Category — Video

Jennifer Garner and Timothy Olyphant filming “Catch and Release” in Vancouver, BC. Photo by Michael Levenston.

Paparazzi alert! Garner photographed in the community garden next to City Farmer’s garden in 2005

Along 6th Avenue in Vancouver, next to our Compost Demonstration Garden, is the Maple Street Community Garden on city boulevard land next to the no-longer-used CPR railway tracks. In July, 2005, Jennifer Garner and crew turned up to film a segment of “Catch And Release”.

Of course we were there, gawking from the rooftop of our building. I got a few zoom shots off before they spotted me and yelled “stop”. The larger versions of the photos include a good number of unusual models of compost bins that we’d donated to the gardens over the years.

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(L-r) Rebecca Hall as Claire Keesey and Ben Affleck as Doug MacRay in Warner Bros. Pictures’ and Legendary Pictures’ crime drama ‘The Town,’ distributed by Warner Bros. Pictures. Photo by Claire Folger

It’s a Boston community garden but which one?

Excerpt from a review in the Observer by Phillip French
Sept 26, 2010

Based on a novel by Chuck Hogan called Prince of Thieves, Ben Affleck’s The Town is a violent crime story set in the Charlestown area of north-east Boston, which boasts more bank and armoured car robbers than any other square mile in America. Forty years ago one might have been surprised by this, as to outsiders Boston was thought of as a sedate city, rich in revolutionary history and the setting for respectable novels of upper-class manners.

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NourishLife.org. Chef Bryant Terry discusses the rise of urban farming and its importance in building healthy communities, engaging young people, and bringing fresh, homegrown food to cities.

The rise of urban farming

By Nourish Video Encyclopedia

Bryant Terry is an eco-chef, food justice activist, and author of Vegan Soul Kitchen and co-author of Grub, with Anna Lappé. For more than a decade he has worked to build a more just and sustainable food system. His interest in cooking, farming, and community health can be traced back to his childhood in Memphis, Tennessee, where his grandparents inspired him to grow, prepare, and appreciate good food.

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Daryl Hannah fights to save the farm

Directed and produced by Michael Kuehnert
Playing at the Vancouver Film Festival
Sep 30th and Oct 1st, 2010

The endangered 14-acre organic farm in South Central Los Angeles, cultivated by 350 families over 14 years and then sold out from under them by the Los Angeles city council, is the subject of Michael Kuehnert’s call to arms. Celebrities – Alicia Silverstone, Amy Smart, Daryl Hannah Julia, Butterfly Hill, Tom Morello, – and activists link arms to fight city hall.

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See the TV episode here.

TV producer is an urban garden educator

By Growing a Greener World

Excerpt:

In this episode we visit with Joe’s Associate Producer of Growing a Greener World, and urban homesteading expert, Theresa Loe. Joe, Nathan and Patti descend on Theresa’s small but productive urban garden in LA to see first-hand how this popular blogger and trained Master Canner incorporates enough produce aesthetically to feed her family of four. Annuals and perennials are intermingled with vegetables, herbs, fruit and chickens for a visually pleasing yet highly productive garden and outdoor learning environment for her two young boys.

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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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Kay Grimm and Sue Spicer of Fruit Loop Acres in Indianapolis, Indiana.

The Queer Farmer Film Project is creating a full-length documentary film which explores the dynamic relationships between gender, sexuality, and agriculture, with a particular focus on the hearts and hard work of America’s queer farmers.

Excerpt from the Queer Film Project website.

Fruit Loop Acres is a 3/4 acre permaculture fruit farm in the heart of the city. Like many post-industrial midwestern cities, much of this urban center is fledgling, depressed, boarded up and faced with significant challenges to accessing good fresh food.

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In 2010, Levi Strauss and Co. began a collaboration in Braddock, Pennsylvania, a broken town struggling to reinvent itself. As part of this collaboration, Levi Strauss and Co. invested in Braddock’s community center, public library, and urban farm. The result is a campaign that tells the story of the people of Braddock.

A vacant lot, an opportunity – We Are All Workers: Episode 7 Urban Farm

As an urban farmer, Marshall envisions Braddock’s empty lots as opportunities to create a stronger, healthier community. Amidst the closed steel mills and abandoned homes, the Urban Farm brings affordable, organic produce that’s “as local as you can get” to the dinner tables of Braddock’s homes. Brought to you by Levi’s in partnership with IFC and Sundance Channel.

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A video survey of urban agriculture and community gardening in Atlanta. This story was featured on “This is Atlanta with Alicia Steele,” a Telly Award-winning and Emmy-nominated magazine show on PBA, Atlanta’s PBS Station. Produced by Jack Walsh. (Beautiful video. Mike)

City Gardens in Atlanta

This is Atlanta with Alicia Steele

At This Is Atlanta, we wanted to explore a kind of urban agriculture that brings people together — community gardens. A community garden can start out as simply as a few plots and some pooled resources, or they can grow to include classes, nature trails, and even chicken coops. Our story features these:

The Oakhurst Community Garden began as a grass-roots environmental education center and added gardening plots at the request of neighborhood residents.

