Category — United States

This farm will create green jobs and provide healthy food to the community

The Viet Village Urban Farm project represents an effort to reestablish the tradition of local farming in this community after Katrina. New Orleans East was one of the most damaged areas of the city New Orleans during the storms of 2005. In response to the devastation, the community has organized around the idea of creating an urban farm and market as the center of the community. The farm, located on 28-acres in the heart of the community, will be a combination of small-plot gardening for family consumption, larger commercial plots focused on providing food for local restaurants and grocery stores in New Orleans, and a livestock area for raising chickens and goats in the traditional Vietnamese way.

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Just blocks from downtown Cleveland is Ohio City Farm, which was established in July. At 4-1/2 acres, it is one of the largest urban farms in the country. See video coverage after minute 6 of the episode here.

Ohio City Farm in Cleveland, Ohio – Episode 142: Farm Country in the City

by Jennifer Boresz
Neotropolis
August 13, 2010

Excerpt:

At Ohio City Farm, the total farmable space is about 4-1/2 acres. Since the nonprofit group Refugee Response is licensed 1-1/2 acres and Great Lakes Brewing Company is licensed another acre, Wobser says there are two 1-acre sites left.

“We are in talks with two other groups, one being a young entrepreneur named Central Roots to take an acre on the site,” Wobser explains. “We’re also in talks with the Cuyahoga County Department of Developmental Disabilities, which has a unique program where it works with developmentally disabled individuals and trains them to work on farms.”

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In New York City, senior gardener Abu Talib oversees the Bronx’s Taqwa Community Farm and its 13 chickens. “Just get a few chickens and you can feed yourself,” says Abu Talib. “He who controls your breadbasket controls your destiny.” Photo by Ira Block

Taqwa Farms is definitely an oasis

Michelle Knapik,
Environment Program Director
Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation Blog
Aug 9, 2010

Excerpts:

The explosion of interest around urban ag is undeniable. It is little wonder as it serves as a portal to community building, local pride, skill building, the knitting of relationships across perceived cultural and age divides, the physical and psychological transformation of vacant lots, the growing of food, and the feeding of people, body and soul. Funders large and small are clamoring to learn more about the social change mechanisms presented in urban ag. The Sustainable Ag and Food System funders dedicated a number of sessions and field visits to urban ag during its 2010 annual conference.

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Amy Brzuchalski with tomatoes, snow peas, and chives, just some of the vegetables in her backyard. Photo by Jetta Fraser

Findley, Ohio city farmer

By Tahree Lane
Toledo Blade
Aug. 4, 2010

Excerpt

Name: Amy Brzuchalski, stay-at-home mom and urban farmer, living in downtown Findlay.

Garden specs: Urban farming is done in our own and others’ yards. We have around 3,500 square feet of veggie beds in five sites. It’s amazing how many people have let us come into their yards — we have four this year and turned down three others. People want to learn and be part of it! In return for their space, they receive produce.

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Jane Stubbs poses for a photo with her chickens, Breakfast, left, Lunch, center, and Dinner, right, at her home in New Orleans. Photo by Rusty Costanza, The Times-Picayune.

This is a neighborhood that doesn’t have a grocery store

By Matt Davis
The Times-Picayune
July 18, 2010

Excerpt:

“It would be great if everyone on this block had some kind of animal and grew vegetables. We could be almost self-sufficient,” said Frank Carter, an engineering technician who trained with the farm network and keeps 12 chickens with his wife, Laura Reiff, in a 60-by-50-foot foot pen in their backyard in Algiers. Their chicken breeds include Rhode Island Reds, Brown Leghorns, and even a Buff Orpington — ordered via the U.S. Postal Service from a breeder in Texas.

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Working in the Cottage Street farm. Photo by Patrick Holian, CSREES-USDA

Food Project is getting $600,000 to renovate a deserted greenhouse in Roxbury and build 400 backyard gardens

By Patrick Lee
Globe Correspondent
July 9, 2010

Excerpt:

Less than two blocks away. halfway between Dudley Square and Uphams Corner, 20 or so of Arsenault’s fellow teenage interns work on an urban farm to produce vegetables and fruits for local shelters and farmers markets. US Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius visited the site today, after she met with city officials about local public health initiatives that had been awarded federal funding in March.

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Jaymon McGhee, 13, plants mustard greens in a raised bed as part of the Lots of Hope gardening project. Photo by Rebecca Droke/Post-Gazette

“These are exciting times”

By Diana Nelson Jones
July 08, 2010
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Excerpt:

The urban farm — a novel, even whimsical, idea a few years ago in Pittsburgh — is now a movement so fully fledged that a neighborhood without one seems almost an anomaly.

