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.

Our first farm is intentionally located in Edmonston, one of the poorest and (until very recently) most polluted communities in the inner-Beltway region. Our target population is the almost 15,000 residents of the Port Towns and vicinity. While only 54 percent of county school children qualify for free or reduced meals (FARM), almost 9 out of 10 of Port Towns students are FARM recipients. All of the elementary and middle schools serving the Port Towns are Title One “low-achieving, high poverty” schools.

Read the complete article here.

Eco-City Farm website here.

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.”

Nowadays it is not uncommon to read about stories such as Soil Born’s and to find similar examples popping up all over North America. The food revolution is alive and well and Soil Born’s work is further evidence of the demand for fresh local food, food education, and the opportunity to connect with the natural environment. Walk the American River Ranch (that is after you miraculously discover it deep in the suburban jungle) and on any given day you will encounter chickens, sheep, cows, and pigs happily munching on perennial pastures (that were established by Soil Born to replace the many acres of Star Thistle) or maybe on the end of season corn stalks. Having animals born and raised on the American River Ranch, only minutes from supermarkets, taquerias, and fast-food restaurants, is an effective way for the farm to communicate to its community about where its food is coming from, the cycles of life on the farm, and how their meat, milk, wool, and eggs could be produced in ways that are more aligned with nature’s principles.

While not only bringing the historically significant American River Ranch back to life, the organization is also encouraging the local community of Rancho Cordova and the greater Sacramento area to familiarize themselves with the farm and find a way in which to connect with its mission. Soil Born provides four different avenues for this interaction to take place: Food Education, Food Access, Food Production, and opportunities to Connect with Nature. For Harrison it’s about “trying to become a regional resource…where people can come and learn about food, health and the environment. Historically this farm was not accessible to the public. So now that we’ve been charged with stewarding the property and bringing it into the public domain…we have to make it functional.” The public has the opportunity to participate in the CSA program or purchase from the farm’s weekly farm stand. As part of its food access goals, Soil Born Farms also works with the Sacramento Food Bank and provides around 10,000lbs of produce which get distributed through mobile markets throughout the city – helping to ensure that the food insecure of Sacramento are not denied access to healthy, organic food.

At the present moment the Food Education branch has been receiving a lot of positive attention, which comes as no surprise since they are tasked with a myriad of activities that are each effectively transforming the school system, food literacy and helping to ensure that organic farming has a future. The farm hosts numerous school groups, runs a high caliber apprenticeship program, is working towards participating in an incubator farmer project, teaches local teachers about how to establish native plant gardens at their school, runs adult education classes about growing your own groceries and then somehow also manages to fit in the Green Corps program – a green jobs training program for low-income high school seniors.

In the youth garden (a separate plot that facilitates youth exploration, discovery and experimentation, but without the risk of destroying all the carrots destined for market) you’ll find every seasonal vegetable you could want and often hear a child exclaiming their new love for kohlrabi or lettuce wraps dipped in hummus. The overall goal is “frequent interactions that build upon themselves.” The children may start out food illiterate and uncomfortable, but they soon find themselves spouting out nutritional information about vegetables, reciting the basic process for making compost, and having the so-called light go on when they connect their recent science class with a real-life experience down at the American River. “The education program is really built upon creating experiences – hands on interaction with the natural and agricultural world,” says Harrison.

No class knows this better than the 4th graders of 2008 from Phoebe Hurst Elementary School. After numerous educational experiences at the farm the students decided to hold a fundraiser for Soil Born – the goal $1000, enough for one cow. And what an amazing cow she has been. Fittingly named Phoebe, she has since given birth to two calves that are being raised on the farm and reminding every adult and child who visits just where their milk and meat comes from and providing valuable services to the farm. These intimate experiences make Soil Born a unique educator and facilitator for interactions with food, agriculture, nature, and the community.

Harrison hopes that the children and youth who are coming to Soil Born are “taking the experiences they got here and bringing them to their home and school environment. We are trying to create experiences and awareness that ultimately translate into behaviors and preferences for how they might live their life and make change in their home environment. Whatever they are hearing from us and experiencing or observing, we want them to take something. Whether it’s a cooking experience, or some kind of service project like planting native plants, or they were out their in the field. That’s the goal of this place.”

