Category — Video

New York Urban Farmers Grow Rooftop Crops

Video:

“Brooklyn Grange” in Queens, N.Y., is a 40,000-square-foot rooftop farm.

“Pluck and Feather” – from Whole Foods Market

After moving into her husband’s Oakland, California home, Esperanza creates a flourishing, urban backyard garden as a space of her own where she reconnects with her personal heritage. The power of fresh, homegrown food nourishes relationships around her new family’s table.

Beyond her garden, Esperanza Pallana works to educate the community on the benefits of local and regional agriculture and the preservation of food heritage.

Link here.

Video Report – Rooftop Farms in New York

By Monika Vosough
Wall Street Journal
7/13/2011

Entrepreneurs are looking to urban farms and rooftop gardens as an alternative to traditional farms. While start-up costs are higher, these efforts could pay off with long-term environmental benefits and better tasting veggies.

Ultra Fresh Goat’s Milk from Growing Cities Movie on Vimeo.
Ultra Fresh Goat’s Milk: We met Jennie Grant, founder of the Goat Justice League in Seattle, WA. She fought to legalize keeping goats in backyards across the city and won. Today she has four goats in her backyard and taught us how to milk them…we even got some milk straight from the udder.

“Growing Cities” Movie

By Dan Susman, Director/Producer

Growing Cities is a feature-length documentary film about urban farming across America. It follows me, Dan, and my friend Andrew on our road trip across country learning about Urban Agriculture from city-dwellers who’ve made it their lives. Visiting urban centers from Los Angeles to New Orleans we discover a diverse, grass-roots movement that is building across our country—people growing food in cities to make a living, to learn and to teach, to provide safe and nutritious food for their children, and to build stronger and more vibrant communities.

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Dive! Trailer from Compeller Pictures on Vimeo.

Dumpster Divers tell their story

A film by Jeremy Seifert
Music by Timothy Vatterott

Grocery stores around the country are filling their dumpsters with food. Not rotten, spoiled food, but billions of pounds of good, edible food.

Why? Because the expiration date is nearing? Because it costs less to simply throw away excess food rather than do something helpful with it?

Whatever the answer, the contradiction is profound: good, edible food is being thrown away in the very same communities where people are going hungry.

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An academic and multimedia investigation of sustainable urban farm communities in 21 cities and towns around the country.

The Goal:

We want to create a documentary, a photo collection, a cookbook and more!
And we want you to be there along the way! Documentary footage will include keystone interviews with Joan Gussow, Will Allen and Alice Waters.

Project Abstract:

Our team – made up of writers, photographers and film makers – will travel the country, visiting major cities and other sustainable agriculture hotspots, in order to document through a mix of media the stories of urban and sustainable farm and food communities we meet.

[Read more →]

The Perennial Plate Episode 57: Lord, Lord, Lord from Daniel Klein on Vimeo.

The Perennial Plate – Episode 57: Lord, Lord, Lord

By The Perennial Plate

It was hard to imagine focusing on just one urban gardener in New Orleans… so we didn’t. This video tells the story of several different New Orleans residents who came back to the city after the storm to rebuild and start making food in the city’s abandoned lots. And you can’t tell a New Orleans story without music, thankfully one of our farmers happened to play in the Treme Brass Band!

Link.

Urban Farming in the Heart of Atlanta: MyFoxATLANTA.com

Video Story

By Beth Galvin
My Fox Atalnta
10 Jun 2011

ATLANTA, Ga. – It’s an oasis in the concrete and congestion of city life. Just around the corner of the historic Wheat Street Baptist Church, a community garden is springing to life.

Drop in and you’ll see people harvesting food, and summer campers practicing their planting skills. It’s part of a project to bring Atlanta back to its roots.

Whole Food Market video

In this episode (Round Table Farm): Neysa and Travis ditch demanding career paths in Boston and follow their dream of organic farming all the way to Texas. In Austin’s thriving local-food scene, growing their first crop opens their eyes and brings up more than fresh vegetables.

From rooftops and back yards to community plots and small farms, across America inspired individuals are waking up and taking food production into their own hands. Look into their lives and living spaces as they nourish themselves and others, along with their gardens.

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Director Karney Hatch’s second feature documentary, will explore urban agriculture worldwide.

