Category — United States

Donovan Eason, 11, of Brightmoor asks if his plant is root bound while planting tomatoes at the Brightmoor Youth garden in Detroit. The garden is a part of the Brightmoor Farmway, a neighborhood development project that encourages neighbors to turn vacant land into food-bearing gardens. The youth garden has a stand at the Northwest Detroit Farmer’s Market. Photo by Kimberly P. Mitchell/Detroit Free Press.

“A sense of accomplishment in a community that has seen so much divestment.”

By Megha
Detroit Free Press
May 20, 2013

Excerpt:

n front yards, backyards and on vacant land where nothing but weeds and debris used to be, an urban farm belt is forming, bringing neighbors back to the earth where just a few years ago, no one would come outside.

“In 2006, there was nobody on these streets. Some people had lived here for 30 years and were utterly discouraged,” said Riet Schumack, the woman at the center of the farmway taking over the area near Fenkell and Eliza Howell Park.

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Jeremy Andrews, CEO Of Sprout Urban Farms with Employees Rebecca Spicer, Left, and Devon Gibson, Right, inside their Greenhouse in Battle Creek, Michigan. Photo by Erik Holladay.

“The average farmer today is 60 years old,” says Spicer. “We need to open up farming as an option for kids to consider when choosing a career.”

By Zinta Aistars
SouthWest Michigan
April 25, 2013

Excerpt:

Sprout Urban Farms grew quickly, and soon included all of these things.

Bright Star Farm became the one community garden. Compost Happens became the community compost project with a focus on youth engagement and environmental stewardship. Fresh on Wheels is the mobile market partnership between Sprout Urban Farms and the Battle Creek Community Foundation. The GreenFist Project is a gardening youth internship made up of youth, ages 16 to 23, from many of the school districts surrounding Battle Creek.

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Food Field, sits on the old site of Peck Elementary in Detroit (formerly a convent).

Food Field is a new urban farm on four acres in Detroit’s Durfee neighborhood, between Boston-Edison and Highland Park. Since May 2011 we have harvested several thousand pounds of organic produce, built relationships with local chefs and neighbors, raised a large hoop house for year-round growing, and hired an intern and neighborhood teens. Our goal is to build a sustainable business feeding Detroit and create real alternatives to our corporate food system, while bringing jobs, resources and benefits back to our community.

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Stanford Daily – ‘Breaking News from the Farm since 1892’

By Graciela Watrous
The Stanford Daily
May 9, 2013

Excerpts:

Unlikely as it sounds, Detroit has no real shortage of small-scale urban farms. In the last couple of years it has been estimated that there are as many as 355 urban agricultural farms and gardens in the city. Most of them are small, and many of them are non-profit community gardens. Detroit Black Community Food Security Network, for example, runs one of the more successful community gardens within the city limits. It hosts a 1.5-acre vegetable garden and an apple orchard. Several other NGOs have sprung up in the last couple of years, like Greening of Detroit, which has given the urban agricultural movement in Detroit legitimacy and force.

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River School Farm wins USDA’s Value Added Producer Grant

By Jason Hidalgo
rgj.com
May 1, 2013

Excerpt:

Score one for urban farming.

At least that was the mindset for Monique Monteverde, who sounded like a lottery winner after realizing that Reno-based River School Farm was awarded a grant by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

“Really?” said the River School Farm director over the phone. “That’s so cool!”

The farm was one of 110 producers across the country who were awarded the annual grant on Wednesday through the USDA’s Value Added Producer Grant or VAPG program.

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Lu Than, team member; Jon Hopkins, PhillyEarth director; Eric Fulks, Bonzai House Photo by Kim Glovas.

North Philadelphia Urban Farm Project Hoping To Attract Young People

By Kim Glovas
CBS Philadelphia
March 9, 2013

Excerpt:

A North Philadelphia urban farm project is gearing up for the planting season and is hoping to attract young people to become part of the effort.

Philly Earth was created last year with the help of director Jon Hopkins.

It’s a farm tended by young people in the area surrounding the 2500 block of Germantown Avenue.

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New video of his Vancouver talk

Artist and designer Ron Finley couldn’t help but notice what was going on in his backyard. “South Central Los Angeles,” he quips, “home of the drive-thru and the drive-by.” And it’s the drive-thru fast-food stands that contribute more to the area’s poor health and high mortality rate, with one in two kids contracting a curable disease like Type 2 diabetes.

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While the Silicon Valley of Apple and Facebook is no longer a land of blossoms and orchards, Chinese farmers like the Kuangs continue to wage a battle for farmland preservation in Santa Clara County.

Farming Silicon Valley

By Li Miao Lovett
HYPHEN – Asia America Unabridged
Issue Number 26
Li Miao Lovett is an award-winning writer who has contributed to the San Francisco Chronicle, KQED’s Perspectives and Narrative Magazine, Earth Island Journal, China Rights Forum and National Radio Project’s Making Contact.