Come out on any Saturday during the summer and you can’t help but feel how palpable that committed energy is and you too are sure to take something away, even if it is just a simple tomato (an area in which Soil Born’s farmers particularly excel). The friendly chatter in the farm stand, the laughter from a nearby bee class, children running around to visit their favorite animals and get a hug from a friendly farmer, a student eagerly showing their parent what they did on the farm that month, and the sight of a group of volunteers toiling away in the fields all with smiles on their faces. Sometimes we forget that a piece of land and some determined people can provide all these experiences on top of producing nourishing organic food. It’s why Shawn Harrison believes that Soil Born Farms in “not just farming food, we’re also farming habitat. We are land stewards. We are growing food, growing plants, and growing people.”

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.

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?

A. I worked at Detroit Public Schools. I started out with the Head Start Center and then I went to the middle school, to the Ed Tech, [which is] now the Computer Lab. I started farming because they laid me off and didn’t call me back. Farming is not making a living, it’s just keeping food in my freezer. I try to sell some so I can get some more equipment, so it will be easier for me to farm.

Read the complete article here.

See Little House on the Urban Prairie 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.”

And the farm serves another purpose: it unites the community. Local residents help out at the farm and that’s important for the area, says Kwamena Mensah, D-Town’s manager.

“When there is a community project going on, then the kids, they feel a sense of ownership,” said Mensah. “They will look out if people just dump tires and stuff in the garden . They won’t let people steal the produce and everything. There are a lot of good things happening as a result of urban farming in this city.”

Read the complete article here.

“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.

Initially, the couple considered buying a second plot somewhere in the countryside. But the Villarreals stumbled onto the St. Louis Land Reutilization Authority’s list of properties after a friend suggested urban lots. The authority manages tax delinquent properties throughout the city, and sells them to prospective buyers who go through an approval process. The couple found their lot on Delmar and were approved to buy it earlier this year after convincing the city they had a solid plan.

A study conducted by the Show-Me Institute this year found that the city had a track record of rejecting buyers for LRA lands. But that appears to be changing, according to the institute, and the city seems more inclined to sell land to prospective farmers.

Read the complete article here.

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.

Donnell says Green City Growers expects to have the greenhouse finished and the first crop planted by May of next year.

They’ll grow lettuce and herbs, but not in soil.

Read the complete article here.

Green City Growers Breaks Ground for Cleveland Greenhouse

Business in Central neighborhood is latest from Evergreen Cooperatives

Green City Growers
Oct. 28, 2011

CLEVELAND, OH – Green City Growers today will welcome community members, partners,
and supporters to Cleveland’s Central neighborhood to break ground for its commercial greenhouse.

Cleveland Mayor Frank Jackson, Cleveland Foundation Chief Executive Officer Ronn Richard, and Cleveland Councilwoman Phyllis Cleveland are among dignitaries scheduled to be on hand as shovels turn the soil.

When completed in the spring of 2012, the greenhouse will produce 3 million heads of red leaf, green leaf and Boston (Bibb) lettuce and 300,000 pounds of herbs each year. Produce will be sold to grocery stores, institutions, distributors, and consumers, who will have the option of buying locally rather than purchasing produce shipped from California or elsewhere. Plants will grow hydroponically, in shallow pools of
nutrient-rich water rather than in soil.

Green City Growers is the newest company from Evergreen Cooperatives, a network of worker-owned businesses that includes Evergreen Cooperative Laundry and Ohio Cooperative Solar. Evergreen companies contribute a portion of profits to a development fund that seeds new businesses.

As a worker-owned cooperative, Green City Growers hires from surrounding neighborhoods. Workerowners share in the company profits, sit on the company’s board, and participate in decisions, including hiring and business strategy.

Mary Donnell, CEO of Green City Growers, said community support helped make the project a reality. The greenhouse will be located on 10 acres on the corner of Kinsman Road and Ensign Avenue.

