Category — United States

Urban Roots – The industrial powerhouse of a lost American era has died, and the skeleton left behind is present-day Detroit.

URBAN ROOTS, directed by Detroit-native Mark McInnis is a documentary that tells the powerful story of a small group of unique individuals involved in Detroit’s urban agricultural movement.

But now, against all odds in the empty lots, in the old factory yards, and in-between the sad, sagging blocks of company housing, seeds of change are taking root. A small group of dedicated citizens, allied with environmental and academic groups, have started an urban environmental movement with the potential to transform not just a city after its collapse, but also a country after the end of its industrial age.

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Photo by Chris Martin

Hayes Valley Farm – San Francisco

Our Vision

Hayes Valley Farm (HVF) is an education and research project with a focus on urban agriculture. Situated on the city-owned lots bordered by Oak, Fell, Laguna, and Octavia streets, the project is organized by an alliance of urban farmers, educators, and designers that comprise the HVF Project Team. HVF is a Parks Partner, a fiscally sponsored project of the San Francisco Parks Trust.

The project is founded on an interim use agreement between Hayes Valley Farm and the City’s Office of Economic and Workforce Development- a two to five year time frame – until which time the City moves forward with other development plans for the site.

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Grow food, health, jobs and justice at an Urban Farm in S Central LA. Community Services Unlimited Inc. (CSU)

Overview

The Community Food Village Urban Farm project will transform an under utilized 1 acre garden into a highly productive urban farm that will supply S Central LA with fresh, local, organic produce. The farm will grow more than just food. It will employ local youth who will learn job, life, and entrepreneurial skills while helping to grow and market produce in the neighborhood. It will empower residents to eat healthy and to participate in transforming their community into a healthy and beautiful place to live.

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By Russ White
February 02, 2010
Written by Lauren Talley
Michigan Live

Hamm is the CS Mott Chair for Sustainable Agriculture and leads the CS Mott Group for Sustainable Food Systems at Michigan State University. He’s been working on a way to use that land to develop an urban agriculture system in Detroit.

Excerpts:

Hamm works with Kathryn Colasanti, a graduate student who analyzed Detroit’s publically-owned space. Colasanti’s study focused on open land where buildings had already been torn down. She didn’t include parks or right of ways.

Colasanti discovered about nine square miles of empty available land within the city limits. If her study included land with abandoned buildings, that space would be doubled or tripled, Hamm said. Hamm and Colasanti determined with just 2,000 acres Detroit could produce up to 75 percent of the vegetables needs and about 50 percent of the fruit needs for 900,000 people.

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Promoting community agriculture efforts and increased access to locally grown food

“2010: The Year of Urban Agriculture” was organized by Seattle Department of Neighborhoods, Department of Planning and Development, and the Seattle City Council.

The site includes:

City Initiatives & Programs:

Street Use Permits: Gardening in Planting Strips
Seattle’s P-Patch Program
What’s new at P-Patch
P-Patch Program Evaluation (2009)
Seattle’s Market Gardening program

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Larger image here.

Farmscape woven into the Urban Fabric

By Trevor Boyle and Justin Fong
Email: boyletrevor@yahoo.com

“The site was directly across from a park that during WWII was used for victory gardens, and so that idea was brought into it as well. The elevated ‘walkway’ is used as a growing surface, translating the urban stacked density into a farming notion, instead of the sprawling countryside that’s usually seen.

“Southern facing walls on the buildings are also plant walls on the exterior, with a modular steel frame. The actual fruit/vegetable growing floor space is only around 30% of the total for the building; it’s more about introducing the idea back into mainstream daily life. The square footage is enough to be able to feed 200 people throughout a year, so it’s more about growing for the community around the site than being able to mass produce and feed the whole city, though that would be possible with another iteration.

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2nd Annual Fruit Tree Adoption- February 6th and 7th

Using fruit as our lens, Fallen Fruit investigates urban space, ideas of neighborhood and new forms of located citizenship and community. From protests to proposals for new urban green spaces, we aim to reconfigure the relation between those who have resources and those who do not, to examine the nature of & in the city, and to investigate new, shared forms of land use and property. Fallen Fruit is an art collaboration that began with creating maps of public fruit: the fruit trees growing on or over public property in Los Angeles.

Over time our interests have expanded from mapping public fruit to include Public Fruit Jams in which we invite the citizens to bring homegrown or public fruit and join in communal jam-making; Nocturnal Fruit Forages, nighttime neighborhood fruit tours;

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By: Allison Arieff
Pepsi Refresh Project
January 27th, 2010

Excerpt:

The complete antithesis of the rural idyll that many might associate with farming, the 4-1/2 acre Alemany Farm is located just off the decidedly non-bucolic Highway 280 in San Francisco, adjacent to a public housing project. But its tough exterior contrasts sharply with its benevolent mission of educating, engaging, and feeding its urban constituency through the organic food it grows. I spoke recently with Alemany’s co-manager, Jason Mark, who, when he’s not harvesting carrots and kale, is editing the quarterly environmental magazine, Earth Island Journal.

