Category — Land

Landshare UK has a community of more than 59,000 growers

Landshare Canada brings together people who have a passion for home-grown food, connecting those who have land to share with those who need land for cultivating food. The concept of Landshare began in the UK, launched through the River Cottage television program in 2009, and has since grown into a thriving community of more than 59,000 growers, sharers and helpers across the country. Now that Landshare is here in Canada, we welcome you to come and take part in this fantastic initiative.

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Photo by Kevin Bauman from website 100 Abandoned Houses. See more here.

Estimated cost $1 million

By Maxwell Strachan
The Huffington Post
March 24, 2011

Excerpts:

Bank of America, the country’s largest bank by assets, has announced an initiative to demolish one hundred abandoned Detroit homes currently under the bank’s ownership, a task that CEO Brian T. Moynihan says will “help ‘right-size’ the city,” according to the Detroit Free Press.

The bank, which estimates the costs at $1 million, says the land plots will be donated to the city “for green space, urban farming or redevelopment.”

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Homeowner Michael Ackhurst (right) is letting Brant Cheetham (left) and Shauna MacKinnon (with baby Neve) grow a garden this summer in his unused backyard. Photograph by Ward Perrin, PNG, Vancouver Sun.

Avid gardeners work their neighbours’ lifeless yards and make them thrive

By Randy Shore
Vancouver Sun
March 25, 2011

Excerpt:

Sharing Backyards was founded four years ago in Victoria by the LifeCycles Project Society and has proliferated around the globe since then, with 41 websites covering 400 municipalities from Vancouver Island to New Zealand.

LifeCycles partners with local organizations such as Vancouver’s City Farmer to help build, host and maintain the websites.

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Craig Strong, left, executive chef at Montage, and Nic Romano, founder and owner of VR Farms, show the bounty picked fresh from the farm at Bella Collina Towne and Golf Club in San Clemente. Photo by Leonard Ortiz, The Orange County Register.

The 1 1/2-acre parcel close to the clubhouse is fully planted

By Cathy Thomas
The Orange County Register
August 18, 2010

Excerpt:

Golf greens and vegetable gardens might seem incongruous, but not at VR Green Farms in San Clemente. Nestled on a slope of the Bella Collina Towne & Golf Club, just east of the clubhouse, urban farming flourishes.

There’s rainbow chard, celery and assorted herbs. Cabbage, summer squash and shallots thrive, along with 180 red flame grapevines. And glorious tomatoes. There are enough tomatoes to harvest more than 400 pounds a week in the summertime.

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Benjamin Woods weeds between carrots and sugar peas at Mama Earth Farm, which he runs with his wife, Mary, and mother, Shirley, in Somerset, near Placerville. Benjamin got his start at an “urban agriculture center” in Santa Barbara; Mary liked organic food as a Sacramento college student. Photo by Paul Kitagaki Jr.

Cities and suburbs now supply young recruits to agriculture

By Carlos Alcalá
The Sacramento Bee
Apr. 20, 2010

Excerpt:

The refrain about young people and agriculture used to be, “How ya gonna keep ‘em down on the farm?”

City attractions were deemed too strong for the simple life to compete for the attention of young rural adults.

That longtime story is reversing.

Cities and suburbs now supply young recruits to agriculture, primarily to small and organic farms, and the trend is playing out in El Dorado County. Melinda Lundgren, 29, first came to agriculture as a college student at Northeastern University in Boston.

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Truck Farmer teaser – 2 minutes

How do you grow your own food in the big city if you ain’t got land?

Truck Farm, a film by Curt Ellis and Ian Cheney. Episodes 1 and 2 are now complete and on the web.

“We’ve combined green roof technology, organic compost, and heirloom seeds to create a living, mobile garden on the streets of Brooklyn, NY. A solar-powered timelapse camera will monitor the crop’s progress throughout the summer, and every month we’ll release a short excerpt from the film – and with any luck a bunch of very local produce.”

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Photo: The Rev. DeVanie Jackson (l.) and the Rev. Robert Jackson, founders of Brooklyn Rescue Mission, stand among plants at their Bed-Stuy Farm on Decatur St.

By Elizabeh Lazarowitz
DAILY NEWS
July 29th 2009

Brooklyn Rescue Mission could lose half of it’s Bed-Stuy Farm property to developmment plans

They turned a vacant lot into an edible Eden that provides freshly grown food to thousands of needy Brooklynites.

But the Brooklyn Rescue Mission, an emergency food pantry in Bedford-Stuyvesant, could lose half of Bed-Stuy Farm – its 5,000-square-foot facility on a long-neglected lot – if plans go through to build on it.

“We have this really thriving, amazing farm that’s feeding people,” said the Rev. DeVanie Jackson, who runs the mission with her husband, the Rev. Robert Jackson. “They’re trying to get us to move it, but the other places they wanted to move it to, it wasn’t the same.”

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Looking West across the Square Mile showing 30 St Mary Axe and Tower 42, Barbican, with Westminster in background.

The local authority wants some of its 9,000 residents to use sites awaiting development to grow food in giant grow bags.

