Category — Events

This SCLA will help you and your team advance and improve efforts to promote urban agriculture and foster sustainable food systems by exposing you to the best available information, expertise and thinking in the field

September 18-20, 2013, Memphis, Tn

Excerpt:

Overview Of The Opportunity

The Institute for Sustainable Communities (ISC) invites teams of five senior officials and/or key stakeholders from up to 12 U.S. cities and metropolitan regions to participate in this unique training and peer-learning opportunity, focused on improving, expanding and accelerating cities’ efforts to support urban agriculture and build more sustainable food systems.

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August 8-11 2013, Seattle, Washington

Four days of workshops and tours showcase exciting developments in the world of community gardening and urban agriculture.
Early Bird Registration: open now to June 15, 2013. Scholarship are also available and due date for scholarship application is June 1, 2013.

Urban Agriculture Tours:

Seattle has a vibrant urban agriculture community that includes continued cultivation of land that once embodied the livelihood of local farmers. Join us to take a look at the old lands still under cultivation in new ways, some of the innovative market gardens that have sprung up across the city and their venues for selling their produce and a peek at a learning garden that specializes in empowering people to grow their own!

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2013 Urban Grown Farms & Gardens Tour anticipates 5,000 participants

Events and activities begin June 15, 2013.

Experience urban agriculture across the Kansas City Metro during this weeklong community event featuring acclaimed food writer and cookbook author Mark Bittman

Sixty urban farms and gardens across the Kansas City Metro are opening their fields to the public and showing off their bounty during the fifth biennial Urban Grown Farms & Gardens Tour. Events and activities begin June 15 with the Urban Grown Crop Mob volunteer event and culminate the following weekend with the self-guided tour. The official kick off will be hosted by the Central Branch of the Kansas City Public Library on Monday, June 17, at 6 p.m.

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Consumers are encouraged to start their own juice carton herb gardens by cutting off the bottom portion of their Happy Planet 1.89 L juice carton and planting seeds.

Win a year’s worth of fresh organic produce delivery service

Press Release: Happy Planet Launches Grow For Good Campaign to inspire the urban farmers of tomorrow. On Earth Day, April 22, Happy Planet is launching the “Grow For Good” campaign and online photo contest. The contest is designed to encourage consumers to ‘grow’ a greater appreciation for fresh food and for the younger generation to develop a curiosity about where food comes from – by starting their own Happy Planet juice carton herb garden.

“We are looking to inspire younger generations to ask questions about what they eat and where it comes from,” said Happy Planet founder Randal Ius. “Creating a ‘Grow for Good’ juice carton herb garden is a fun and creative activity that will also help foster an enthusiasm for fresh food; inspiring both the urban farmers – and consumers – of tomorrow.”

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Help during the last week of June, 2013 (Working language: French)

Métropolisation de l’agriculture et enjeux alimentaires

L’agriculture urbaine rencontre un attrait grandissant, tant de la part de ceux qui ont en charge la gestion des villes que de la part de citadins ou d’associations. L’usage du singulier tend à mettre en avant l’existence d’un lien, reliant les problématiques de la conservation des surfaces agricoles dans le contexte de la métropolisation, et celles des pratiques des citadins en demande de nature. Ce lien, c’est celui de l’alimentation et des enjeux associés à la proximité.

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From “Feeding Cities: Food Security in a Rapidly Urbanizing World,” March 2013

Feeding Cities conference breakout session moderated by Laura Lawason, Professor of Urban Planning at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Ms. Olufunke Cofie (IWMI-Ghana, West Africa) from RUAF.

Nevin Cohen, Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies at The New School, New York.

Domenic Vitiello, Assistant Professor, Department of City & Regional Planning, UPenn School of Design.

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Fringe festivals create a ‘living orchard’ of people

Pop-up-foundation
Chelsea Fringe Festival on 18th May 2013
“At the same time we have people from other parts of the world doing the same – from Adelaide to Uluru in Australia, to Hong Kong and Uganda, New York and BC Canada.”

The Planting Ideas project is set against the industrial backdrop of the Battersea Power Station but we anticipate that brilliant new ideas will come out of this harsh landscape, reinventing the relationship between people and planet.

During their time in the soil participants will ‘plant’ ideas that relate to the themes of energy, waste, water and growing food. The intention is to create a ‘living orchard’ of people, whose exciting new ideas will be harvested, shared and publicised through our website.

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This year, Mrs. Obama invited children from schools that have made exceptional improvements to school lunches through implementation of the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act.

The garden so far has produced more than 3,000 pounds of food

By Associated Press
April 04, 2013

Excerpt:

WASHINGTON — Salad using lettuce from Michelle Obama’s garden could be served up in just a few weeks.