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Artwork by Galadriel Rosen

Lake Clifton greenhouse project harvests 1st crops
Installation’s backers hope to produce fresh food, ‘green’ jobs

By Timothy B. Wheeler
Baltimore Sun reporter
December 17, 2009

Though it’s nearly freezing outside, fresh arugula, kale and more greens are flourishing in Hoop Village. That’s the name given to Baltimore’s newest urban farming venture – a trio of plastic-skinned hoop greenhouses on the historic Lake Clifton schools campus.

The structures, finished in October, are already yielding harvests that will provide wholesome snacks to some city elementary students this winter. And students at the three Lake Clifton schools are helping to raise the food they’ll be eating.

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By John C. Downen, Research Analyst
2009 | Volume 69, Number 3
Bureau of Economic and Business Research
University of Utah

Excerpts:

This study examines urban farming along Utah’s Wasatch Front. It covers agricultural activity in Weber, Davis, Salt Lake, and Utah counties using data from the USDA’s Census of Agriculture from 1974 to 2007. It begins by looking at the amount of farmland and farms, as well as the distribution of farm sizes. Next we consider farm ownership and operator characteristics, noting that most farms on the Wasatch Front are sole proprietorships. The study then turns to farm finances, based on data from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, and an analysis of direct sales and current organic practices. A summary concludes the piece.

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Design Trust Seeks Two Fellows for Urban Agriculture Project

The Design Trust is currently seeking two fellows for Five Borough Farm, a project to create New York’s first citywide plan for urban agriculture. For the project’s first phase, the Design Trust will select two fellows in the fields of metrics/evaluation and policy/sustainable development. Deadline to apply is February 3, 2010.

Five Borough Farm will partner New York City’s most successful urban farm – Brooklyn-based Added Value – with New York’s largest landowner – the City itself – to create the nation’s first citywide plan for urban agriculture.

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Phoenix, Arizona Urban Farm

By Greg Peterson
1-800-Recycling
January 19, 2010

Excerpt:

There is something to eat in my yard every day, 365 days a year. Last Thanksgiving it was a wonderful salad of six different greens, including nasturtium leaves and sorrel (a surprise find, growing in the back “wild” area); ruby red pomegranate seeds; an incredible citrus called limequat that was sliced up skin and all for a tangy/sweet sensation; and a little bit of tarragon and fennel, with a smidge of that pretty little three-leaf clover you see growing in some yards called sourgrass. The flavors were so diverse and striking that I chose not to add any dressing at all.

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“The Thomason family has been farming in the same part of Richland Parish Louisiana for almost two-hundred years, but our 1/10th acre urban eco-micro farm is located in historic downtown Ypsilanti, Michigan. We are located just a few miles east of Ann Arbor. We raise Mini-Nubian-Nigerian-Dwarf goats for milk and meat, Hubbard ISA Brown French hens for eggs, and Lionhead Dwarf rabbits as pets. We grow organic vegetables for sale including: garlic, mixed salad greens, kale, spinach, Amish paste and Sungold cherry tomatoes, broccoli, peppers and various squashes.”

Collective efforts

BY CURT GUYETTE
Metro Times
April 9, 2009

At first glance, Ypsilanti resident Peter Thomason and his family don’t have a lot in common with the residents of the Detroit collective known as Trumbullplex.

Thomason, who’s in his mid-50s, is a politically conservative, NRA card-carrying, churchgoing father of 10 who teaches construction management at Eastern Michigan University. Trumbullplex, on the city’s near west side, is an anarchist housing collective and show space inhabited by 11 people (at the moment), none of whom are older than 30. And none of them, it’s safe to say, belongs to the NRA.

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Video Interview with Tynes Viar, the Director of Development and Sustainability – (above)

The Center for Urban Agriculture at Fairview Gardens is a California non-profit organization that was established in 1997 to preserve and operate Fairview Gardens, the historic farm where our products are grown. Founded in 1895, Fairview Gardens is considered by some to be the oldest organic farm in southern California, and is now preserved in perpetuity through an agricultural conservation easement.

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“We are a partnership of two women who love to garden and want to be immersed in the dirt of our food systems.”

By Andrew Simmons
SF Weekly
Jan. 13, 2010

Brooke Budner and Caitlyn Galloway are the guerrilla green thumbs behind Little City Gardens, a cherry tomato-sized urban farm in the Mission. Simultaneously a small salad mix business, a hub of food/community positivity, and what the farmers themselves call “a working model of food production in [the city],” Little City Gardens hooks up Bar Tartine and several local caterers with greens (delivered, quite awesomely, on foot and by bike), offers tours, conducts workshops, and generally keeps it as real as water, soil, sun, and fat, writhing earthworms.

