Category — Policy

One of the proposed sites. 1.63 acres at 2518 Ridge Court, adjacent to the Douglas County United Way building.

14 sites totaling about 70 acres that could be used for the program

By Chad Lawhornon
Well Commons
October 31, 2011

Under her proposal, the city and county would “license” the property to the growers for a three-year period, although the city and the county would have broad authority to end the license. Horn said more discussion would be needed to determine what growers should pay the city and the county for use of the property.

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Mayor Gregor Robertson debates with NPA mayoral candidate Suzanne Anton.

The urban agriculture movement is gaining strength across B.C., enthusiastically adapted by everyone from businesses to backyard growers to pot-growers. So why is it being used as a wedge issue in Vancouver’s latest election?

By Peter Ladner
Crosscut
Nov 7, 2011
Peter Ladner is the founder of “Business in Vancouver” newspaper and a former Vancouver City Councillor. He is currently a Fellow at the Simon Fraser University Centre for Dialogue. His new book is named: The Urban Food Revolution: Changing the Way We Feed Cities.

Excerpt:

As the Nov. 19 municipal election deadline nears, the struggling right-of-center Non-Partisan Association (NPA) has been challenging the ruling Vision Vancouver party’s misspending through its Greenest City Action Plan. The one project singled out for high profile ridicule is the “wheat fields” — a modest $5,000 grant to the Environmental Youth Alliance dedicated to planting enough wheat in numerous front yards to harvest 100 pounds, redefine the notion of the “city farm,” and teach young people how bread is made. It’s definitely a stretch of taxpayer dollars, but hardly significant for a city with a $1 billion budget.

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Will Robb of Burlington, head of the city’s urban agriculture task force, is photographed Thursday beside a garden on South Winooski Avenue. Photo by Joel Banner Baird, Free Press

Our recommendations will reach the City Council and the new mayor’s desk in March 2012.

By Will Robb
Burlington Free Press
Nov. 4, 2011

Excerpt:

Farmers, small-scale food enterprise and backyard growers of all kinds are putting together programs, cultivating land and growing and serving food in a number of innovative ways. The city should be prepared to listen, to step in with support, help practitioners negotiate a maze of state, federal and local regulation, and to facilitate connections to resources and land.

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‘Vision Vancouver’ – Community gardens and food security

By VoteVision, Press Release
Vision is a Vancouver, BC, political party
Oct 25, 2011

Take a walk through the expanded Cottonwood Community Gardens on Raymur Avenue or the newly formed Mount Pleasant Gardens on Ontario and West 16th and you’ll see the potential for growing food in an urban setting. Tomatoes, bok choi and apple trees abound! Vision Vancouver sees the potential too – we even built a community garden at City Hall.

In 2010, Vision Vancouver established 450 new community garden plots in the city. It’s just one of the ways Vision Vancouver is support urban agriculture and food security. Vancouver now has approximately 3260 community garden plots.

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Written by Heather Wooten, MCP (PHLP) and Amy Ackerman, JD (Consulting Attorney)
The National Policy and Legal Analysis Network to Prevent Childhood Obesity (NPLAN)
October 2011 – 40 pages

Introduction – Excerpt

Communities can support, promote, and preserve urban agriculture through land use laws. Land use policies can assist in securing access to and ensuring the preservation of land for agricultural uses. Zoning regulations can ensure that agriculture occurs in suitable locations and under the proper conditions. But there is no one-size-fits-all urban agricultural land use policy. Urban areas vary in availability of land for agriculture, population density, soil suitability, and resident interest. This toolkit sets forth a framework and model language for urban agriculture land use policies that communities can tailor to their particular context and needs.

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First lady Michelle Obama visits Growing Power Urban Farm, Tuesday, Oct. 25, 2011, in Chicago with Mayor Rahn Emanuel. The farm is a seven acre site on the city’s South Side that produces healthy food year round. (AP Photo/M. Spencer Green)

Michelle Obama Urges Mayors to Adopt Chicago’s Food-Desert Fight

By Blair Euteneuer
Bloomberg
Oct 25, 2011

Excerpt:

The first lady joined Emanuel and eight other mayors, along with chief executive officers of several food retailers. Emanuel announced one of Chicago’s major urban farm networks, Growing Power, has signed a memorandum of understanding with Walgreen Co. and Aldi to sell locally grown produce. The farms would offer job opportunities and economic development.