The first lady on Thursday planted lettuce and other crops in her garden on the South Lawn of the White House, with an assist from schoolchildren from Washington, D.C., and several school districts around the country.

Two varieties of wheat were planted for the first time: club wheat and bread wheat.

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The 2013 Permaculture Your Campus Conference

June 23-26, 2013
University of Massachusetts, Amherst

The mission of the 2013 Permaculture Your Campus Conference is to bring together students, faculty and staff from international colleges, universities, and businesses to learn why and how permaculture design is being used as the guiding framework for some of the most cutting-edge sustainability programs around the world.

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Prof Lou Yongqi (Shanghai), Dr. Despommier (New York), Prof. Ranhagen (Stockholm), Dr. He Jie (Singapore) discuss urban agriculture.

20 videos from the Linköping, Sweden 2013 Urban Agriculture Summit now online

Conference was held Jan. 29-31, 2013

Urban Agriculture Summit 2013; the largest conference ever in the rapidly growing area of urban agriculture becoming internationally recognized as an important trend according to Wall Street Journal, and the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences and many others.

As always when challenges are to be met, new marketplaces emerge. We have successfully assembled leading authorities and decisionmakers from China, India, Japan, the Middle East, Europe and the US; politicians, researchers, business people, innovators, entrepreneurs – from states, cities, universities, non-profit organisations, large corporations and the local community.

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May 17, 2013, by The Cultural Landscape Foundation & Pennsylvania Horticultural Society

Civic Horticulture Conference
May 17, 2013: The University Of The Arts, Philadelphia, Pa
Presented By: The Cultural Landscape Foundation & Pennsylvania Horticultural Society With Support From: Landscape Forms
See the conference here.
(Must see. Mike)

Excerpts from Abstracts:

Panel 2: The Productive Garden

Moderator:
James F. Lima
The Many Forms of the Productive Garden

After WWII, food production as integral to cities disappeared with the growth of globalized industrial food systems. But increasingly across the country, the “agropolis” is back.

This presentation will set the stage for this panel discussion by looking at how productive gardens take many forms, considering the various entity structures that operate and maintain them. Productive gardens are public, private or quasi-public places. Some are small neighborhood plots designed and maintained in a participatory process. Others have emerged within formal campus settings overseen by universities or public housing authorities. Elsewhere, planting beds on the rooftops of sprawling industrial warehouses are a prized local source of fresh produce, eggs and honey for locavore restaurants and farmers markets. The entities that operate and maintain these gardens range from traditional public parks agencies, to conservancies, Friends of groups, to BIDs and land trusts.

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Open until August 11th, 2013 – New York City

By Lori Zimmer
Inhabit
02/05/13

Excerpt:

The exhibition covers both historical and present day methods of farming as well as how food is transported, cooked and eaten all around the world. Visitors are first greeted with a futuristic scene – a floor-to-ceiling LED vertical farm. Glowing in red and blue lights, the lightweight structure supports a slew of edible plants within a massive vertical structure. An second vertical garden faces Central Park West in the museum’s windows. All of the herbs and produce grown in the museum’s gardens are used in the Global Kitchen food demonstrations, and are meant to be eaten and enjoyed by visitors.

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Mel King and Greg Watson(Commissioner Massachusetts Department of Agricultural Resources. Photo by Maureen White.

First annual Massachusetts Urban Farming Conference at Roxbury Community College

Excerpt from Greg Watson’s Facebook page:

“The opportunity to present my dear friend and mentor Mel King with the first Urban Farming Lifetime Achievement Award this past Saturday at the Massachusetts Urban Farming Conference was one of the greatest honors of my life. Mel has been one of the best friends the state’s agricultural community — rural, urban, suburban — has ever had.”

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Photographic art pieces and arrangements of locally-grown vegetables and herbs provided an extra sensory experience.

‘All & Sundry’ collaborated with the Vancouver Urban Farming Society for their latest urban farmers gathering.

Excerpt from their site:

The 2012 Vancouver Urban Farming Forum, held at the sustainability and creativity co-working space the HiVE, was centred around local urban farmers who wished to share data about their work and discuss subjects relevant to the farmers themselves.

All & Sundry created the large black-and-white photographic art pieces, signage, activity booklet cover pages, and table centrepieces for the 2012 Forum. With the theme of local food and sustainability at the forefront of such an event, the art pieces and accompanying signage were made-to-assemble so that they could be easily stored and reused for future events. An assortment of locally-grown herbs (rosemary, lavender, sage, Italian parsley) and two types of kale and chard were used for the table centrepieces to provide that extra sensory experience—the visual piece of seeing what can be grown most anywhere in the city as well as the lovely scent of fresh herbs—and as gifts for the event volunteers.

