A large urban farm on Vernon Drive near Terminal and Clark

Photos by Michael Levenston

We’ve linked to news reports about SOLEfood Farm’s exciting new development on the EXPO lands in Vancouver. SOLEfood is also building another large farm next to the busy cross streets of Clark Drive and Terminal Avenue in Vancouver.

After searching the area for some time, we discovered the site on Vernon Drive just under the Terminal overpass and watched an employee ‘hosing’ soil into the unique grow beds built on pallets. The pallets can be moved with a forklift if the farm needs to change location.

This farm, along with the other sites being developed, makes this one of the largest urban farms in North America.


SOULfood’s grow beds.


Denbow brings the soil.

The soil comes from Eco-Soil (it’s their “Organic Veggie Mix”) and the ‘blown-in installation’ of the soil was contracted to Denbow.

See SOLEfood here.

See Eco-Soil here.

See Denbow here.

Homeowners fed up with turf pests are turning over a new leaf by having their sod replaced with organic vegetable crops

By Randy Shore
Vancouver Sun
May 16, 2012

Excerpt:

Urban farmer Camil Dumont and his partners couldn’t be happier about the chafer beetle epidemic ravaging lawns across the city.

Dumont’s Inner City Farms – a partnership of five young farmers – is growing organic vegetable crops on 19 residential yards in Vancouver, most of which had been laid waste by voracious predators of chafer larvae. Skunks, raccoons and crows eat the grubs, but the animals have to tear up the sod to get at them and they have devastated thousands of lawns from New Westminster to east Vancouver.

The larvae prefer to feed on the fibrous roots of grass sod and are seldom a problem to vegetable gardens.

The produce the Inner City farmers grow feeds 62 families – as well as the five farmers and five interns – through the growing season and provides a variety of full-and part-time jobs. Inner City will also begin selling produce to a handful of restaurants this season and is a regular contributor to Oppenheimer Park Community Kitchen on the Downtown Eastside.

“I’m the biggest fan of the chafer beetle that there is,” said Dumont. “This is the beginning of the end of the front lawn.”

Read the complete article here.

Around 500 families will be provided with seedlings

The Times of India
May 15, 2012

Excerpt:

KOCHI: Giving thrust to organic farming and self-reliance in vegetable cultivation, a terrace vegetable farming initiative was inaugurated here on Monday.

Jointly organized by the Ernakulam District Agricultural Society, Horticultural Society, Ernakulam District Resident Association’s apex council, residents association apex council and the Vegetable and Fruit Promotion Council Keralam ( VFPCK), the programme was inaugurated by district collector Sheikh Pareeth.

Nearly 2,50,000 seedlings were distributed in the city. The aim is to distribute seedlings to 500 families before Friday. The second phase, which aims to bring one lakh families under the programme, will be implemented in Tripunithura, Kakkanad, Maradu, Kalamassery and Thrikkakara.

Organic methods will be used for this green endeavour, and though the primary experiment began in Kochi, people from Alappuzha and Thrissur can also join the initiative. As part of the drive, guidance will be given to people. There will also be a follow-up along with a 50% subsidy to select families. The implementation committee headed by the collector as chairman and the monitoring committee chaired by the joint director of agriculture and deputy director of horticulture will check the progress of the programme and make necessary amendments.

Read the complete article here.

Purple Leaf ‘mini-farm’ will sell fresh produce, flowers at farmers market

By Jean Lotus
Forest Park Review
5/15/2012

Excerpt:

Jessica Rinks, president and founder of the Forest Park Community Garden, is turning over a new leaf. She’s also turning over 12,000 square feet of sod behind the Altenheim senior residence and creating a pesticide-free vegetable and flower garden this summer – to sell produce at the Forest Park Farmers Market.

Rinks contracted with the village to lease a 240-by-50-foot sliver of Altenheim land to grow fresh produce for the market. She’s calling her venture Purple Leaf Farms.

“I’ve done market growing before but not with a lot of space,” Rinks said. The plot will be situated west of the buildings abutting the cemetery, and probably will not even be visible from Van Buren Avenue, she said.

“I want people to know that I’m going to be offering really local, pesticide-free stuff that’s grown in Forest Park.” When she says local, she means grown 100 yards from the market itself. That guarantees it’ll be fresh. “This is a little dream of mine,” she said.

The board voted Monday to lease the land for $300 plus 7 percent of Purple Leaf’s net profits.

In an unusual vote, Mayor Anthony Calderone voted with commissioners Chris Harris and Rory Hoskins to approve the vote 3 to 2. Commissioners Mark Hosty and Tom Mannix voted against the resolution.

Both opposing commissioners said they did not want to set a precedent of leasing portions of the Altenheim land because it might interfere with its sale. Hosty said allowing one lease was, “the camel under the tent.” He warned that Illinois real estate law prevented landlords from evicting farmers until all crops were harvested.

Read the complete article here.