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Kitchen Gardeners International

Roger Doiron is founding director of Kitchen Gardeners International, a network of people taking a hands-on approach to re-localizing the global food supply. Doiron is an advocate for new policies, technologies, investments, and fresh thinking about the role of gardens. His successful petition to replant a kitchen garden at the White House attracted broad international recognition. He is also a writer, photographer, and public speaker.

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Here, herbs growing at the edge of sidewalks, traffic noise and the looming skyline identify it as City Farm, a 1-acre farm on unused city property in downtown Chicago. Photo by Brett T. Roseman for USA TODAY.

The city’s new rules “put urban agriculture on the map,” says Andy Rozendaal

By Judy Keen
USA TODAY
9/20/2011

Excerpt:

In Salt Lake City, the City Council voted this spring to allow the sale of produce without a business license and eased rules for greenhouses and plastic-covered “hoop houses.”

“We have a great tradition of making the desert bloom here,” says Councilman Luke Garrott. Besides the nutritional advantages of locally grown food, he says, “there are also the community considerations. Social capital gets built.”

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Children growing on church land amongst the tombstones. Photo by Arthur Edwards.

“By growing and sharing their own food, people are building independence from global supply chains and a degree of resilience, cushioning the impact of shortages or price rises.”

By Julian Dobson
Urban Pollinators
October 2011

Excerpt:

‘You have to act to hope.’ Todmorden shows how such action can become viral.

The town’s schools are just one example. Every local primary school was given a disused pleasure boat to use as a planter. One school got permission to grow vegetables in a graveyard. All of them have now clubbed together to plant their own orchard.

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Esperanza Pallana, a leader in the Oakland urban farming movement, picks Brandywine tomatoes in her backyard, where she grows Fuji apples, figs, berries and other crops. Oakland now allows her to sell the produce, but Pallana also has animals she would like to slaughter for meat for herself. Photo by Manny Crisostomo/Mcrisostomo.

“It doesn’t matter what animal you own, whether it’s livestock or domesticated cats and dogs, you need to be a responsible neighbor and clean up after your animals.”

By Grace Rubenstein
Sacramento Bee
Oct. 9, 2011

Excerpt:

However, eco-friendly arguments don’t soothe residents like Ian Elwood, co-founder of a group called Neighbors Opposed to Backyard Slaughter. Well-meaning as urban farmers might be, he said, their ignorance and inexperience leads to animal suffering.

“People are learning through do-it-yourself,” he said. “But when you forget to water the chard, the chard dies and it’s not that painful for anyone.” With a chicken, Elwood said, such errors amount to abuse or neglect.

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“If you’re living in an owned or rented unit you will be able to legally sell produce that you grow on the lot.”

By Lee Romney in Oakland
Los Angeles Times
October 4, 2011

Excerpt:

“With this simple but important change, Oakland residents will now be able to start their own locally-grown food micro-enterprises,” said Esperanza Pallana, owner of the home-based Pluck & Feather Farm and co-founder of the East Bay Urban Agriculture Alliance.

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Illustration: Tavis Coburn.

While we’re busy teaching our kids to tend school gardens, they’re failing provincial tests in reading, writing and math. The folly of the new enviro-propaganda

By Jan Wong
Toronto Life
October 2011

Excerpt:

This fall, hundreds of Toronto students are harvesting beets and zucchini from their school gardens. I say: nice photo op, bad idea. The argument for school gardens assumes that by grubbing in the dirt, kids will learn to love eating vegetables. They won’t think chickens hatch into this world as deep-fried nuggets. And they’ll develop a respect for nature.

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Mayor Colin Haime.

He (the Mayor) still doesn’t believe that current residential lots are the appropriate place to grow food because of the conflicts between neighbours growing food creates, namely composting and manure practices.

By Toby Gorman
Nanaimo News Bulletin
September 28, 2011

Excerpt:

Better use of Lantzville’s Agricultural Land Reserves could solve the community’s urban agriculture issue, but critics say Mayor Colin Haime’s plan won’t take root.

Over the last 10 months, a group of urban agriculture supporters demanded council amend its zoning bylaw to allow small-scale farming on residential lots.

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Growing Towards Food Self Reliance: A Whole Community Agricultural Strategy – District of North Saanich: A Place to Live, Work, Play and Grow Food!

This strategy was prepared by the District of North Saanich staff
Robert Buchan, Jessica Lam, Adam Fitch, Mark Brodrick
District of North Saanich, British Columbia
Agricultural Strategy, February, 2011

Excerpts:

“Non-traditional agriculture” which we define as small scale food production operations (plants and animals) on land not traditionally associated with farm business operations. Examples of non-traditional farming include residential yards (back, side and front), public road boulevards, community gardens, community orchards, roof tops, and green spaces in multi-family, institutional (e.g., schools) and commercial developments.

