Category — Urban Farm

Curtis Stone SHAW TV interview, May 24th 2011.

“In any other system of agriculture, profits are totally diluted through all the machinery, mortgage and lease payments that you have, plus all your transportation costs.”

By Adrian Nieoczym
Globe and Mail
May. 26, 2011

Excerpt:

Kelowna, BC. Mr. Stone describes himself as a “pedal-powered urban farmer.” Now in his second year, he works three-quarters of an acre spread between six plots located in other people’s backyards. “With the land that I’m running now, I could feed about 120 families,” he said.

A former musician who had not even gardened before starting his business, Mr. Stone is quickly emerging as a leader in the growing urban agriculture movement known as SPIN (small-plot intensive) farming. This past winter, he delivered paid workshops in California and B.C., sharing his techniques with other would-be urban farmers. He recently accepted a gig to do the same next year in India.

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Fox 2′s Urban Farming Garden in Detroit

WJBK FOX 2
Detroit, MI
May. 22, 2011

Spring has sprung in the Fox 2 garden! The folks with Urban Farming came out this week to work on what will soon be a mini-farm with crops right outside our studio.

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Brother Nature in North Corktown. Photo by Marvin Shaouni.

Detroit’s food system seems to get richer and more complex everyday.

Patrick Crouch
Model D Media
Apr. 26, 2011

Excerpt:

Detroit’s current vibrant urban agriculture movement attracts people to this work for multiple reasons.

For some it’s the political act of increased food sovereignty for peoples in the city of Detroit, exhibited by groups like Feedom Freedom, the Detroit Black Food Community Security Network, and the Capuchin Soup Kitchen’s Earthworks Urban Farm.

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Camilla Hammer, left, and Alexanna Ashley-Roth till the earth at their first planned farm in Lower Manhattan. Photo by Librado Romero/The New York Times.

A Farm Grows in the Battery – only one acre in size

By James Barron
New York Times
April 10, 2011

Exceprt:

The idea for an urban farm there originated with the environmental club at Millennium High School on Broad Street, a short walk from the park. The Battery Conservancy says that 650 students from 8 schools have now signed up to farm, and it is expanding the program to include community groups, Lower Manhattan residents, even people who just work there and want to do some digging, planting and nurturing.

The planting officially begins on Monday, when the the students will plant enough vegetables to fill the produce section at a corner deli.

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The Marathon Farm in North Philadelphia’s Brewerytown neighborhood will both ship food to the six Marathon restaurants throughout the city and sell produce to local residents. Photo by Dan Nessenson.

Urban farms surge around Philadelphia

By Hayley Brooks
The Daily Pennsylvanian
April 13, 2011

Excerpt:

Marathon Restaurants — a Philadelphia chain with six locations, including 200 South 40th St. — recently acquired 15,750 square feet of land at the corner of Master and 27th streets. The formerly vacant urban spot in North Philadelphia’s Brewerytown neighborhood has been transformed into “Marathon Farm.”

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Urban farmer grows crops right in backyard: wthitv.com

Urban farmer grows crops right in backyard

By Matt Gregory
WTHI TV
Mar 27, 2011

Excerpt:

TERRE HAUTE, Ind. (WTHI) – He doesn’t own a combine or even a more than an acre, but Kevin Levesque has crops.

“This is our little backyard farm, I gotta keep enough room for the kids and the puppy dogs, “ Levesque said.

From his house right here in Terre Haute, Levesque grows enough produce to cut right into the family’s grocery bills. He calls himself an “Urban Homesteader.”

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Harry Rhodes, executive director of Growing Home Inc., tends to more than just plants at the farms. Growing Home provides transitional jobs for people who have multiple barriers to employment, such as a criminal record and housing instability. Photo by Harry Rhodes.

We farm 12 months of the year, but we harvest 10 months out of the year.

By Jennifer Wholey
Medill Reports
Feb 04, 2011

Excerpt:

Harry Rhodes, 51, came home to Wilmette in 2001 after living in Israel for 16 years, where he worked on Jewish-Arab co-existence projects. When he returned, he became the one and only staff member at Growing Home, a non-profit organization started in the early ‘90s to provide job training for the homeless using urban agriculture as a teaching tool.

Now as executive director, Rhodes is at the forefront of the urban agriculture and food justice movement in Chicago, where Growing Home operates three farms on the South Side with a fourth springing up later this year. The farms next season will employ 35 people who have been imprisoned or homeless, and if Growing Home’s record holds, more than 75 percent will find jobs afterward.

