Category — United States

Rainbow Chard growing in deep winter. Photo by Eco-City Farms.

By Tracey Gold Bennett,
Washington Informer
03 January 2012

Excerpt:

Our urban farm in Prince George’s County is a response to the fact that roughly 70 percent of all county residents are overweight or obese, and diet-related diseases amongst Port Town’s adults and youth have reached epidemic proportions. There are many pockets of the county that are documented food deserts– meaning that food access is limited to snack foods at corner markets, convenience stores or take-out restaurants, with few healthy or nutritious options.

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Soil Born Farms from Soil Born Farms on Vimeo.

Soil Born Farms Apprentice 2011

By Emily Pearson
December, 2011

When Shawn Harrison speaks he has the uncanny ability to make people listen. This has come in handy during his years as co-founder and director of non-profit Soil Born Farms – an urban agriculture and education program that is changing the way his native town of Sacramento thinks about food. The project’s home base, the American River Ranch is a testament to his vision and to the possibilities that urban agriculture holds for transforming our food system in North America.

The 40-acre property sits on one of the oldest pieces of agricultural land in California and is home to the multi-pronged approach that Soil Born Farms has to changing the way we think, interact and experience our natural and agricultural environment. Behind the organization’s many lofty goals and activities lies a powerful mission statement. Created in 2000, Soil Born Farms aims to “create an urban agriculture and education project that empowers youth and adults to discover and participate in a local food system that encourages healthy living, nurtures the environment and grows a sustainable community.”

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Whole Foods Market ‘urban farming’ series

YellowTree Farm’ – Looking for more time together and less time selling cars, Justin and Danielle set out to make a living by farming their small St. Louis backyard. Radishes, bees, quail and local chefs are all parts of the business plan; happiness, the bonus.

See the first 4 videos in this excellent series here.

Photo by Patrick Crouch.

28 lots, $3,000 — that’s a lot of work.

By Patrick Crouch
Grist
Dec 8, 2011
Patrick Crouch manages a 2.5 acre organic farm which is part of a soup kitchen in Detroit. He also serves on the Detroit Food Policy Council and blogs at Little House on the Urban Prairie.

Excerpt:

Edith Floyd is the real deal. With little in the way of funding or organizational infrastructure, she runs Growing Joy Community Garden on the northeast side of Detroit. Not many folks bother to venture out to her neighborhood, but Edith has been inspiring me for years. I caught up with her on a cold rainy November afternoon. While we talked in the dining room, her husband Henry watched their grandkids.

Q. You haven’t always been an urban farmer. What did you do before this?

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See the Voice of America video here.

D-Town Farm in Detroit

By Selah Hennessy
Voice of America
November 17, 2011

Excerpt:

D-Town is a 1.6-hectare farm that grows 35 different kinds of fruit and vegetables. Volunteers plant the farm together and in return get a discount on produce. Hunt says the aim is to give Detroit’s residents access to fresh food.

“One of the things we can do by doing this, by having people who don’t farm, who don’t have gardens in the back yard, have them come out here and see how easy it is to plant whatever it is that’s planted,” she added. “It’s like simple. You can do it in the back yard. You can grow enough in the back yard to feed everybody.”

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“There’s a lot of interest out there,” he said. “We’re very open to selling all the lots we have for useful purposes.” Otis Williams, deputy executive director with the St. Louis Development Corp.

By Georgina Gustin
St Louis Today
Nov 4, 2011

Excerpts:

The couple, both 35, have secured city approval to buy a derelict one-third-acre lot at 4539 Delmar Boulevard and start farming it next year. They plan to take on trainees who will eventually do the same thing on other properties throughout the city, transforming vacant eyesores while providing jobs and healthful produce in the process.

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Green City Growers’ CEO Mary Donnell.

New Urban Farm Joins Cleveland’s Central Neighborhood

By Anne Glausser
Ideastream
Oct 17, 2011

Excerpt:

DONNELL: We’re looking at 10 acres of ground that has been assembled in the heart of Cleveland, in the Central neighborhood, where we’ll be building out a 3.25-acre greenhouse for year-round food production of leafy greens and herbs.

Right now they’re clearing and leveling the land–you can hear the backhoes in the distance. They’re prepping to pour the foundation for the greenhouse which the for-profit company is paying for through loans.