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See social media at work.

“All the people on Facebook saying that it’s okay, yeah it’s okay to them … they don’t have to smell it everyday. — Neighbour.”

By Hannah Sayle
Memphis Flyer
Sep 23, 2011

Excerpt:

After a social media outcry to the tune of thousands of supporters, and even some national media attention, Guerrero’s story moves toward a happy resolution: He will keep his front yard garden trimmed, install a bubbler and introduce mosquito-eating fish into his backyard pond, reduce the number of on-site worm bins, and install mesh covers on his rain barrels to keep mosquitoes out.

“I never said you could not have a garden,” said Potter, clearly concerned about the negative attention his court has received of late. “That’s inaccurate. I’ve always encouraged environmental activism, sustainability, going green, and blight reduction.”

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The Chicago Lights Urban Farm in the Cabrini-Green neighborhood, a garden run in collaboration with Growing Power Inc. Image via ChicagoLights.org.

An opportunity to train youth, create economic development and create tax revenue for the city.

By Judith Nemes
Chicago Business, Crain’s Blogs
Sept 22, 2011

Excerpts:

Crain’s: Why is this new ordinance getting rave reviews from the urban farming community?

Ms. Allen: It legitimizes urban agriculture as an enterprise or a business that hasn’t been on the books before. Chicago always had farms within the city limits, but the new ordinance creates a space where we can begin to create economic opportunities within our communities, especially in areas where food deserts are a direct result of unemployment and little economic opportunity.

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Jodi Peters and Jeffery Radke are fighting back against orders to tear down their garden. Photo by Matthew Burrows.

Tenants challenge explicit orders to remove their veggie patch.

By Matthew Burrows
Georgia Straight
September 14, 2011

Excerpt:

Two gardening renters in East Vancouver are headed to provincial arbitration on September 30. This will come after their landlords demanded they dig up their extensive vegetable garden, and remove a greenhouse and rain barrel, along with other instructions sent in writing on August 5 and 14.

“It was like an absolute slap in the face,” Jodi Peters, project coordinator with the Environmental Youth Alliance and an avid gardener, told the Georgia Straight while sitting in the back yard of their multi-unit dwelling at 1922 Adanac Street.

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Jardin du marché rue Ontario is a small oasis in an alley at the corner of Ontario and d’Iberville Sts.: Projects like this one are springing up as interest grows in urban agriculture. Photograph by: Pierre Obendrauf, The Gazette.

Urban agriculture could possibly be discussed in public consultations that are planned for early 2012

By Monique Beaudin
Gazette Environment Reporter
September 17, 2011

Excerpt:

Demand for a plot in one of Montreal’s 97 city-owned community gardens is so high some people wait as long as four years to get a plot, said Marie-Ève Chaume of the Conseil régional de l’environnement de Montréal. But even these internationally-renowned community gardens, where residents can use a small plot of city-owned land to grow vegetables or flowers, are threatened, Chaume said. Three were shut down four years ago because their soil was contaminated, and Mayor Gérald Tremblay personally intervened last year to stop the city from selling a community garden to a developer.

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Adam Guerrero’s Garden.

Seeds of Discontent

By Hannah Sayle
Memphis Flyer
Sept 15, 2011

Excerpt:

Adam Guerrero and three kids from his neighborhood, Jovantae, Jarvis, and Shaquielle, hardly seem like lawbreakers as they turn over soil at Guerrero’s Nutbush home.

But the city’s code enforcement department has deemed their urban garden a nuisance, and a judge has ordered them to remove the small ecosystem they’ve been working on for the last two years.

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Brothers and co-directors of Matthew 25, Courtney Ball (left) and Clint Twedt-Ball, walk down G Avenue NW as they discuss their proposed Ellis Urban Village in the Time Check neighborhood. Taken on Wednesday , June 8, 2011. Photo by Cliff Jette/SourceMedia Group.

Brothers proposed plan for “small plot intensive farming” in Cedar Rapids

By Rick Smith
The Gazette
15 September 2011

Excerpt:

CEDAR RAPIDS — Urban farming has gotten a boost from the City Planning Commission.

On Thursday, the commission endorsed a proposal to amend the city’s zoning ordinance to allow urban farms in every zoning category in the city.

The City Council will take up the matter next.

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