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Ou and Muya. (Photo by Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)
Bob Ou, left, 43, a refugee from Cambodia, and Bilali Muya, a Somalian refugee who doesn’t know his age, share a laugh at the New Roots Community Farm in the City Heights neighborhood of San Diego. The two farmers have become leaders in the community, demonstrating how to bridge cultural differences and develop friendships.

In San Diego, fertile ground for the seeds of understanding

At the New Roots Community Farm, refugees plow and share — and watch friendships sprout. It’s not just a source of food, but a connection to their homelands, their new country and one another.

By Anna Gorman
LA Times
January 15, 2010

Reporting from San Diego – A slight breeze carried the scents of onion, cilantro and mint through the roadside garden.

At plot No. 17, Bob Ou picked up a well-worn can and watered rows of radishes and Asian lettuce. At plot No. 33, Bilali Muya crouched down to pull weeds from beds of carrots and sweet chard. He spotted a bright red tomato in a nearby plant, grabbed it and took a bite.

“Your tomatoes are so huge,” Ou said, warning that he might steal one when he walked by.

Muya laughed as he licked the juice off his fingers. “Don’t touch my tomatoes, buddy!”

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Photo of FollowNathan.

4,300 miles from Belfast, Maine to Bellingham, Washington over the course of 5 months

“On May 10th, 2009 I set out on a cross country bicycle adventure starting in Belfast, Maine. My destination was the Washington coast and I had very little worry about what came in between. With a piqued curiosity into complex food movements, the mindset of the American Farmer and the never ending desire to see what type of obscure situations I could land myself in I packed 70 pounds of gear on my bike and set out to follow my dreams. Over 5 months time I had done what most people advised me not to do. I rode a bicycle from one ocean to the other heading East to West fully loaded.”

On the following page see:

A Closer Look at Community Growers an Urban and Rooftop Garden in Milwaukee, WI

Gretchen Mead of The Victory Garden Initiative Talks About Urban Gardening and Sustainability in Milwaukee

Lots To Gardens Ari Rosenberg Speaks About Sustainability and Agriculture

Meagan of Gather ‘Round Farm in Cleveland Ohio Talks About Urban Farming, Using Waste and the Local Food Chain

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The Rockland County Patriotic Society on their way to charge a ten-acre plot and convert it into a vegetable garden. They believe the spade is as valuable as the rifle.

How the stay-at-homes can provide the sinews of war for America and our European Allies

Popular Science Magazine 1917

America turns to the soil in earnest. Even women are responding to the call for active service. Mrs. Ruth Litt, the wealthy suffragist, has turned over her 135-acre farm for cultivation, the work to be done entirely by women.

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Photo by E. SKYLAR LITHERLAND. Vincent Dessberg stands at his rooftop hydroponic farm near downtown Sarasota, where he is growing fruits and vegetables. His lettuce is selling at the Sarasota Downtown Farmer’s Market. With about 6,000 plants, this new small farm is by far the most urban in the county.

By Kate Spinner
Herald Tribune
January 4, 2010

SARASOTA – In an industrial park about a mile from Main Street, mechanics repair cars, cleaners launder draperies and Vincent Dessberg grows crops on the roof of his old glass shop.

Dessberg used to fuse glass into colorful windows. But after the economic downturn he turned from the kiln, seeing better opportunity on his 3,000 square-foot roof.

“Nobody needs glass. Everybody needs to eat,” he said.

His lettuce is selling at the Sarasota Downtown Farmer’s Market. Other fruits and vegetables — cauliflower, okra, goji berries — are bound for dinner plates at some of the city’s best restaurants.

With about 6,000 plants, this new small farm is by far the most urban in the county. Crops grow vertically in 180 hydroponic planters that stand about six feet tall.

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Fortune asked artist Bryan Christie to imagine how Detroit’s thousands of abandoned residential acres might be transformed into cutting-edge, city-style farms (see illustration above): Solar panels and windmills power vertical growing systems that are efficient, attractive, and tourist-friendly. Greenhouses allow crops to grow year-round. And new development sprouts on the periphery.

Can farming save Detroit?

By David Whitford
December 29, 2009

Excerpt:

DETROIT (Fortune) — John Hantz is a wealthy money manager who lives in an older enclave of Detroit where all the houses are grand and not all of them are falling apart. Once a star stockbroker at American Express, he left 13 years ago to found his own firm. Today Hantz Financial Services has 20 offices in Michigan, Ohio, and Georgia, more than 500 employees, and $1.3 billion in assets under management.

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