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Jesse DuBois is an urban agriculturalist. He moved to Los Angeles to become a screenwriter, but instead got caught up in reshaping the food system. He is the CoFounder and currently serves as the Chief Eclectic Officer for two start-ups: Farmscape, an urban farming maintenance company, and Agrisaurus, a web-based polyculture gardening assistant. Horticulturally, he is a big fan of the nightshade family.

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Delicious kale chips. Photo by Lucinda Chua.

50,000 vacant properties – no shortage of land

By Jon Bingham-Hall and Lucinda Chua
Situated Urban Research Detroit
Oct 15, 2011

Excerpt:

Joel Howrani Heeres came to Detroit to follow work but fell in love with the draw of a lifestyle that would be almost impossible to achieve in other American cities. With average house prices at $7500 and land in no shortage, young people have an unequalled opportunity to buy city-center properties on huge green plots. Joel and his partner Ana have used this opportunity by turning their land into a productive kitchen garden.

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Detroit public school teacher and urban farmer Paul Weertz with his working 50 year-old Ford tractor in the back of his house on Farnsworth Street.

Weertz has been buying up abandoned homes and vacant parcels of land in his neighborhood for years.

By Jon Kalish
Make Magazine
September, 2011

Excerpt:

I’ve seen terrible urban ghettos in my time, but nothing prepared me for the shock of driving through Detroit neighborhoods where so many houses were crumbling, boarded up or missing altogether. In the midst of that depressing landscape I met Paul Weertz, who lives alone in the Farnsworth neighborhood.

Well, not totally alone. The 58 year-old public school teacher has a dozen chickens and ten beehives that belong to a neighborhood “honey co-op.” He has about an acre of fruit trees and veggies growing on ten vacant lots behind his house. The day I came by, his working 1960 Ford tractor was parked a few paces away from a huge pungent patch of basil. Weertz’s sister was about to go pick peaches. The slim urban farmer walked over to his tractor and looked at a gauge that reported more than 2,000 hours of use since Weertz bought it 20 years ago.

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Video about Rachel Hoff and Tom Ferguson’s “Dog Island Farm”. No. 3 in Whole Foods “Grow” series.

No groceries for a year – Vallejo couple tries it

By Lauren Reed-Guy
San Francisco Chronicle
September 4, 2011

Excerpts:

The dogs are the first to greet you as you enter Rachel Hoff and Tom Ferguson’s yard, a wagging welcome committee to the couple’s quarter-acre garden, aptly nicknamed Dog Island Farm.

Brimming with everything from cornstalks to honeybees, the garden has been the couple’s primary source of food for the past year, as they decided to forgo grocery stores in favor of the bounty of their Vallejo backyard.

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Urban agriculture functions as a catalyst for larger food system transformations.

By the Urban Design Lab
The Earth Institute and Columb1a University
Prepared by Kubi Ackerman
Project Team:
Richard Plunz, Urban Design Lab, Columbia University
Michael Conard, Urban Design Lab, Columbia University
Ruth Katz, Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture
Sarah Brennan, Lenfest Center for Sustainable Energy, Columbia University Patricia Culligan, School of Engineering and Applied Science, Columbia University
2011, 112 pages

Excerpt:

Key findings in brief

• Urban agriculture can play a critical role as productive green urban infrastructure. There is significant potential for urban agriculture to provide critical environmental services to the city through stormwater runoff mitigation, soil remediation, and energy use reduction. At a time when municipalities are straining to address complex infrastructural challenges with limited budgets, productive urban green spaces will be increasingly important in their capacity to function as a cost-effective form of small scale, distributed green infrastructure.

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Thayne Tagge displays a cantaloupe grown on land Salt Lake County is leasing near the Holladay Lions Recreation Center. The county leased three parcels as part of its urban farming initiative; Tagge says Holladay soil is particularly productive for melons. Photo by Erin Alberty | The Salt Lake Tribune.

Tagge’s fruits and vegetables are sold at the Holladay stand, at the South Valley Unitarian Church.

By Erin Alberty
The Salt Lake Tribune
Aug 15 2011 04

Excerpt:

That’s the goal of the farming leases, said Julie Peck-Dabling, director of Salt Lake County’s urban farming program. The three parcels — one in Holladay and two in Draper — were originally bought for future parks land, but funding shortages left them undeveloped.

“It actually takes staff time to go out there a few times a year and cut the weeds and spray them,” Peck-Dabling said. Until the space is converted to parks, leasing the land to local farmers is more productive, she said.

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The urban farm in the Buckeye neighborhood of Cleveland is surrounded by homes and a busy road. Photo by David Joseph for The New York Times.

