Category — Urban Farm

Viet Village Urban Farm, New Orleans, Louisiana, by Mossop + Michaels.

There are 8,000 Vietnamese concentrated in a one-mile radius in New Orleans East.

J. Green
The Dirt
06/10/2013

Excerpt:

The development corporation found a trainer who could teach aquaculture, the practice of raising fish on land. A two-day session brought up new ways to create more sustainable systems. In a pilot phase, workshop attendees tested out growing koi, bluefish, and catfish. Some then experimented with “aquaponics,” which uses the waste from fish as fertilizer to grow produce. “This is more sustainable growth,” as the fish byproduct isn’t simply dumped into waterways.

Now, the VEGGI Farmer’s Cooperative, a massively scaled-up aquaponics operation for the community, sells fresh produce to local restaurants and stores.

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A 3.5-acre campus containing the historic Eastern Pumping Station

Excerpt:

Urban Farming: Urban farming is an emerging piece of the local food economy, bringing productive new use to vacant urban land, creating jobs in under-served communities, and providing very local food production. Most importantly it empowers under-served communities by connecting them to fresh food sources in their own neighborhood. Baltimore-based Big City Farms plans to build a high-intensity urban farm at the Baltimore Food Hub, as part of its network of urban agriculture sites. Big City Farms is a for-profit urban agriculture company that is both a grower-network of small, urban sustainable farms and an aggregator that collects, processes, and delivers produce to grocery stores, hospitals, colleges and individual farmer’s market shoppers.

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

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

By Megha
Detroit Free Press
May 20, 2013

Excerpt:

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

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

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

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

By Zinta Aistars
SouthWest Michigan
April 25, 2013

Excerpt:

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

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

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

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

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

By Graciela Watrous
The Stanford Daily
May 9, 2013

Excerpts:

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

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River School Farm wins USDA’s Value Added Producer Grant

By Jason Hidalgo
rgj.com
May 1, 2013

Excerpt:

Score one for urban farming.

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

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

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

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Shelby and Zsuzsi have been making their way around the city visiting urban farmers on site who have been graciously hosting them for in depth interviews on the practices research project.

Understanding Our Practices from Seed to Scrap

Project Backgrounder
February 2013
Vancouver Urban Farming Society

Excerpt:

Project Overview & Team

In Fall 2012 the Vancouver Urban Farming Society (VUFS) hired a coordinator team of Shelby Tay and Zsuzsi Fodor to research what a code of best practices for urban farming in Vancouver could look like to provide a way for urban farmers to proactively and continually address the challenges and concerns around growing practices, community engagement, business practices, health and safety, among others. The research team is also working on:

1. VUFS Communication: Website, Newsletter & Social Media

2. Community Engagement & Education: 2012 Urban Farming Forum, 2013 Workshops & Tours

3. Organizational Development: VUFS Strategic Planning & Visioning

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

North Philadelphia Urban Farm Project Hoping To Attract Young People

By Kim Glovas
CBS Philadelphia
March 9, 2013

Excerpt:

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

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

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

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Kickstarter vacant lot project

By Robert Hohne

Excerpt:

If you drive around New Orleans you’ll notice that there are tons of vacant lots–especially in certain neighborhoods. So a few months back I thought it would be an awesome idea to turn one of them into a productive farm that could grow everything from micro greens to beets to okra. Well maybe not everything. But there is plenty that can be grown in the city, which actually presents several advantages over farming in a more rural environment.

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New video of his Vancouver talk

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

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In this clip, Jay Rosenberg speaks about Hayes Valley Farm demonstrating urban agriculture as a strategy for interim land use in San Francisco.

Upcoming feature-length documentary:- forthcoming 2014

Promises of Urban Agriculture is a feature-length documentary on urban agriculture across the world. Looking at the historic, cultural, and economic significance of urban agriculture in a number of major cities, the video examines a wide range of approaches and asks: is this a movement that will dramatically reshape our cities and way of life?

Spanning from Quito, New York, Milwaukee, Albany, Detroit, Berlin, Tel Aviv, Amherst, Brussels, and elsewhere, this research project draws from the diverse narratives of a range of groups and individuals involved with urban agriculture–activists, historians, entrepreneurs, traditional farmers, futurists, food foresters, urban homesteaders, policy makers, and closet gardeners.

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Our team consists of six youth committed to changing the face of food in the region

We see Kinsmen Park becoming an ideal place for community gathering. Our goal is to create a youth-run farm social enterprise that contributes to a safe and positive atmosphere, beautifies the neighbourhood, and provides jobs for youth in the Cowichan Region. We already have an educational space for all members of our community to learn the skills necessary to take food production, preservation, and nutrition into their own hands. To build on this, we would like to create a demonstration site where we can explore the potentials of urban agriculture, while respecting and contributing to the space as a community park.

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

Farming Silicon Valley

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

Excerpt:

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

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

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Indoor farm.

The Urban Farm: A New American Frontier

By Erin Sund
Food and Nutrition Magazine
February 26, 2013

Excerpt:

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

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

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

By Nick Carey
Reuters
February 19, 2013

Excerpt:

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

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

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Yale’s Sustainable Food Project

Mark Bomford is innovator in both non-profit and academic contexts. Mark has founded and managed projects focused on urban agriculture, community food security, and food systems modeling and research. He’s dabbled in everything from farming to food-centered organizations—both in Canada and around the world. In 2011 Bomford joined the Yale Sustainable Food Project. He looks forward to deepening the impact and broadening the reach of the Project as it enters its second decade of playing a transformative role in the larger food system.

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

By Story by Allen Young
Comstock Magazine
Feb. 2013

Excerpt:

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

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

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Covered Roots: The History of Vancouver’s Chinese Farms

Video visits Chinese Canadian farmers

Produced by: Chinese Canadian Stories (www.chinesecanadian.ubc.ca).
Created by: Alejandro Yoshizawa and Wendy Phung.
2012

Less that 100 years ago, ‘eating local’ was not a luxury but a reality. So who fed Vancouver? Discover the little-know history of Chinese farms in the Vancouver area, as told by the farming families themselves. Includes rare photos and old family videos.

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Meet Seann Dory from Sole Food Farms in this 10th short film in the ‘Meet your Urban Farmer’ series.

By Vita Mavronicolas, Digital Storyteller
Shaun Mavronicolas
Fire and Light Media Group
2013

From Fire And Light’s description:

Seann J Dory is the Co-Director of Sole Food Farms. Before starting Sole Food, Seann was a project manager at United We Can a social enterprise creating employment opportunity for inner city residents through environmental enterprises. Seann is a founding member of the Young Agrarians, an initiative to recruit, promote and support young farmers in Canada.

Seann speaks regularly about food, sustainability and inner city development and has presented at the EAT Vancouver Festival and the Projecting Change Film Festival. Seann is a graduate of the Sustainable Community Development program at Simon Fraser University and a member of the National Farmers Union.

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