“Despite a tough economy nationwide, I found civic, corporate, and philanthropic partners willing to support a strong business model that yields fresh, locally grown produce and a terrific opportunity for workers,” Donnell said.

“We feel very welcomed by the people of the Central neighborhood. We look forward to a wonderful partnership with the community.”

Richard of the Cleveland Foundation said Evergreen businesses show that Cleveland companies will purchase locally when given the opportunity.

“Institutions such as Case Western Reserve University, the Cleveland Clinic, and University Hospitals increasingly ‘buy local’ rather than from out of state,” Richard said. “By keeping purchasing power in the neighborhoods, these institutions are helping to strengthen Cleveland’s neighborhoods.”

Keith Parkham, Evergreen Cooperatives’ first hire at Evergreen Cooperative Laundry, said employee ownership transforms the jobs into careers. Evergreen workers are involved in strategic business decisions.

“When I come to work every day, I know I am building something – for my family and for the community,” Parkham said. “Evergreen has changed my life.”

Green City Growers will begin hiring in the spring of 2012 for crop managers, customer service representatives, harvesting and packaging personnel, production supervisors, truck drivers, and quality assurance technicians, all from Cleveland neighborhoods.

For information on employment or produce availability, call 216-268-0200.

Link here.

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.

“Agrisaurus is a suite of digital tools to help food gardeners plan and manage a successful garden. The design tools focus on polyculture gardening for small beds, while the calendar tools assist with climate-informed planning and management of successive planting schedules.”

Visit Farmscape, your family farmer here.

Visit Agrisaurus, plan, manage, and troubleshoot your garden here.

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.

The new Detroit arrivals setting out on this lifestyle experiment are often referred to as “urban pioneers”. Joel was reluctant to be labeled as such. He told us he hadn’t come to Detroit as a martyr for green living but was struck by the space for his favored pursuits of cycling and gardening. He referred to the concept of “urban homestead”; proposed by CDAD (Community Development Associates of Detroit), which Joel sees as an essential model for re-populating some of the 50,000 vacant properties here and the empty plots surrounding them.

As this land has always been residential Joel and Ana don’t suffer from the soil contamination that plagues the vast ex-industrial zones and forces planting into expensive raised beds. The rich, low-lying land of the Great Lakes region has a long history of cultivation and this neighborhood in particular once consisted of ribbon farms edging the river. By planting straight into the soil at this fully localized scale, Joel and Ana are able to produce most of their own fresh vegetables. The small surplus is either sold at central Detroit’s Eastern Market or made into preserves like their delicious kale chips.

Read the complete article here.

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.

“I farm about ten acres in the city,” Weertz tells me. “Alfalfa’s my thing. I bale about a thousand bales a year.” Some of that alfalfa is used to feed animals at the Catherine Ferguson Academy, a high school for pregnant and parenting young women. Weertz started an agriculture curriculum at the school and worked there for 20 years but now it’s a private charter school and this year he’s going to have to work elsewhere in Detroit’s public school system.

“So many people think you can’t do [farming] in a city,” he says in his Midwest twang. “And you can. It’s the same dirt and the same plants.”

Read the complete article here.

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.

“It’s about knowing where the food is coming from,” Hoff said. “Was that pork ethically slaughtered? Most of the vegetables aren’t even from the U.S. anymore. How old is that tomato when it gets to us?”

In addition to the lengthy vegetable beds they’ve tended since they moved in three years ago, Hoff and Ferguson’s lot now accommodates an array of animals – goats, chickens, turkeys, rabbits and bees – from which they get eggs, honey and meat.

Complete story here.

See “A Year Without Groceries” here.

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.

• Urban agriculture can play an important role in community development. The benefits of urban agriculture are not limited to the provision of food, with many advocates citing community empowerment, environmental justice, public health, and education and training as primary goals. Urban agriculture can be a means of transforming underutilized or neglected space into a public resource, providing opportunities for social interaction, greater community cohesion and self-sufficiency, and engagement for young people in underserved neighborhoods.

