Category — Podcast

Photo by Andy Boenau, used with permission.

Interview with Josh O’Conner, Senior Editor for the Urban Times an online magazine. He’s a planner by trade and an advocate for community-oriented urbanism.

By Andy Boenau
Urbanism Speakeasy
05/20/2013

Excerpts:

Why does the government make growing and selling your own food so difficult? The FDA approves sugary desserts and sodas but I can’t bottle my own milk and sell it to a neighbor. Is there any hope that local or state governments will get behind their constituents and make small-scale agriculture more attractive? [Spoiler alert: prohibition never ended in the United States.]

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Downtown Saskatoon’s 1.5 acre Food Bank Garden Patch.

Urban agriculture is a new way for the Food banks to supply nutritious emergency food while addressing underlying causes of hunger and food insecurity.

By Alison Robertson
Director of Community Development,
Saskatoon Food Bank and Learning Centre
July 26, 2012

If you are heading through downtown Saskatoon you will happen upon a somewhat unfamiliar sight – businesses owners, police officers, librarians, newcomers to Canada, and perhaps even the City’s mayor – all working together on a 1.5 garden parcel of once vacant land, now transformed into a beautiful, bountiful garden.

These community members from all walks of life have joined forces to grow food for hungry families in Saskatoon.

The Garden Patch is an innovative partnership between the City of Saskatoon and the Saskatoon Food Bank & Learning Centre. The City of Saskatoon has adopted a “Garden Site Policy” that allows community organizations to grow food on any vacant municipal land.

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Country farm and city skyscrape.

From rooftop apiaries in Paris to a vegetable-and-chicken farm in Philadelphia, agriculture has come to the city. Urban farmer Mary Seton Corboy and food writer Jennifer Cockrall-King talk about the future of food in the city. Plus, Tama Matsuoka Wong gives tasty tips for eating garden weeds.

By Ira Flatow, Host
NPR
May 18, 2012

Excerpt:

This is SCIENCE FRIDAY. I’m Ira Flatow. If you live in a big city, there’s no shortage of places to buy groceries. You’ve got your supermarkets, your delis, your farmers markets, your sidewalk fruit stands. It seems like a limitless supply of food, right? But if you stop the delivery trucks, experts say a city’s food would run out in just three days.

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Photo by Amy Senese.

Hear Feed ‘Em Freedom Grower at 31.30 minutes in the radio show. Slide the button forward to the chosen time.

By Krista Tippett
On Being – American Public Media
January 19, 2012

We travel to Detroit to meet the civil rights legend Grace Lee Boggs. We find the 96-year-old philosopher surrounded by creative, joyful people and projects that defy more familiar images of decline. It’s a kind of parallel urban universe with much to teach all of us about meeting the changes of our time. Radio interview here.

“Detroit, because we have this position in the history of the country and the world, is creating that alternative — not in words but in action,” she says. “There’s a group on the east side called Feed ‘Em Freedom Growers; if you don’t have food you can’t be free. Detroit has over 1,000 community gardens. Urban agriculture started very simply with some African-American women seeing some vacant lots.

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Amplify Baltimore Episode 2: Farmers’ Markets & City Farms.

“I sell to restaurants, I go to market on a weekly basis and I operate a small CSA.”

By Matt Purdy,
Baltimore, 88-1, WYPR
Sept 2011

Excerpt:

Abby Cocke is an environmental planner with the Office of Sustainability.

“There’s been a community gardening movement for many, many years which is just about encouraging self-reliance and community building and reusing of vacant spaces, building up of neighborhoods and at least as I’ve been able to see the urban agriculture movement has sort of sprung out of that, out of that energy and out of the energy of young people… to see can we make a living off of this, can we change the way that these food systems work, not just for me and my neighbors but for the whole city.”

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The International Rescue Committee’s New Roots Community Farm brings refugees together to share experiences and feel a connection to their new home through community gardening and nutrition and micro-enterprise programs. The farm is located on 54th Avenue and Chollas Parkway in City Heights. Photo by Photo by Ruxandra Guidi / KPBS.

Radio Series

By Megan Burke, Maureen Cavanaugh, Patty Lane
KPBS, San Diego State University

Monday Aug 29, 2011 – The Grow It Yourself movement (GIY).

Tuesday Aug 30 – We look at problems with urban farming, and how that might affect local refugee and immigrant communities.

Wednesday Aug 31 – Low water edibles and growing your own at home without a yard

Thursday Sept 1 – Local restaurants embracing community farming and bringing it to the table.

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Video by Simon and Schuster

Radio Interview with author Manny Howard

The Takeaway is a national morning news program that invites listeners to be part of the American conversation. Hosts John Hockenberry and Celeste Headlee, along with partners The New York Times, BBC World Service, WNYC, Public Radio International and WGBH Boston, deliver news and analysis and help you prepare for the day ahead.?May 19, 2010

For this week’s food segment, we talk with Manny Howard, a man who turned his tiny New York City backyard into a farm, complete with produce and livestock.

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Gardeners and Food Bank Planting Seeds for Urban Farming

Rachel Ward
WXXI Centre for Public Affairs
2010-05-06

Audio story: Listen here.
WXXI’s Rachel Ward reports on a coalition of urban agriculture advocates hoping to find a new way to deal with hunger in Rochester neighborhoods.