Nationally, the movement is profuse, with seeds in the 1980s when foodies sprouted and gourmet eating went mainstream. The roots of several movements have intertwined since: urban enterprise farms, urban farms for educating children, community gardens, vacant lot greening, soil remediation of industrial landscapes, community supported agriculture, backyard chickens and bee hives, consumers who buy into livestock with farmers and grocery chains selling local produce.

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City Seeds Urban Farm

Gateway Greening was one of four non-profit finalists for What Do You Care About TODAY?, a contest sponsored by the NBC TODAY Show and the Pepsi Refresh Project. They granted each finalist $50,000! Funds will go towards City Seeds Urban Farm.

About the City Seeds Urban Farm

The City Seeds Urban Farm is a 2.5 acre vegetable farm located near Union Station in downtown St. Louis on land provided by the Missouri Department of Transportation. Tended by St. Patrick Center clients, these urban farmers seek to overcome homelessness, beat drug addiction and cope with mental illness. Mentored by Gateway Greening, the farmers take classes in horticulture while learning hands-on vegetable production and landscape maintenance.

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Customer Leslie Porto, of Snyder, watches as Janice and Mark Stevens, and their daughter Jerusha, 9, pull beets and onions at their urban farm. Photo by John Hickey / Buffalo News.

The Stevenses built a two-acre garden on city land last spring, and now they’re known across the East Side for their produce

By Maki Becker
Buffalo News
July 04, 2010

Excerpt:

Former farmers who had moved to the East Side from rural Wyoming County, the Stevenses and their seven children wanted their own farm to grow their own food without the use of pesticides and other chemicals while also providing fresh produce to their community.

City Hall initially was resistant, saying the land had been set aside to build new houses. City officials didn’t want to sell the land but were willing to lease it. However, the city wanted to maintain the right to sell the land with just 30 days notice.

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Joseph Swain, right, operates Swainway Urban Farm on his Clintonville property. Sustainable Clintonville members recently toured the small farm.

“We call it food landscaping”

By Kevin Parks
ThisWeek
May 19, 2010

Excerpt:

In the opinion of Joseph Swain, fast food has had its day and it’s time for “slow food” to hold sway.

Swain is a farmer. He lives in Clintonville. On the Swainway Urban Farm.

If Swain had his way, most people would be, at least a little bit, farmers as well. And he’s willing to help people learn to start growing their own food “on whatever scale they want.”

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Gardens of Park Place, Birmingham, AL. See larger image here.

Breaking Through Concrete continues to impress!

Michael Hanson is an award winning photographer based in Seattle, WA and was recently named one of the World’s Top Travel Photographers by Popular Photography Magazine.

In the midst of a summer sleeping on buses or in chain hotels throughout the Appalachians while playing baseball in the Atlanta Braves minor league organization, Michael started to make pictures. The unique environment, personalities, and lifestyle of minor league dovetailed with Michael’s sensibility for documentary photography. Over the two years he played with the Braves, Michael shot a series that sparked his post-baseball photography career.

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Detroit Urban Agriculture Movement Looks to Reclaim Motor City

By Nicole Salazar and Malik Yakini
June 24, 2010
Democracy Now
A daily TV/radio news program, hosted by Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez, airing on over 800 stations, pioneering the largest community media collaboration in the U.S.

In Detroit, demolition crews are planning to tear down 10,000 residential buildings over the next four years that the city has deemed dangerous. But as old structures are coming down, the city is redefining itself in other ways. An estimated 20 to 30 percent of the city’s lots are vacant, and there is a growing urban agriculture movement that community groups are using to reclaim the city. Malik Yakini, chairman of the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network, gives us a tour of D-Town Farm, one of the biggest urban farms in Detroit.
Link to Democracy Now story here.

Bruce Edwards shows the demonstration garden at the Regional Food Bank’s Urban Harvest. The garden provides produce for the food bank and offers an example of how food can be raised in urban areas. Photo by Steve Sisney / The Oklahoman.

Food Bank’s Urban Harvest program feeds the hungry while educating and inspiring the community into taking a look at its own practices.

By Dave Cathey
News OK
June 9, 2010

Excerpt:

Talk about the value and importance of local, sustainable food sources has been rampant the past couple years. Movies have been filmed, books have been written and immeasurable oxygen has been sucked from the atmosphere in discussing the subject. But Bruce Edwards, director of the Regional Food Bank of Oklahoma’s Urban Harvest program, is doing more than talking; he’s putting it into practice to feed the hungry and activate the community into not taking the practices of our ancestors for granted.

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The Growing Solution to Urban Food Deserts from Conscious Living TV on Vimeo.

Urban agriculture in Chicago

by Conscious Living TV/Soul of Green
Correspondent: Bianca Alexander
Executive Producer: Michael Alexander

Excellent video! Mike

With the near epidemic of type-2 diabetes, breast cancer and other degenerative diseases in communities of color particularly relative to non-hispanic white communities, this episode of Soul of Green examines the link between these growing health disparities and the lack of basic access to fresh healthy food and produce.