• There is a substantial amount of land potentially available for urban agriculture in NYC. We have identified almost 5,000 acres of vacant land likely to be suitable for farming in the five boroughs, the equivalent of six times the area of Central Park. In addition to this land, there are many other potential sites, including over 1,000 acres of NYCHA green space, underutilized open spaces, and Greenstreets. There are also many other potentially suitable sites and properties that are not included in these designations that would greatly expand the total amount of land available for agricultural production. Each of these different types of sites would demand different approaches and strategies if they are to be deployed for agriculture. In this regard, existing data on land availability and suitability is inadequate to understand true capacity, and information on public (municipal) land is insufficiently accessible.

• Intensive growing methods adapted to urban spaces can result in yields per acre which greatly exceed those of conventional production techniques. More land under fruit and vegetable cultivation will be needed if the population is to shift to a healthier diet. Employing high-yield or “biointensive” production techniques characteristic of urban agriculture can contribute to this goal. Widely-practiced intensive farming techniques for small sites in urban areas, such as intercropping, intensive soil management, or hydroponic cultivation can convert underused or neglected urban space into a highly productive community asset.

• While urban agriculture cannot supply the entire city with all of its food needs, in certain neighborhoods it can significantly contribute to food security. There are a number of neighborhoods where a confluence of factors makes urban agriculture a particularly attractive and effective means of addressing multiple community challenges. These factors include low access to healthy food retail, high prevalence of obesity and diabetes, low median income, and comparatively high availability of vacant and other available land. These issues are all correlated, and it is in these areas where urban agriculture could have the greatest impact on food security.

• There is a need for cost/benefit analyses that reflect the full complexity of the city’s social and environmental challenges. Unlike other forms of green infrastructure, urban agriculture has the potential to generate revenue and provide long-term employment as well as to provide environmental benefits such as decreasing stormwater runoff (both by harvesting rainwater and by increasing surface permeability). Conventional cost-benefit analyses that consider complex problems in isolation often miss potential synergistic solutions that address multiple problems at once. Urban agriculture clearly has the potential to provide such solutions for NYC.

• NYC’s rooftops are a vast, underused resource that could be transformed for food production.
NYC is one of the most advantageous places in the nation to establish rooftop agriculture due primarily to density, but also to public interest and support, access to capital, a robust transportation network, adequate infra- structure, proximity to institutions of higher education, and consumer demand. Existing green roof incentive programs have not been designed to support rooftop agriculture. Rapidly changing technologies and the skills and experience being developed by today’s rooftop farming pioneers will likely make wider adoption much more feasible in the near future.

• Bureaucratic challenges are a major barrier to the expansion of urban farming. Uncertainties over land jurisdiction and management remain a major hurdle to prospective urban farmers. City agencies, already stretched by budget cuts, often don’t have adequate capacity to provide oversight for this type of activity on their properties. Additionally, there is the added complication of using public land for commercial ventures (for 3 farms intended as for-profit operations). Though not without precedent, these issues will need to be comprehensively addressed if more of our available public spaces are to be used for urban agriculture.

• Existing infrastructure has the potential to support the expansion of urban agriculture. There are substantial opportunities to take advantage of underused existing refrigeration, food processing, and distribution infrastructure within NYC, which are all critical to delivering food from the urban farm to the consumer. Churches, schools, and other institutions often have kitchen and refrigeration facilities that are not always in use, and assessing such resources and developing alternative networks for their use would assist in the expansion of agricultural activity in the city.

• Urban farmers are establishing viable businesses by taking advantage of multiple revenue streams. While farming in cities remains a challenging and low-profit margin activity, enterprising urban farmers are developing multiple-revenue stream models to adapt to urban conditions. In addition to selling food directly to the public, farmers have developed direct marketing relationships with restaurants and institutions, initiated revenue-generating education and training services, and can profit from the environmental services they are providing, such as tipping fees for collecting compostable waste.

• Urban agriculture is part of a broader horticultural approach to urban greening that encompasses more than fruits and vegetables. The capacity of the city for agricultural production includes the cultivation of non-crop food products to take advantage of the diversity of environments and urban fabric types that exist in NYC, including such products as honey, chickens, and fish. All of these approaches have proven successful in urban areas and can be symbiotically incorporated into more conventional fruit and vegetable production methods. Additionally, the production of non-food crops such as flowers and raw materials could allow for the economic and environmental benefits of urban horticulture to be more widely distributed to sites that are not suitable for food production.