“Maybe there’s 40 to 50 acres under urban farming,” in Cleveland. “Maybe up to 100 acres.”

By Michael Tortorello
New York Times
August 3, 2011

Excerpt:

THIS city contains 20,000 vacant lots, more or less. Probably more. Every year, demolition crews knock down another 1,000 houses. And the housing market being what it is, few souls are returning.

A vacant lot may be a lot of things: an eyesore, a dump, a symbol of American industrial decline. But one thing it is not is vacant. When we leave a yard behind, the bulk of the biomass does not follow us in a U-Haul. Put another way, a dandelion is unmoved by foreclosure. It lingers where it pleases.

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Sisha Ortúzar on NYC’s Most Urban Farm.

The Riverpark Farm, created under the direction of Chef/Partner Sisha Ortúzar, is already supplying fresh produce to the adjacent Riverpark restaurant, making innovative use of one of New York City’s 600+ stalled construction sites

Press Release:
New York, August 3, 2011 – The Riverpark restaurant and the Alexandria CenterTM for Life Science – New York City today announced the creation of New York City’s most urban farm, the 15,000 square foot Riverpark Farm at Alexandria Center. The Farm’s large scale, direct connection to the restaurant, highly urban location, and operation within one of the city’s 600+ stalled construction sites distinguish it from all other urban farms in New York. The Farm is a landmark example of the temporary alternative use of a stalled site to stimulate local interest and economic activity, benefit the environment, beautify an area, and engage the community.

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Image via The Wall Street Journal.

Herbs and vegetables common in Latin America, such as yerba buena (“good herb”), cilantro and tomatillos, grew alongside Italian staples like basil and tomatoes next to African-American classics like collard greens.

By Sophia Hollander
Wall Street Journal
Aug 1, 2011

Excerpt:

The 2.5-acre plot is actually a working farm in the heart of the Bronx called La Finca del Sur, yielding 30 pounds of produce a week at peak harvest. Wedged between Metro North tracks, the Major Deegan and the Grand Concourse, it is the largest of a growing network of farms across the Bronx that health and government officials say will soon rival Brooklyn and Manhattan’s more celebrated web of local food producers.

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An Urban Farm is more about the compilation of these various elements than a large space dedicated to growing food.

Written By Jay Rosenberg
Hayes Valley Farm
14 June 2011

Excerpt:

For a brief period of time, we have been granted the opportunity to research, educate and demonstrate what an Urban Farm could be. Recently, as the city has come to an agreement to sell a portion of the farm for development, we have been engaged in a series of meetings at City Hall to scout locations for future farms.

At the same time, the San Francisco Urban Agriculture Alliance realized a tremendous success when Mayor Ed Lee signed the “Salad Bill,” further advancing the city’s priority on urban agriculture. This has been a very exciting time!

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City Farm Spreads the Urban Farming Gospel

Photos and text by Frank Carini
ecoRI News staff
July 3, 2011

Excerpt:

PROVIDENCE — There’s an urban farming revolution underway in Rhode Island, and City Farm deserves much of the credit.

The three-quarter of an acre farm in the heart of South Providence has served as an outdoor classroom for three decades. Kids, college students and inspired backyard gardeners have visited this urban oasis for a food-growing education. Its bounty and beauty — cultivated for the past nine years by Rich Pederson — has inspired apprentices, interns and volunteers to grow fruits and vegetables in vacant lots, on porches and in backyards.

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We have ten sites, over a half-acre of land (distributed around the city), and over a hundred volunteers!

The Urban Farm Collective began in 2009, educating, growing and sharing food in inner NE Portland, Oregon and exchanging produce exclusively via a barter system. The first year we grew on just one lot; by the next year we’d grown to four sites.

This year, we have been accepted as a project of Oregon Sustainable Agriculture Land Trust and have the opportunity to take on five new plots, bringing our total garden space up to more than 1/2 acre.

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The penitentiary at Leavenworth has its own garden that inmates maintain. Last year 4,597 families benefited from the fresh produce. Garlic grows outside the prison gate.

$96,856.57 – Estimated grocery store value of the produce given to the needy

By James A. Fussell
The Kansas City Star
June 7, 2011

Excerpt:

Prison food has never enjoyed a great reputation. But the quarter million pounds of produce grown annually by inmates at the United States Penitentiary at Leavenworth just might change that. It’s fresh, free, feeds the less fortunate and even has helped inmates get good jobs after being released — all without costing taxpayers a nickel.

Wait. A prison farm?

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