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Dig where you live

We are a new farm enterprise that grows lots of food in small city spaces through a network of urban farms.

We envision a small central farm located in downtown Raleigh that grows and markets food in the city. Core operations are self-sufficient, sustained by revenue from sales to Raleigh residents and restaurants. We are part of a sustainable food system that provides competitively priced fresh produce while restoring the environment.

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The Dervaes harvested 7,030 pounds of organic produce on 1/10th acre in 2010 – a record since they started keeping track 10 years ago

Excerpt from the Urban Homestead site:

These last few days, I too have been anxiously waiting the final harvest tally from Justin who’s been going through the invoice books to tally the herbs and edible flower boxes that we harvested and sold (which came to 117 lbs for the year).

On a side note, we just couldn’t figure out how to calculate the weight of 100 plus flats of wheat grass that we grew last year, so we just left them out of the final tally. Oh well.

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Rabbi Gavriel Goldfeder of Boulder’s Aish Kodesh

“One of the things we can look for in the Torah is the Torah’s vision of our environment, food supply and agriculture, and a very deep and sacred relationship with the land,” said Rabbi Soloway.

By Susan Glairon
Intermountain Jewish News
13 Jan. 2011

Excerpt:

The first year, approximately 70 families joined the CSA; that number has since doubled. Bates said that the organizers of Tu Ha’Aretz hope 200 families will join this year.

The term Tuv Ha’Aretz, which is found in Deuteronomy, means both the “good of the land” and “good for the land,” Rabbi Soloway said, meaning that the CSA provides goodness from the earth to eat and that it’s environmentally responsible.

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Model Urban Farm – Excellent 8 minute video

Reporter/Producer: Val Zavala
Video by SoCal Connected (KCET Public Television)
December 10, 2010
Highly recommended. Mike

Anchor Val Zavala visits an urban farmer in Pasadena whose family-run farm allows them to harvest enough not only to feed themselves but also to sell to local restaurants.

Visit Urban Homestead here.

Attendees at the Black Farmers Conference. Photo by Natasha Bowens.

Will Allen comes from a long line of farmers, with over 400 years of farming in his family since sharecropping days

By Natasha Bowens
Grist – A beacon in the fog
Nov. 30, 2010

Excerpt:

On the same day black farmers gathered in Brooklyn for the first annual Black Farmers Conference, the Senate finally voted to award $4.5 billion in damages to African American and Native American farmers for discrimination. The long-awaited settlement funding — three decades in the making — was an outgrowth of the Pigford vs. Glickman class action suit over how processing times for loans to black farmers from a long-ago U.S. subsidy program had far exceeded those for white farmers.

Nice coincidence. But as attendees of this conference know, there’s still a long road ahead to end discrimination, and to fight for land and the right to grow healthy food.

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K. Rashid Nuri. Photo by Joeff Davis.

Truly Living Well Center for Natural Urban Agriculture to break ground – Urban Farm in Old Fourth Ward

Old Fourth Ward is getting a neighborhood, organic vegetable garden on 4-acres leased from Wheat Street Baptist Church! The project will also be a marketplace and serve as a training center for budding urban gardeners.

With the help of District 2 City Councilmember Kwanza Hall and generous investments by the Environmental Protection Agency and the Atlanta Falcons Youth Foundation, Atlanta’s Old Fourth Ward will soon be the site of a new four-acre organic urban garden.

The historic Wheat Street Baptist Church, one of the nation’s oldest African American churches, has leased four acres of inner city land to Truly Living Well Center for Natural Urban Agriculture (TLW) to build an organic vegetable garden, which will also serve as a market place and training center for Atlantans interested in urban agriculture.

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From Our School At Blair Grocery.

New Orleans is taking city-grown food from farm stand to standing resource

By Tracie McMillan, an award-winning food and poverty journalist.
The Atlantic
Nov.12, 2010

Excerpt:

Enter the next generation of urban farmers, most of whom operate through the New Orleans Food and Farm Network (NOFFN). NOFFN had launched prior to Katrina, planting its first food gardens in NOLA’s Hollygrove neighborhood days before the storm. Post-Katrina, the dire lack of food in the city compelled NOFFN to switch gears; the group made national headlines with its DIY food maps of the city in the weeks after the storm. More recently, the group has gotten its hands dirty in the Big Easy’s soil: planting farms, launching markets, and even training new farmers in the business of urban gardening.

