Category — Urban Farm

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

By Tracey Gold Bennett,
Washington Informer
03 January 2012

Excerpt:

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

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River Cottage Urban Smallholding (1 of 5) “Beginnings”

During River Cottage spring (2008) Hugh helped a group of Bristol families start a smallholding on derelict council land.

A talented writer, broadcaster and campaigner, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall is widely known for his uncompromising commitment to seasonal, ethically produced food and has earned a huge following through his River Cottage TV series and books.

His early smallholding experiences were shown in the Channel 4 River Cottage series and led to the publication of The River Cottage Cookbook (2001), which won the Glenfiddich Trophy and the André Simon Food Book of the Year awards.

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Soil Born Farms from Soil Born Farms on Vimeo.

Soil Born Farms Apprentice 2011

By Emily Pearson
December, 2011

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

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

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Whole Foods Market ‘urban farming’ series

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

See the first 4 videos in this excellent series here.

Photo by Patrick Crouch.

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

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

Excerpt:

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

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

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Vegetable Vancouver 2010: An Urban Farming Census. See the two page flyer PDF here. (1.7 MB)

An Urban Farming Census – Project Description

By Marc Schutzbank, MSc. Candidate
University of British Columbia
November, 2010
Presented at the Vancouver Urban Farming Forum

The Food and Agriculture Organization’s Food Price Index is at the highest level ever recorded. Wheat crops have failed in Russia and in China due to severe heat and draught. International food access issues are stirring local public and private responses, one of which is urban farming. To ascertain the community impacts of urban farming, I propose the development of an urban farming census to measure the economic, social and environmental outcomes of urban farming.

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See the Voice of America video here.

D-Town Farm in Detroit

By Selah Hennessy
Voice of America
November 17, 2011

Excerpt:

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

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

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Watch this new documentary named “West Philly Grown”. By Clay Hereth. 2011. 17 minutes. (Must See. Mike)

The little half-acre that could: Urban minifarms, like Mill Creek, are keeping many Philadelphians from going hungry

By Dan Geringer
phillynews.com
June 08, 2009

Excerpt:

“When you use solar panels,” Walker said, “you don’t pay an electric bill.”

In a shoestring operation like Mill Creek Farm’s, that is one of many huge savings that help keep prices low for the fixed-income-neighborhood seniors who make up more than half of the farm’s customers and the low-income families that use food stamps to buy vegetables from the little half-acre that could.

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Photo by Neal Santos.

Philadelphia Community Building

By Felicia D’Ambrosio
Generocity Writer
11/05/11

Excerpt:

Here is Farm 51, a micro urban farm conceived and carried out by public landscapes manager Andrew Olson, in collaboration with partner Neal Santos and neighbors like Roberta Baker, Yahya Adib Bey and his son Yahya Jr.

“I saw Andrew from the window of my apartment,” says Miss Roberta Baker, a resident of 51st and Chester Ave. for the past five years. “And I was so jealous! I came out here and told him, ‘I’ll talk to the greens.’ I can’t dig anymore, but I can talk to the greens. ‘You can grow better than that, I’d tell them.’”

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

By Georgina Gustin
St Louis Today
Nov 4, 2011

Excerpts:

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

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Green City Growers’ CEO Mary Donnell.

New Urban Farm Joins Cleveland’s Central Neighborhood

By Anne Glausser
Ideastream
Oct 17, 2011

Excerpt:

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

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

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

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Delicious kale chips. Photo by Lucinda Chua.

50,000 vacant properties – no shortage of land

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

Excerpt:

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

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“We really want to be debt free by the next three years.”

By Irma Widjojo
Times Herald
10/03/2011

Excerpt:

Just over a year ago, Vallejoans Rachel Hoff and Tom Ferguson, frustrated with the food industry, challenged themselves: For a full 365 days, that ended Saturday, they would not step into a grocery store.

“I couldn’t trust the food from the store anymore,” Hoff said. “There’s a lack of trust with the food system.”

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

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

By Jon Kalish
Make Magazine
September, 2011

Excerpt:

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

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

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

No groceries for a year – Vallejo couple tries it

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

Excerpts:

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

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

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City Farm, Chicago.

“Some people just buy it because you can’t find it elsewhere and it tastes better.”

By Marissa Lee
Seedstock Digest
August 17, 2011

Excerpt:

City Farm used to be a gas station. It was also a de facto dumping site for debris from a demolished building located nearby. Before the organization could grow any vegetables, the land had to be remediated. To insure against soil contamination the land was capped with a four to six inch layer of clay to control potential site contamination. The clay cap acts as a barrier to protect the crops from absorbing any chemicals that might have seeped into the ground. Otherwise, Rozendaal is not too anxious about pollution – an issue all urban farms encounter.

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

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

By Erin Alberty
The Salt Lake Tribune
Aug 15 2011 04

Excerpt:

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

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

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Our two community-run farmers markets make fresh food available and affordable, while building our local economy and creating places for neighbors for meet and greet.

Video by Hugues Anhes – 2011
Excerpt from Natasha Bowens’ blog “Brown. Girl. Farming.”
July 12, 2011

“Some of you may remember the posts from my time at East New York Farms! last year – a place that meant so much to me and youth that blew me away with inspiration. Now I want to share some words directly from them, in line with the current theme of sharing stories from black and brown farmers and communities involved in food issues here on the blog!

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

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

By Michael Tortorello
New York Times
August 3, 2011

Excerpt:

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

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

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