By John Vidal
The Guardian UK
16 June 2009

The Square Mile, capital of commerce and the site of Britain’s most expensive real estate, could soon host some of its first temporary allotments with giant “grow bags” set up on building sites.

The City of London, one of the few authorities not to have formal allotments, wants some of its 9,000 residents to use the spaces to grow fruit and vegetables. The authority has only 22 acres of open space, mostly in old burial grounds and small squares, but the recession has left many building sites vacant.

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What is Landshare?

With allotment waiting lists massively over-subscribed and people right across the country keener than ever to grow their own fruit and veg, the aim for Landshare is to become a UK wide initiative to make British land more productive and fresh local produce more accessible to all. But all of this depends on people like you registering their interest now.

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Surrey may be home to region’s first vertical greenhouse

By Kelly Sinoski, The Vancouver Sun
21 Oct 2008

Rooftop gardens and vertical greenhouses could be a sign of the times in Metro Vancouver as the region wrestles with ways to tackle a global food crisis and the effects of climate change.

And Surrey could lead the trend, with at least one developer considering building a so-called vertical farm in Whalley, which is slated to become the region’s second downtown.

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Urban Wheat Field Sprouts Busting Through Concrete and Myths in New York City

On Monday, October 6th, a live wheat field, approximately one quarter of an acre in size, sprouted at New York City’s South Street Seaport. The Wheat Foods Council’s “Urban Wheat Field Experience,” which ran October 6th through 8th, brings the farm-to-fork journey of America’s most-consumed grain to life with a wheat field, full-size combine, functioning mill, bread-baking station, nutrition lab and more.

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Girl in garden, early 1900′s. Larger image here.

Julian Cribb, author of ‘The Coming Famine’, said:

“This intensive urban vegie culture is an entirely new industry and will need a new professional – the urban farmer who can grow food on the roofs and sides of buildings, in intensive biocultures and by other novel methods to feed the megacities of 30 million-plus inhabitants.

“If we don’t, by 2050 we will have more than three-quarters of the human population – almost 8 billion people – living in places where they are totally without the means or the knowledge of how to feed themselves. Our giant cities will be gigantic death traps, at the mercy of even quite minor glitches in regional or global food supplies.”

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Aboriginal Community Kitchen Gardens at UBC Farm, Vancouver, BC

Since 2002, members of the Musqueam First Nation have grown vegetables on the farm site for their community kitchen project. With an interest in expanding the potential benefits of this community nutrition project, the farm initiated a new pilot program in 2005. In collaboration with 17 different agencies working on Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside (DTES), a plot of land on the farm is dedicated towards the DTES Aboriginal Community Kitchen Garden Project.

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Map: Entebbe, Uganda.

By Kayita Dan Davis Lule
Third Year Paper, BSc. Agricultural Land Use and Management
Makerere University (11,000 words)

5.1 Conclusions

Women are more actively involved in urban farming activities more so in food production oriented activities than their male counterparts. Women endeavored to supplement on the market purchased food stuffs, where as their male counterparts did show more involvement in market oriented production activities i.e. rearing activities (mainly in instances of poultry and zero-grazing units).

Urban agriculture significantly contributes to additional income generation activities of many town dwellers either directly or indirectly. For example those involved do, save on food costs, others from sales made more so of animals and their related products such as poultry, eggs, milk from zero-grazing units etc, food stuffs like greens, yams, potatoes and many others; fruits like jack fruit, mangoes and oranges.

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Tasha talks to Mike about natural lawn care at City Farmer. A push mower makes no noise, uses no gasoline and does not pollute the atmosphere. See what else you can do to become a green ‘Lawnranger’.

Visitors learn about alternatives to lawns at the Vancouver Compost Demonstration Garden. How about a waterwise native plant garden or replacing your lawn with a variety of classy ground covers?

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Report Published by the BC Ministry of Agriculture and Lands
July, 2008

“Currently, land being farmed in British Columbia produces just over half of our food requirements. There is, therefore, tremendous potential to expand agricultural production so that it plays a greater role in feeding our growing population. However, a major challenge we face is to effectively manage urban growth in a manner that protects existing farm operations and provides opportunities for the agriculture industry to continue to grow. Part of this challenge in ensuring urban and agricultural land uses can successfully co-exist will require that the interface between these land uses is effectively planned.

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Alethea Marie Harper, May 2007
Award-Winning Master’s Thesis, 160 pages
Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning
University of California, Berkeley

“West Oakland is a community with limited access to healthy food. My work for People’s Grocery, a local nonprofit, will help the neighborhood and the nearby agricultural community work together to repair the local food system. Local production, self-sufficiency, and restoration of knowledge and local bonds are emphasized throughout. This project exemplifies how analysis and planning can combine pragmatism with idealism, creating a realizable vision for a thriving neighborhood and a robust local food system.

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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.”

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“The livelihood of a large number of people in cities in developing countries depends on urban agriculture. However, municipal governments to a large extent have looked upon agriculture as incompatible with urban development and as a relict from rural-urban migration that dwindles as cities and urban economies grow. Today economic hardships have necessitated the growth of Urban Agriculture (UA) in Zimbabwe and competition for land among the farmers themselves. Historically, no support has been given to poor urban farmers to enable them to have access to land to practice agriculture.”

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