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David Kahn founded Edendale Farm five years ago on a sloping half acre in the middle of a Silver Lake neighborhood. He wanted to show that a slower pace is possible, even in a metropolis like Los Angeles. Photo Credit: Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times

Urban farm really grows on visitors and volunteers

By Kate Linthicum
Los Angeles Times
November 07, 2010

Excerpt:

If there are any doubts about the viability of Edendale Farm — which Kahn built, improbably, on a sloping half acre smack in the middle of a swanky Silver Lake neighborhood — the mealtime menus should quell them.

The workers were chewing in silence Thursday, gazing happily out at the shady yard, when they noticed that something seemed off. The landscape was moving — and clucking.

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The Urban Agriculture Innovation Zone will reuse 28 acres of land in Cleveland’s ward 5 into farmland

By Eugene McCormick
Cleveland Leader
10/21/2010

Twenty-eight acres of under-utilized and vacant land in the Kinsman neighborhood will soon become the largest urban agriculture district in the U.S. Ward 5 Councilwoman Phyllis Cleveland; Mayor Frank Jackson; Burten, Bell, Carr Development, Inc; The Ohio State University Extension; representatives from Ohio Governor Ted Strickland’s office; and representatives from the U.S. Department of Agriculture will take part in an announcement at Otter Park, E. 83rd Street and Gill Avenue tomorrow announcing the plans.

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Touring the farm. Photo by Mark Randall. Urban Farmer founder Jessica Padron talks with Chef Baron Skorish, owner of the Blue Moon Fish Company in Lauderdale by the Sea. The chef toured the property on Powerline Road where Padron is growing various types of lettuce, peppers, tomatoes and strawberries on about 6000 square feet of a 1.15 acre industrial site. The produce is being grown hydroponically on verticle stands. More photos here.

Some municipalities are changing laws to allow farming on under-utilized lots, other small pieces of land

By Maria Herrera
Sun Sentinel
October 17, 2010

Excerpt:

Appropriately named The Urban Farmer, Jessica Padron will participate in a community agriculture program, offer workshops for children and adults and have a farm stand for the extras.

“If I won’t feed it to my daughter, I won’t sell it to you,” Padron said.

Padron’s is one of dozens of farms sprouting in urban settings and inner cities across South Florida. There’s Earth N’ Us and Roots in the City in Miami; Marando Farms in Fort Lauderdale; and the Girls U-Pick Strawberry Farm in Delray Beach. There are also smaller community gardens taking root behind backyard fences, church gardens and abandoned lots.

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Andrew on left.

Andrew Plotsky visits the farmers

I am looking for young farmers and urban agricultural projects to visit, to learn about and document. Using photographs, essays and videos, it is my intention to share the stories of the people who are taking initiative and making these projects happen.

I am interested in Doers. People who are passionate, whose eyes glow when talking about their trade. People whose hands have been callused and will continue to harden with the labor of growing food and growing a movement. I’m looking for people who are Movers, who understand the importance of community and personal interaction. People who are living out their dreams, who are not afraid to go for It and see what happens.

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Partners put down roots in the heart of the Bull City, North Carolina

By Elizabeth Shestak
The Durham News
Oct 2, 2010

Darko Urban Farm is another example of Durham ahead-of-the-foodie-curveness.

Approximating a bit over 2,000 square feet of crops ranging from fruit trees to herbs, asparagus to lettuces, the farm is located about a block from Little Five Points in the Cleveland Holloway neighborhood near downtown.

Urban farming has been gaining ground, or rooftop, in many cases, but Darko Urban Farm is the first official farmlet, as I like to call them, trying out a CSA program. (CSAs are community supported agriculture programs and usually entail customers making a seasonal payment to farmers in exchange for weekly produce deliveries.)

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See the TV episode here.

Must-see interview with Mary Seton Corboy of Greensgrow Farms

By Growing a Greener World, a groundbreaking new television series that delivers the latest trends in eco-friendly living mixed with traditional gardening know-how to a modern audience.

Excerpt:

Joe and Patti journey to Philadelphia, home of Greensgrow Farms, fulfillment of the dream of visionary in urban farming, Mary Seton Corboy. More than ten years ago a city block in the Kensington area was the site of an abandoned galvanized steel plant and an EPA brownfields project (see below) that the neighborhood had given up on. But not Mary. Beginning the experimental transformation she was growing lettuce hydroponically (growing plants in a water and nutrient solution without soil) for her clients; high-end local restaurants in need of fresh, organic produce. But the one attribute she prides herself on is her ability to change.

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