“I grew up on a farm, and though I’ve spent most of my adulthood in cities, I’ve always remained connected to the farming lifestyle. My grandparents were huge gardeners, too, so I’ve had the bug for many years. When I first moved to Los Angeles in 2000, I became aware of the idea of urban farming and how much sense it made, especially in a semi-desert like Southern California which steals (sorry, no other word fits!) most of its water from elsewhere. I began researching the documentary in earnest in 2009, and filming began in Los Angeles last year and now is ramping up with this ambitious filming trip which will take me to Asia, Africa and Latin America before returning to the US for additional filming into the Spring of 2012.

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Released for the Five Year Anniversary of the Eviction Of the South Central Farmers in Los Angeles

Featuring Daryl Hannah, Julia Butterfly Hill, Alicia Silverstone, John Quigley and More

Press Release:

LOS ANGELES (May 19, 2011) – June 13, 2011 marks the five-year “anniversary” of the eviction of the farmers from the South Central Farm in downtown Los Angeles. The award-winning documentary short film SAVE THE FARM, directed by Michael Kuehnert, will be released on digital platforms on June 7, 2011 to commemorate the needless destruction of an important environmental and cultural oasis.

The South Central Farm (SCF) sprung up on an abandoned industrial area of approximately 14 acres in South Central Los Angeles. The land had been acquired by the City of Los Angeles in 1986 from developer Ralph Horowitz for $4.7 million.

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New York Farm City from Petrina TV on Vimeo.

Video by Gina and Scott Keatley
Nourishing NYC, East Harlem

Featuring:

Ben Flanner and Anastasia Plakias
Brooklyn Grange Farm, Queens

Patrick Connolly
Bobo, Greenwich Village

Daniel Bowman Simon
People’s Garden NYC
City Hall, Manhattan

See the new trailer.

“It took men like Henry Ford, William Durant, and Lee Iacocca to build this city, but it’s taken a bunch of strong willed self-taught urban farmers to save it.”

Urban Roots is a documentary film, which follows the urban farming phenomenon in Detroit. Urban Roots is a timely, moving and inspiring film that speaks to a nation grappling with collapsed industrial towns and the need to forge a sustainable and prosperous future.

Producer’s Statement
Leila Conners

After making The 11th Hour, it was clear to me that the oft-quoted saying “think globally, act locally” was the key to solving our environmental crisis. When the story of the urban farmers in Detroit was brought to us, we knew that what they were doing – acting decisively and caring for themselves and their community – basically healing themselves and their neighborhoods through growing food, was that kind of local action that can make the world a better place so we committed to bringing their story to the world.

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Nokia – HK Honey from The Silentlights on Vimeo.

Hong Kong honey

Directed by Kiku Ohe.
Produced by Exit Films as part of Nokia’s E7 Success Redefined campaign.
(Brilliant video. Mike)

Hong Kong is home to more than 7 million people. Amongst the high rise apartments, product designer Michael Leung founder of HK Honey, has created his own space bringing nature back into the metropolis one box at a time.

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A CNN video report

March 24, 2011

Vertical farming is a revolutionary idea that would enable cities to feed themselves.
Note (Mike): See a 15,000 sq. ft. rooftop greenhouse under construction in New York City by Gotham Greens. Viraj Puri describes the project.

British TV Show

This TV pilot gives you a glimpse at how to grow your own community from meeting the Transition Town Lewes group who are learning to live without fossil fuels, to community allotments, to bee keeping in the church yard, to keeping chickens in a tiny back garden of a town house. Produced and directed by Sara Proudfoot Clinch, shot on HD by dop Simon Archer, sound by Martin Beresford

Everything from urban fish farming to alternate energy

Who are we….. We are the urban experiment…

We are the seed that died and went into the ground. We are about 20 families who have purposefully uprooted from out of their comfortable suburban homes and moved into one of the worst neighborhoods in Kansas City. We bought homes within a 5 block radius of each other and we put down our stake for the sake of the youth and the poor.

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ResilientCITY Short trailer

“Welcome to ResilientCITY, the third and definitive documentary project in the END of SUBURBIA trilogy. This is a rough cut of the trailer we will be releasing in early 2011.”

Gregory Greene – director/writer is a Toronto-based filmmaker with a background in social and political documentaries.

Link to website here.

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.

Nomadic green: The Princess Garden in Berlin-Kreuzberg

All four films are in German

Four new short films (in German) by George Eich show the different dimensions of urban gardening, its liveliness as well as its social and cultural aspects: A mobile, urban agriculture at the Prinzessinnengarten in the middle of Berlin-Kreuzberg; a neighborhood garden that becomes the departure point for city development from bottom up; cooking with boys with Turkish background in the intercultural garden in Görlitzer Park; and the moving of the Guerilla Garden “Rosa Rose”.

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