Excerpt:

Bob and Judy Kuang’s farm begins where a cul-de-sac ends in the tiny town of San Martin, CA. It’s about 30 miles south of San Jose and home to some of the country’s most expensive real estate. At first glance, it might not even be recognizable as a working farm.

The vegetables grown there Chinese celery (gao choy or chives) gau gei (leaves of Chinese wolfberry) and gai lan, which looks and tastes nothing like Western broccoli despite its common nickname (“Chinese broccoli”) are hidden from sight in a greenhouse. The only thing that catches the eye is a cottage with corrugated tin panels. That’s where the field hand lives.

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Indoor farm.

The Urban Farm: A New American Frontier

By Erin Sund
Food and Nutrition Magazine
February 26, 2013

Excerpt:

Growing Power’s Erika Allen is a board member of the Chicago Food Policy Advisory Council, a network working to improve Chicago residents’ access to “culturally appropriate, nutritionally sound and affordable food that is grown through environmentally sustainable practices.”

CFPAC addresses key issues facing the growth of Chicago agriculture. For example, composting is heavily regulated because it can attract rodents and generate seepage if done incorrectly. Obtaining the proper city licenses for indoor farming is also a challenge, according to The Plant’s Hoekstra. “The City of Chicago had never seen an indoor farm and wasn’t sure how to license us, but after a number of meetings and a lot of inspections, the requirements have been clarified and we’re moving forward with success,” she says.

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The number of empty plots and abandoned homes, and estimates vary wildly, going as high as 100,000

By Nick Carey
Reuters
February 19, 2013

Excerpt:

There are also an estimated 2,000 city gardens, which environmental activist Shea Howell says popped up years before the idea of urban farming surfaced. “They are operated extra-legally or illegally, but the city has bigger things to worry about than going after someone raising a few chickens,” she said.

Kirk Mayes of the Brightmoor Alliance, in one of the city’s poorest areas, says there are 200 community gardens in Brightmoor alone. As farming is imagined for Detroit’s future, abandoned land would provide fruit and vegetables to the city’s inhabitants, for whom fresh food is often not accessible because grocery stores are few and far between.

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Mayor says: “In one swoop, you’d be solving a real problem in terms of the degradation of one of our commercial corridors by an obsolete land use (the motels), and creating the supports for workforce development and job creation in the ag sector.”

By Story by Allen Young
Comstock Magazine
Feb. 2013

Excerpt:

The ‘growtel’, an informal city proposal that so far lacks a dedicated funding source, would alleviate a number of West Sacramento’s challenges, including urban blight, undernourishment and unemployment. About a fifth of the city’s 50,000 residents live below the poverty line, and 17.5 percent of Yolo County residents are food insecure. There is also a growing acknowledgement that conventional farming methods are unsustainable. California’s $38 billion agriculture sector is experiencing attrition despite a need for increased output.

“The hard part is not convincing people to try to grow food. The hard part is showing you can actually make a living doing it,” says Dan Gannon, a 32-year-old, third-year farmer who operates a half-acre farm on the outskirts of West Sacramento.

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Painting by Abbi Canney.

Kate Canney wasn’t going to let living in a suburban environment keep her from gardening. She created The Neighborhood Farm to pursue her passion.

By Farm Aid
Mother Earth News
February 7, 2013

Excerpt:

Faced with the challenge of land access in a suburban environment just outside of Boston, Kate formed the idea to use private yards within the community as her starting ground. The idea has since sprouted into The Neighborhood Farm: nearly four acres of gardens spread among seven different spaces dedicated to growing produce that Kate sells at local farmers markets.

Access to farmland is a challenge that plagues prospective farmers nationwide. The 2007 National Resources Inventory Report found, “Every minute, America has been losing more than an acre of farmland to urban sprawl and development.”

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The 1.4-acre lot at 28th and Peralta streets aims to create a more reliable source of fresh produce.

By Madeleine Key
East Bay Express
January 30, 2013

Excerpt:

In the last decade, organizations such as People’s Grocery, Phat Beets Produce, and City Slicker Farms have emerged to create a more equitable food system in Oakland. But while the growing urban agricultural movement has led to an increase in urban homesteading and farming, the issue of land security remains a top challenge, because most people lease or rent the land they farm on. Now, the nonprofit City Slicker Farms (which, in the interest of full disclosure, I have volunteered for in the past) hopes to change that dynamic.

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In addition to potentially fostering a spirit of community, urban farming efforts can bolster the local economy by stimulating use of the Harvest Kitchen, a food-processing center in Providence. Photos by Nayhaniel Wood.

Providence’s Lots of Hope partnership seeks to expand thriving urban agriculture practices

By Katherine Cusumano
The Brown Daily Herald
February 5, 2013

Excerpt:

The plot of land at the corner of Slocum and Almy Streets in Providence’s West Side has seen better days — the old building’s brown paint is peeling, slats are stripping from its walls and a fading sign reads “Providence Head Start,” a faint trace of the school it once housed.