• Urban agriculture functions as a catalyst for larger food system transformations. Urban farmers are developing vital connections between urban and rural communities. Already urban farms in the city are providing such linkages, particularly in low-income neighborhoods, by doing such things as inviting rural farmers to participate in and supplement their community-based farmers markets, providing a customer base for both the urban and rural farms simultaneously.

See the complete 112 page report here.

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.

“You shorten the distance between the farm gate and the dinner plate,” Peck-Dabling said. “The food is fresher, it tastes better and it’s more nutritious when it’s just been picked.”

Farmers who lease the land are required to sell locally — at fruit stands, through community-supported agriculture (CSA) membership distributions or at farmer’s markets.

Read the complete article here.

“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.

And so, on a recent Monday morning, Garrett Ormiston, 29, was taking an informal census of the vegetation occupying an otherwise empty yard on East 93rd Street, just a few miles east of downtown Cleveland.

“Right here is kind of a mix of plants that probably existed as people’s landscaping,” said Mr. Ormiston, a naturalist with the Cleveland Museum of Natural History. “This here looks like somebody’s ornamental rose that has just kind of persisted.”

Read the complete article here.

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.

Michael Grady Robertson, owner of Grady’s Farm and adviser to the Riverpark Farm at Alexandria Center, discusses the Riverpark Farm and the opportunities in urban farming in New York City and beyond.

A stalled site is a construction site where work has been temporarily suspended. In the wake of one of the greatest economic crises in history, the number of stalled sites has increased tremendously; in New York City alone there were over 600 stalled sites reported by the New York City Department of Buildings in July 2011. Showing how the land of a stalled site can be put to productive temporary use is a key goal of the Riverpark Farm at Alexandria Center.

Located at 430 East 29th Street in Manhattan, the Riverpark Farm was developed through a partnership of Riverpark restaurant and the Alexandria Center for Life Science – New York City. Created under the direction of Riverpark’s Chef/Partner Sisha Ortúzar, Riverpark Partner Jeffrey Zurofsky, and Alexandria Real Estate Equities, Inc.’s Executive Director of Corporate Strategy Scarlet Shore, the Farm is already supplying dozens of varieties of fresh produce to the adjacent Riverpark restaurant. In September 2011, the construction fence at the site will come down to reveal a unique green space offering private outdoor dining at a Farm Table with views of the city, the East River, and the unique urban farmscape.

“We feel very fortunate to be able to grow our own vegetables in the middle of New York City. This is a great opportunity not only for our guests who will get to eat hyper- fresh produce, but to the members of our staff that want to be more connected to the food they cook,” said Sisha Ortúzar, Farm Co-Founder and Chef/Partner at Riverpark. “The incredible support and collaboration with Alexandria has made this a reality, and serves as a model for making productive use of stalled construction sites citywide.” As a former member of the team at Gramercy Tavern, Sisha played a critical role in the growth of the Craft Restaurant Group and created the ’wichcraft concept, where he has since served as chef and creative director.

Zachary Pickens, urban gardener, farmer, seed saver, Master Composter, and a full-time urban farmer at the Riverpark Farm at Alexandria Center, explains how milk crates have been used as planters on the Farm. All 6,000+ vegetables, herbs, and flowers have been planted using this unique milk crate system, making individual plants and the Farm, as a whole, portable.

Restauranteur Tom Colicchio, owner of the Craft Restaurant Group, Riverpark Restaurant partner, and farm-to-table pioneer commented: “Congratulations to Sisha, Jeffrey, Alexandria, and the Riverpark family for literally bringing the farm to the table. They have also brought the Farm to the heart of the city, providing a unique green space as well as a community resource to show how fresh, healthy food can be produced just about anywhere.”

