amount of resources—land, water, transportation fuel— which will become increasingly scarce and expensive as world populations grow and continue to urbanize. At the same time these resources diminish, demand for food will increase, requiring current food production levels to double by 2050 to support the world’s population. We need a better way.

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Photo of Naomi’s Organic Farm Supply

The Chicks Are Coming! local resources for urban chicken farmers

by Kate Bryant
Feb 03, 2010
Portland Monthly

Ten years ago, when I first kept chickens, there were few places in Portland to buy supplies. Driving out to Foster Feed on Southeast Foster & 103rd (Tel: 503-777-2967) was something of a pilgrimage from the city — there weren’t many of us with chickens yet then – and I’d often ride out with one of the few other chicken-o-philes I knew so we could pool resources and buy big sacks of grit and oyster shell, feed (there was no organic feed available then) or bedding. We chicken people stuck together.

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Photo by WontonBrutality

From their program website:

Backyard Harvest’s mission is to strengthen the Twin Cities local foods infrastructure one yard at a time by turning lawns into nourishing and healthy landscapes. We connect eaters directly to their food, neighbors to one another, and urban farmers to professional opportunities.

Backyard Harvest is a community-building program in urban Permaculture. The program provides both garden fresh food and garden education for homeowners, renters and neighborhoods, as well as entrepreneurial and small-scale food production training for our farmers. Our farmers contract with homeowners, renters and communities to create gardens in their backyards, maintain the gardens and harvest all of the produce weekly for each family.

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Ethiopia. Photo by treesftf. See larger image here.

By Menberu Kitila
Ethiopia, Jimma – University
Email: kitilamenberu@yahoo.com.uk

Currently I am working as the head of the environmental protection and urban agriculture office in Jimma city in Ethiopia. Jimma city is 350 km. from the capital city of the country (Addis Ababa).

Also, I am a student(Msc.) of Horticulture (vegetable crop production) in Jimma University College of Agriculture and Veterinary Medicine (JUCAVM).
My thesis research also deals with the UA activities (specifically tomato production) in the Jimma area.

Jimma city is one of the biggest cities found in the country and, more than 200,000 people are living here. It is the place where Coffee Arabica originated.

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Farm in Liberia

CARE
Closing date: 15 Feb 2010
Location: Liberia – Monrovia, Liberia

CARE is seeking an Urban Agriculture Expert for a proposed, USAID – funded, large-scale, multi-year Food and Enterprise Development Program to be based in Monrovia, Liberia. The Food and Enterprise Development (FED) Program will be implemented to achieve the following objectives: 1.) increase agricultural productivity and profitability; 2.) stimulate private enterprise growth and investment; and 3.) build local technical and managerial human resources to sustain and expand accomplishments achieved under objectives one and two.

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“We are a partnership of two women who love to garden and want to be immersed in the dirt of our food systems.”

By Andrew Simmons
SF Weekly
Jan. 13, 2010

Brooke Budner and Caitlyn Galloway are the guerrilla green thumbs behind Little City Gardens, a cherry tomato-sized urban farm in the Mission. Simultaneously a small salad mix business, a hub of food/community positivity, and what the farmers themselves call “a working model of food production in [the city],” Little City Gardens hooks up Bar Tartine and several local caterers with greens (delivered, quite awesomely, on foot and by bike), offers tours, conducts workshops, and generally keeps it as real as water, soil, sun, and fat, writhing earthworms.

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Rancho Cordova eyes ordinance on pot growing

By Loretta Kalb
The Sacramento Bee
Jan. 10, 2010

When the persistent “skunk” smell of marijuana became too much for Linda Kurtz, she did what she said she had to do.

She went to Rancho Cordova City Hall and asked the City Council to protect her from the smell coming from her neighbor’s backyard marijuana plants.

In so doing, she brought the city to the forefront of the next big issue facing marijuana producers and municipal regulators in California.

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Neighborhood Fruit helps people find and share fruit locally, both backyard bounty and abundance on public lands – 10,000 trees nationwide and counting!

Neighborhood Fruit was created to make use of the abundant fruit growing in our urban environments. Currently, the bulk of fruit grown in backyards and in our cities goes to waste, while the fruit we consume is grown in water-intensive orchards far from our homes. We envision a different future, where the bulk of backyard fruit is utilized and shared between neighbors and our diets replete with home-made goodies. Join us in creating a future where the food we eat is truly fresh, seasonal and local!

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Urban activist Majora Carter, second from right, talks about ideas for farming in the city during a recent visit to Detroit. She met with local officials and members of nonprofits at Catherine Ferguson Academy on Dec. 2. (JAMES BURLING CHASE/Majora Carter Group)

Activist sows seeds for farm co-op owned by workers, venture could reap profits for Detroit

By John Gallagher
Free Press Business Writer
Dec. 26, 2009

The Mo’ Green Town proposal by New York City activist Majora Carter just might hit the sweet spot in Detroit urban agriculture.

Carter visited Detroit recently to talk up her plan to create a worker-owned urban agriculture cooperative venture. By pooling the efforts of numerous small growers in Detroit, it would attempt to grow big enough to generate real profits and a return for investors. But it would be run by local community growers themselves.

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An estimated 15 million urban white-collars spend more than five hours a day on Happy Farm, according to data from the game’s creator.

China’s growing addiction: online farming games

Elliott Ng
Venture Beat
October 29, 2009

A new agrarian revolution has occurred in China, but only in the virtual worlds of social games. Social farm games now dominate all major Chinese social networking sites — RenRen (formerly Xiaonei), Kaixin001, 51.com, and QQ’s QZone. The May launch and 2H 2009 adoption of QQ Farm — a version of China’s already popular Happy Farm game built to run on Tencent’s estimated 228 million active-user QZone platform — may very well have transformed China into the leading country of online farmers.

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Urban Agriculture Ideas Competition – Mowing to Growing

Non-Profit Design Group Terreform ONE Announces First Annual “One Prize” Award to Promote Green Design in Cities

Seeking architects, urban designers, planners, engineers, scientists, artists, students and individuals of all backgrounds:

How can we break the American love affair with the suburban lawn?

Can green houses be incorporated in skyscrapers?

What are the urban design strategies for food production in cities?

Can food grow on rooftops, parking lots, building facades?

What is required to remove foreclosure signs on lawns and convert them to gardens?

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The author’s pet rooster, 15-year-old Mr. X, checks out the cool veggie garden. Photo by Rosalind Creasy

The total value of the fresh vegetables author Rosalind Creasy grew in her 100-square-foot garden in 2008 was $683.43!

By Rosalind Creasy with Cathy Wilkinson Barash
December 2009/January 2010
Mother Earth News

In 2007, I began to get lots of questions about growing food to help save money. Then, while working on my new book, Edible Landscaping, I had an aha! moment. As I was assembling statistics to show the wastefulness of the American obsession with turf, I wondered what the productivity of just a small part of American lawns would be if they were planted with edibles instead of grass.

I wanted to pull together some figures to share with everyone, but calls to seed companies and online searches didn’t turn up any data for home harvest amounts — only figures for commercial agriculture. From experience, I knew those commercial numbers were much too low compared with what home gardeners can get. For example, home gardeners don’t toss out misshapen cucumbers and sunburned tomatoes. They pick greens by the leaf rather than the head, and harvests aren’t limited to two or three times a season.

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