But the parking lot out front is home to rows upon rows of dirt mounds out of which small shrubs and plants, the remnants of last year’s planting season, are visible. A small stone Buddha rests under a gnarly tree. In the back, massive piles of compost wait for the next season of planting.

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Mayor Angel Taveras of Providence, Rhode Island.

Providence aims to turn abandoned urban plots into community gardens in midst of economic stagnation

“A lot of people are doing this for subsistence,” King said. “We shouldn’t always romanticize urban farming.”

By Chad Simon
Brown Daily Herald
February 5, 2013

Excerpt:

Mayor Angel Taveras announced a partnership with Southside Community Land Trust and the Rhode Island Foundation Jan. 14 in a project aimed at renovating the vacant lots that sprinkle the city’s undeveloped land parcels and turning them into small farming plots.

The Florida-based Local Sustainability Matching Fund and the Rhode Island Foundation together provided the project, Lots of Hope, with $100,000 to put toward developing urban farms throughout Providence and its surrounding urban areas.

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From left, Nataka Crayton-Walker, Greg Bodine, and Bobby Walker at a City Growers micro-farm in Dorchester. Photo by Leise Jones/City Growers.

Urban farming fits into a broader vision by Mayor Thomas M. Menino’s office that would ensure access to healthy, local, nutritious food at fair prices for all Bostonians.

By Patricia Harris and David Lyon
The Boston Globe
Feb 1, 2013

Excerpt:

Glynn Lloyd, CEO of Roxbury-based City Fresh Foods catering company, had an epiphany a couple of years back. “I was standing in the kitchen at City Fresh and realized that we were buying all this lettuce from California and paying a pretty good dollar for it,” he recalls. “Then I was driving up Harold Street [in Roxbury] and I just noticed vacant lot, vacant lot, vacant lot, vacant lot. I said, ‘We are going to get land and start growing food.’?”

He was hardly the only one with that idea. Margaret Connors, a public-school wellness coordinator, was concerned that school meals had so little local food. She met Lloyd when City Fresh catered meals after her school’s kitchen broke down. They started talking, and together they hatched a for-profit, urban-farming company dedicated to providing farm-to-table produce, creating jobs, and bringing vacant neighborhood land back into productive use. They call it City Growers.

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Whitaker Farm Draft Proposal.

Three acres would be committed to a “Farm-to-School” market garden

By Larry Bingham
The Oregonian
January 30, 2013

Excerpts:

The site of the former Whitaker Middle School, demolished in 2007, could become a national model for urban community farming if a proposal unveiled Wednesday night moves forward.

The Whitaker Community Farm project would be a temporary, 5-year use of the vacant site owned by Portland Public Schools.

If the site is OK, it would be divided into three areas, said Weston Miller, community and urban horticulturist with the Oregon State University Extension Service.

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“We are excited to be aligned with Mayor Don Grebien’s Pawtucket Culinary Arts Initiative.”

By Ethan Shorey
The Valley Breeze
1/29/2013

Excerpt:

The New Urban Farmers started the Urban Food Lab for many reasons, mostly because we saw a need for a community food hub in Pawtucket. We wanted a place where people could learn about food and where our locally grown produce could go get ready for market or be processed into a value-added product.

We see the Urban Food Lab as the umbrella that covers all of what we do here at New Urban Farmers, from planting seeds to making sauerkraut. We feel it is important for all communities to have healthy and green places. We do it through farming. We see more food being grown locally and more people eating from those local harvests and benefiting from better health.

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Gary Wozniak, representing RecoveryPark is standing in a field that he wants to use for urban agriculture in Detroit. RecoveryPark is the brainchild of Gary Wozniak, a former stockbroker and recovering addict who is director of development for SHAR, a nonprofit addiction recovery agency headquartered on Detroit’s west side.

RecoveryPark has raised $1.4 million of the $15 million needed to start.

By Gary Anglebrandt
Crain’s Detroit Business
Jan 20, 2012

Excerpt:

RecoveryPark, the nonprofit seeking to create an indoor tilapia farm on Detroit’s east side, is in talks with the city to acquire nearly half of a three-square-mile area just east of Eastern Market.

The nonprofit would use the land for urban agriculture and to spin off for-profit food production and distribution businesses using the farm products grown there.

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Photo by Kevin.

Adventures of a San Jose urban farmer

By Kevin’s Edible Yard
Oct 2012

Excerpt:

Sometimes you visit people and you want to bring them something. A Lady Gaga poster may be something you’d like in your house, but giving it as a gift is very risky. What if your host prefers the old school beats of The Commodores? Giving food is a great idea because it’s not something that sticks around to clutter the house. And what is better than the food you grow in your own yard!

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