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Urban gardening: We spend a day on the farm in deepest Berlin to find out how urban agriculture is taking root in the German capital

In Monocle
12.08.10

Reporter: Markus Albers
Narrator: Saul Taylor
Director/Cameraman: Christian Fussenegger
Producer: Gillian Dobias
Editor: Aleksander Solum

See the video here.

The Local Show on KCPT is designed to highlight artists and entrepreneurs, leaders and overachievers from all walks of life – and in the process, help Kansas Citizens discover substantially more about this place we call home.

Link to Kansas City Center for Urban Agriculture here.

Raising $125,000 to shoot a pilot episode on urban agriculture in America

Food Forward goes beyond celebrity chefs, cooking competitions, and recipes to reveal the compelling stories and inspired solutions envisioned by food heroes across America who are striving to create a more just, sustainable and delicious alternative to what we eat and how we produce it.

Written by food journalist Stett Holbrook and produced by a veteran documentary film making team led by Greg Roden, Food Forward is a series of thirteen, 30-minute episodes exploring new ideas of food in America as told by the people who are living them.

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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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‘Food Not Lawns’ documentary fundraising teaser

By Karney Hatch

This is the fundraising teaser for the upcoming documentary “Food Not Lawns”. The documentary examines the efforts of a variety of individuals and organizations in Los Angeles to replace lawns with food-producing gardens. It also looks at larger-scale urban agriculture projects such as a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) farm operating in North Hollywood.

The second focus of the film will be to examine the success of urban agriculture in Havana, Cuba, with an eye towards transferring the ideas and methods that have worked in this “Third World” city to urban centers in the United States and elsewhere in the “First World”.

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Yonge Street’s videographer Rose Bianchini went to Parkdale to see what Greenest City is up to in that neigbourhood.

Greenest City

Greenest City is an award-winning charitable organization that grows local organic food, youth leaders and healthy, sustainable communities with a focus on Toronto’s Parkdale-High Park neighbourhood. Our animated, community-driven initiatives are grounded in urban agriculture.

Why focus on food? Because we believe that food and urban agriculture offer opportunities to connect people to nature, to each other and to new skills, simultaneously addressing a variety of critical urban issues.

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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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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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The Fabulous Beekman Boys

Planet Green’s The Fabulous Beekman Boys will make its Discovery on Demand series premiere on Friday, June 9, before the network premiere on Wednesday, June 16, at 9 p.m.. Subsequent episodes premiere on-demand on Tuesdays and on the network on Wednesdays at 9 p.m.

By Valerie Milano
Hollywood Today
May 26th, 2010

In June, the Discovery channel’s Planet Green is introducing a new series based on a urbanite gay couple in New York who ‘accidentally’ became farmers. Trying to build a sustainable farm while managing a relationship makes for some funny and emotional episodes. Author Josh Kilmer-Purcell and Brent Ridge, a doctor and former executive with Martha Stewart, run the Beekman Farm.

The idea blossomed from an unlikely place, and Ridge explained, “We started by growing vegetables on our rooftop in New York City, and that inspired us so much that we started looking for what we thought was going to be a weekend place in the country and grew the size of our garden. Now we grow 110 different varieties of heirloom vegetables. What we hope is that by doing a show like this, we will inspire more people to do that, to see how easy it is.”

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Full hour and 30 minute video.

The Business of Urban Agriculture – Urban Farming Summit, University of Michigan-Dearborn held April 7, 2010

Urban farming is a subject of increasing importance in metro Detroit and other cities across the United States. The University of Michigan-Dearborn has held two summits to explore urban farming and other food-related issues in southeast Michigan.

Urban farming can succeed in Detroit, panelists say

By Nancy Kaffer
Crain’s Detroit Business
April 7, 2010

Excerpt:

Beer is proof that small-scale, local farming can be a business success, Eastern Market Corp. President Dan Carmody says.

Carmody, who was a panelist Wednesday at a business of urban agriculture discussion hosted by the University of Michigan-Dearborn and Crain’s Detroit Business, said that in the 1980s, big companies like Budweiser and Miller chased small brewers out of the market.

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Video by Al Jazeera.

French farmers turn Champs-Elysees into huge farm

BBC News
23 May 2010

One of Paris’s main thoroughfares, the Champs-Elysees, has been covered in earth and turned into a huge green space in an event staged by young French farmers.

They want to highlight their financial problems, caused by falling prices for agricultural produce.

Plants, trees and flowers were brought in by lorry overnight to transform the avenue into a long green strip.

More than a million people are expected to visit over the next two days.

The event, which cost 4.2m euros (£3.6m; $5.3m) to stage, has been organised by the French Young Farmers (Jeunes Agriculteurs) union over the holiday weekend in France.

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