Excerpt:

ROCHESTER, NY (WXXI) – At first glance, the farm does not look promising. It’s overgrown with tall grasses and weeds. There’s a high brick wall surrounding it, which casts deep shadows over the cluster of apple trees. And there are kids running around everywhere.

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Brooke Salvaggio at Bad Seed, the urban farm she started at Bannister Road and State Line Road. Photo by Sylvia Maria Gross / KCUR.

Kansas City Council Considers Nurturing Urban Agriculture

By Sylvia Maria Gross
KCUR
2010-05-03

KCUR’s Sylvia Maria Gross recently visited a home farm in southwest Kansas City. Bad Seed Farm has become ground zero for the debate over urban agriculture. And real estate agent Stacey Johnson-Cosby, with the Center Planning and Development Council, weighs in with concerns about the proposed ordinance.

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Young Urban Farmers

The YUF garden system incorporates two styles of gardening: rasied garden beds and direct in-ground gardening. This allows us to utilize the best of both worlds to grow a variety of delicious produce.

Our raised bed planter measures 4×4 feet and is assembed in attractive, organized grids. This setup allows for 16 square feet of planting space, and a wide array of plants. Within each square a different type of plant can be planted, however it is recommended to choose your top 4 or 5 favourite fruits, vegetables or herbs to get a full harvest of each type.

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Angel Morgan P-Patch Community Garden in Seattle. Photo by Collin Dunn

Seattle radio interview with three experts

Steve Scher
KUOW Radio 94.9FM
04/28/2010

This year has been declared the year of urban agriculture in Seattle. Is urban agriculture more than just growing food in P–Patches and backyard gardens? What is local government doing to support food production within the city? Some urban areas in Asia produce more than 60 percent of their food within city limits. Could Seattle be that fertile? Is urban agriculture the way of the future, or simply a hobby for people who have backyards?

Guests:

Darrin Nordahl is the city designer at the Davenport Design Center in Davenport, Iowa. He has taught planning at the University of California at Berkeley, and is the is the city designer at the Davenport Design Center in Davenport, Iowa.

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Image from the Carrot City Slide Presentation w/Mark Gorgolewski.(Fairmont Hotel) See here.

Farming in the City XIII

by Jon Steinman – Deconstructing Dinner
Radio show broadcast
February 4, 2010

In November 2009, a panel discussion on urban agriculture was hosted by Backyard Bounty and the University of Guelph. The event was called Opportunities for Action: An Urban Agriculture Symposium and Deconstructing Dinner partner station CFRU recorded the panel. This episode hears from two of the panelists who both share innovative urban agriculture projects: the Carrot City exhibition – a collection of conceptual and realized ideas for sustainable urban food production, and the Diggable Communities Collaborative – a community garden initiative that demonstrates the importance of partnerships and the ways in which regional health authorities and local governments can support and implement local food system and urban agriculture planning.

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By Darrin Nordahl
Island Press (September 23, 2009)
200 pages

Public Produce makes a uniquely contemporary case not for central government intervention, but for local government involvement in shaping food policy. In what Darrin Nordahl calls “municipal agriculture,” elected officials, municipal planners, local policymakers, and public space designers are turning to the abundance of land under public control (parks, plazas, streets, city squares, parking lots, as well as the grounds around libraries, schools, government offices, and even jails) to grow food.

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Christoph Martens and Paul Hoepfner-Homme with the baby greens in one of their plots. The two hope to make food more local by using unused yards in and around Nelson.

“FARMING IN THE CITY XI (Nelson Urban Acres / Massachusetts Avenue Project)”

By Jon Steinman
Deconstructing Dinner
September 10, 2009

Nelson Urban Acres

Nelson Urban Acres is bringing fresh produce closer to home. They are a multi-plot urban farm in Nelson, British Columbia that launched into operation in 2009 based on the SPIN farming model. Co-founders Paul Hoepfner-Homme and Christoph Martens are working backyard gardens within the city using low-impact, organic farming techniques to grow fresh produce.

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Photo by Belinda Pryse. Elephant plant holders at Hyderabad hotel.

BBC’s OnePlanet: Farming in the City
By Andrew Luck-Baker
24 July 2008

Andrew Luck-Baker investigates the pros and cons of urban farming in India. Hyderabad is a city with a booming IT industry. Its streets are also home to thirty thousand buffalo – the animals behind the Indian city’s booming urban dairy businesses. But are the two compatible in a fast modernising city? And is re-using Hyderabad’s polluted waste water to grow vegetables good environmental practice – or a danger to consumers?

Link to BBC Hyderabad podcast.

IDRC Photo: by Frederick Ibanda (follow link). “Kampala residents have set up several flower and tree nurseries along the roads leading to residential districts; there they use polythene bags that once carried milk, fruit drinks and groceries as containers for seedlings. Also many residents now eat vegetables grown in re-used polythene bags.”

BBC’s OnePlanet: Farming in the City
By Andrew Luck-Baker
17 July 2008

“Andrew Luck-Baker goes in search of farmers growing crops and rearing livestock amid concrete and traffic, in this edition of One Planet.

“The world’s city dwellers now outnumber its rural folk, so it may become necessary to farm in cities in order to feed everyone. Andrew investigates how green urban agriculture is and whether it is safe.

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