The Farm’s location is the future site of Alexandria Center’s west tower, the second phase of a potential 1.1 million square foot science park, where construction was temporarily suspended due to the unprecedented worldwide financial crisis. When construction on the west tower resumes, the Riverpark Farm, which was created with portability in mind, will be relocated to another part of the 4-acre Alexandria Center campus.

“The Farm is a true reflection of innovation and teamwork,” stated Scarlet Shore, Farm Co-Founder and Executive Director of Corporate Strategy at Alexandria Real Estate Equities, Inc. “Here, in a few short months, we have transformed a temporarily idle construction site into a productive urban farm – making purposeful use of 15,000 square feet of space until construction resumes on the west tower. We are proud to be a part of such an exciting project and encourage other developers to learn from our experience and consider additional, similar projects.”

There are presently over 6,000 plants growing on the farm, which include about 100 different types of vegetables, herbs, and flowers. Many of the plants began their life at Wilklow Orchards in the Hudson Valley prior to the availability of the Farm site. Planted entirely in milk crates, the plants were subsequently relocated to the Riverpark Farm at Alexandria Center. Fall crops will be planted and grown entirely at the Riverpark Farm, as will next season’s spring crops.

The Farm was created with advice and support from GrowNYC, a non-profit focused on improving New York City’s quality of life through environmental programs, green markets, community gardens, and education initiatives such as Learn It, Grow It, Eat It (LGE) and the School Garden Initiative. Riverpark is also working with the Fresh Air Fund (FAF), a not-for-profit agency that has provided free summer experiences in the country to more than 1.7 million New York City children from disadvantaged communities, as part of a summer internship program involving the restaurant and the Farm.

Architected by ORE Design and Technology, the farm’s simple but effective modular approach of employing milk crates stacked on pallets makes the whole farm portable within hours, and enables sites previously thought unsuitable for urban agriculture to be viable for farming. “Thousands of soil-filled milk-crates sitting on a concrete foundation is just another way to think about a farmer’s field,” said Zach Pickens, one of the urban farmers at the Riverpark Farm at Alexandria Center. “Add some sun, water, and patience and a great harvest will follow.”

See their web site here.

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.

On Saturday, 29 people boarded a trolley in Midtown for a tour of several Bronx farms, a monthly excursion created by a coalition of groups to promote a range of health programs and reshape perceptions of a borough associated with urban blight, officials said.

“The Bronx seems to be always overlooked as far as a pioneer innovator related to urban agriculture,” said Regina Ginyard, one of the founders of La Finca del Sur who also helped create the farm tours. But, she pointed out, “It used to be farmland.”

Read the complete article here.

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!

And once again the question is being asked, “what is an urban farm?,” and I am glad to report back on some of what we’ve learned…

Read the complete article here.

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.

The farm has fostered a vibrant local food movement — City Farm alone grew 1,539 pounds of food last year, everything from arugula to tomatillos— and helped bolster Rhode Island’s burgeoning farmers’ market scene.

“The big thing at City Farm is there’s a shared sense of ownership,” said the farm’s current apprentice, Laura Brown-Lavoie. “Everyone is encouraged to think of themselves as stewards of this space. We share in the responsibility of passing along how to care for this space and soil.”

Read the complete article here.

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.

If we are able to transform these new lots into gardens, this would create something that as far as we know exists nowhere else in the country: a non-profit urban farm, exchanging produce to participants via barter and donating significant amounts of fresh, local produce to the community at large.

Volunteer gardeners and land owners are already on board; all we need is the money to transform the lots. The money will go toward purchasing irrigation systems, tools, greenhouse supplies, path and fence building materials, water catchment systems and harvesting supplies.

See their fundraising site here.

$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?

Believe it or not, an ecologically responsible one. Carefully screened volunteer inmates from Leavenworth’s minimum-security prison camp are allowed outside the secure perimeter to grow tomatoes, potatoes, sweet corn, watermelon, onions, radishes and other crops. Prisoners who work on the farm are serving time for a variety of non-violent crimes, including wire fraud, mail fraud and embezzlement.

Last year more than 80,000 pounds of produce grown by prisoners went to help feed the needy throughout the greater Kansas City area. This year, estimates put donated produce at up to 200,000 pounds.

Read the complete article here.