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Part 1/3 – 2013 Feb. 16 – Urban Agriculture Series Week 1: What is urban agriculture? – Richmond, Virginia

Duron Chavis, Coordinator at McDonough Community Garden opened the series with introductory comments on urban agriculture then introduced Vickie Campbell, Coordinator of Community Gardens for the City of Richmond, Virginia. Vickie showed slides of local community gardens in Richmond and variety of other images related to the benefits of organically grown food.

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Urban Agriculture in Morocco.

International Colloquium Of Urban Agriculture
27 Feb-02 March 2013,
Casablanca, Morocco

Confirmed Speakers:

Dr. Amin AL HAKIMI, University of Sana’a, Yemen
Thiago BARBIZAN, Municipality of Sao Paulo
Dr Alison BLAY-PALMER, Wilfried Laurier University, Ontario
Dr Moez BOURAOUI, Université Tunis
Sonia CALLAU, City of Barcelona
Nevin COHEN, The New School, NYC
Julien CUSTOT, FAO Food For Cities
Marielle DUBBELING, Head of RUAF Foundation
Moncef FADILI, UN-Habitat, Morocco
Mehdi GUADI, Association Marocaine pour des Éco-Villes (AMEV)
Dr. Hans R. HERREN, Millenium Institute, Washington
Dr. Abdelkader KAIOUA, Inspecteur de l’Urbanisme, de l’Habitat et de la Politique de la Ville du Grand Casablanca
Andrea KOCH-KRAFT, German Federal Ministry of Education and Research

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Danielle Nierenberg, Food Tank co-founder, researching urban agriculture.

Why it’s important for the funding and donor communities and policy-makers to invest in urban agriculture

By Danielle Nierenberg
Co-Founder, Food Tank
January, 2013
For the 2013 Urban Agriculture Summit, Linköping, Sweden

More than half of all people in the world live in cities. By 2050, 80 percent of the world’s population will live in urban areas, according to the United Nations. And today, at least 800 million people worldwide participate in some form of urban food production. Finding better ways for farmers and food entrepreneurs to grow food, raise livestock, and process and manufacture food in cities is more important than ever before.

And there are hundreds of initiatives around the world helping urban farmers, businesses, and consumers, find ways to grow, sell, and process food in cities.

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Community Gardening Grants from Woodbridge by Robert Mondavi.

Theme: Cultivating Community, Harvesting Health – Community Gardens to Urban Farms

Call for Presentations by March 1, 2013

Conference Dates: August 8 to August 11, 2013
University of Washington – Gould Hall, School of Landscape Architecture

In 2013 two great events in the urban gardening world will happen in Seattle. The Seattle P-Patch community gardening program, one of the premier community gardening programs in the country, celebrates its 40th birthday, and the American Community Gardening Association, the premier national representative of community gardening and a pioneer in urban agriculture, returns to Seattle to celebrate its national conference.

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Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, President of Liberia.

President of Liberia, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, to give Keynote

National Conference “Enhancing Urban and Peri-Urban Agriculture for sustainable livelihoods”
14-15 February, 2013
University of Liberia/City Hall
Monrovia

Agriculture is seen as the backbone of Liberia, but it is estimated that Liberia only meets a third of her total food consumption requirements from local production. Cities are quickly becoming the principle territories for intervention and planning of innovative strategies that aim to eradicate urban hunger and improve livelihoods. Many urban households seek to increase their food production, as a way to provide their families with fresh and nutritious food, and some of them also sell this on the market.

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“The center is one of several places in the region where New Yorkers can indulge their weekend or would-be farmer impulses, or just learn something about what they eat, even if they don’t want to grow it themselves. In its fifth year the conference had sold out [its 260 spots] in 36 hours, with 175 on the waiting list.” Photo by Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times.

Stone Barns Center for Food & Agriculture Conference

By Kathryn shattuck
New York Times
January 3, 2013

Excerpt:

Few flaunt the farm-to-table ethic more proudly than New Yorkers, who long ago jumped on the organic and locavore bandwagons.

Well aware of that the Stone Barns Center addresses farming on a scale and with a consciousness appropriate to urban and peri-urban environments, from rooftop and backyard gardens to the farms of tens and hundreds of acres normally cultivated in the densely populated Northeast rather than those with thousands of acres found farther west. (There is actually more land in urban communities that could be used to produce food than most New Yorkers realize, Mr. Kirschenmann said, citing a map created a few years ago at Columbia University that showed 25,000 such acres inside the city.)

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