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Urbandale Farm Project

By Emily Fox
mlive.com
June 07, 2010

Laura DeLind from Michigan State University’s Department of Anthropology and retired MSU teacher-education professor Linda Anderson, are reaching out to a community on the east side of Lansing through urban farming.

DeLind and Anderson recently started the Urbandale Farm Project. One of the hopes for the project is to create access to healthy food in the community. The neighborhood where the farm is located is called a “food desert.”

“A food desert is primarily in a neighborhood where people have limited incomes, there’s no easy access to places to buy healthy food like fresh fruits and vegetables, unless you have transportation and many low income families don’t have easy transportation. Therefore their sources of food are often fast food restaurants, liquor stores, corner grocery stores—not a lot of fresh produce,” Anderson says.

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The Breaking Through Concrete bus on the way to Oregon. Photo by Michael Hanson.

The Breaking Through Concrete team

The Breaking Through Concrete team — David Hanson, Michael Hanson, Charles Hoxie, and Edwin Marty — is taking a 21st century road trip to document the American urban farm movement. Driving across the country and back in a biodiesel-fueled, Internet-enabled short bus they’ve nicknamed Lewis Lewis, they’ll visit 14 diverse projects that are, in distinct ways, transforming our built environments and creating jobs, training opportunities, local economies, and healthy food in our nation’s biggest cities. Along the way, David will post stories for Grist (and for one of the team’s sponsors, WHYHunger), illustrated by his and Michael’s stunning images — material that will ultimately be collected into a book — and Charles’ short video snippets.

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Granata Farms

By Dorothée and Mark
Organic Nation TV
June 4, 2010

Excerpt:

While producing a video about SAME Café, the pay-what-you-can restaurant on Denver’s Northwest Side, co-owner Libby Birky suggested that we check out Granata Farms, which provides a lot of the fresh, organic vegetables served at SAME Café. So while we were in Denver, we met up with Elaine Granata at her one-acre plot on Clarkson Street.

Elaine told us that she started the urban farm, which is made up of three city plots in different locations, after she lost her own farm in the country. Remarkably, she runs the farm by herself, growing a diverse mix of greens, herbs, tomatoes, beans and squash. She sells her produce to multiple restaurants in Denver as well as her fourteen-member CSA.

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Photo by People’s Grocery.

A Growing Concern

By Sena Christian
Earth Island Journal
Summer 2010

Excerpt:

Sean Hagan shoves a digging fork into the soil and pries out a bunch of carrots. He ties the bunch together, then stops and looks across the crops to another farmer calling for his attention. She holds a gnarly root in her hand.

“Do we have something against large turnips around here?” asks Sonya Ciavola.

“I have something against turnips in general,” Hagan says. He’s not fond of their taste.

On a gloomy February morning, the blond, 29-year-old Hagan trudges through muddy row crops growing on six acres of agricultural land operated by Soil Born Farms Urban Agriculture and Education Project, a nonprofit farm in Sacramento, California. Soil Born has two other acres for pasture and plans to plant a three-acre fruit tree orchard this fall.

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On Day 2, Richmond High School was equally blessed with the construction of 6 wooden planter beds, the planting of six fruit trees, and the raising of a native plant garden. Each wooden bed spans 32 feet in length, 4 feet across, and nearly 2 feet deep!

Job Opportunity, teacher – Environmental Science II: Urban Agriculture and Food Systems

Kennedy High School (KHS) in Richmond, California is looking for a Biology (or possibly Chemistry) teacher who will also teach 1 section of Environmental Science II: Urban Agriculture and Food Systems. Candidates need a teaching credential in biology or chemistry. This is an exciting opportunity for an energetic teacher to help build a cutting-edge urban agriculture program.

The Urban Ag and Food Systems class is a new course developed and supported by a local non-profit—Urban Tilth. Urban Tilth helped Kennedy High students and staff put in a 4,000 square foot market garden and a 1,500 square foot edible forest.

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Collie Graddick. Consultant at MN Dept of Agriculture, Board Member at Minnesota Environmental Partnership, Board Member at Preventing Harm Minnesota.

Food advocate urges Blacks to form Twin Cities farm cooperative

By Charles Hallman
Minnesota Spokesman-Recorder
5/26/2010

Excerpt:

Collie Graddick says the time is now for neighborhoods all over the Twin Cities to set up urban farms. “A community food system, in my opinion, is a way to hopefully bring economic opportunities to inner-city communities,” explains Graddick, a Minnesota Department of Agriculture consultant, of his “neighborhood-level sustainable food system.”

This is a good fit with the growing “sustainability” movement, which Graddick, an educator and food justice advocate, believes more Blacks should understand and appreciate. He defines sustainability as simply ensuring provision of the basics needed to live.

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