See Purple Leaf here.

“Developing urban agriculture is crucial, given demographic trends.” – FAO

IRIN – Integrated Regional Information Networks
Humanitarian news and analysis, a service of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs
BANGKOK, 16 May 2012

Excerpt:

A Geographical Information System (GIS) is being used to map vegetable production in the greater Bangkok region, seat of Thailand’s capital, to analyse how urban and peri-urban agriculture (UPA) contribute to food security in the city of more than 14 million.

“UPA produces around one-fifth of world’s food, with 800 million people involved in it. Our project aims at giving decision-makers more elements to harness this potential,” Yingyong Paisooksantivatana, the associate dean of the agriculture faculty at Kasetsart University in Bangkok, told IRIN.

The V-GIS (vegetable-GIS, or “veggies”,) project is a computerized information system that analyses data gathered on the ground and via satellite about crop species, production, land surface and workforce, launched in April 2012 by Kasetsart University and the German University of Freiburg, with funding from the German Agency for International Cooperation (GIZ).

Researchers, urban planners and policymakers can access the information for free, said David Oberhuber, the GIZ country director in Thailand.

“The cultivation of fruits and vegetables inside Greater Bangkok is necessary for many inhabitants but very little is known about it,” said Narin Senapa, a research and training assistant at the Taiwan-based NGO, AVRDC-The World Vegetable Centre (AVRDC), previously known as Asian Vegetable Research Development Centre, which is participating in the project.

Read the complete article here.

Meet your Urban Farmer – Vancouver BC

By Shaun Mavronicolas
Creative/Technical Director
Fire and Light Media Group

Meet Chris Thoreau of My Urban Farm in this second short film in our Meet your Urban Farmer series. This is the extended interview version.

Chris is a creator, papa, urban grower of sunflower, pea, and buckwheat shoots which are then cut and pedaled to you within hours of harvest, bike-powered. Chris likes soil, compost, and microgreens.

From 2001 to 2006 Chris operated Influence Organics – a small, certified organic farm, on Vancouver Island. “Too much work”, he thought, “I’m going back to school”. He now holds a BSc. in Agroecology from UBC where his studies focused on soils, urban farming, and plant breeding. Chris still works too much, but that’s ok.

Link to Fire and Light here.

My Urban Farm site here.

15 beds, each 15 feet in length. In Portuguese.

A salada vem do telhado

Quer umas verduras? Vá buscar lá no telhado. O agrônomo Marcos Victorino, vem desenvolvendo projetos de hortas sobre telhas em espaços pouco valorizados da metrópole, como lajes, quintais e terrenos de imóveis comerciais e residenciais. As hortas foram plantadas em varios locais da cidade de São Paulo, como exemplo na foto acima, no campus da Faculdade Cantareira, no bairro do Belém-São Paulo Capital, sobre uma laje no telhado.

A produção das hortas trás a participação dos alunos de escolas, e tem como objetivo ajudar na mudaça do hábito alimentar a ao mesmo tempo servir de uma sala de aula em campo aberto para a construção do conhecimento e valorizar as atividades transdisciplinares, transformando a educação em um processo agradavél para o professor e para as crianças.

Esse é apenas um dos benefícios! Os vegetais vão direto da terra para o prato e conhecimento para a vida toda.

O método da produção nas telhas pode ser adaptado a qualquer espaço, desde que haja incidência de sol. As telhas da foto, por exemplo, têm quatro metros e sessenta centimetros de comprimento, e cada uma custa em torno de R$ 250,00. Fora isso, há ainda o custo com terra e sementes, normalmente encontradas a um preço acessível.

O que barateia a horta suspensa é que a própria telha garante uma impermeabilização adequada, até porque é feita para isso mesmo. O escoamento de água é feito diretamente para uma calha ou ralo que já exista no local.

Como hoje a tendência é a busca da sustentabilidade, estamos trabalhando no reaproveitamento da água drenada para retornar no sistema de irrigação.

Read the complete article here.

And see school video here.

Urban farming is so much more than adorable animals and markets; it is a symbol of modern London’s approach to making sustainable food sources and community spaces.

By Idroma Montgomery
Sustainable Cities Collective
May 14, 2012
Idroma Montgomery is a freelance researcher and earned her M.A. in Culture, Globalisation and the City from Goldsmiths, University of London.

Excerpt:

Recently I’ve noticed that London embraces urban farming in a way I haven’t seen in other cities. Last month, I attended the Oxford-Cambridge Goat Race at Spitalfields City Farm in East London, a popular annual event that raises money for the farm. It is housed on a side street off the trendy and boisterous Brick Lane, and like many other city farms in London, offers a study in how to effectively utilize small amounts of urban space.

Spitalfields City Farm resides alongside a small park and a residential area, including council flats and primary schools. The sound of the Overground is ever present as trains rush past, visible behind the small playground and vegetable patches. The farm contains a small menagerie of rare breeds, a weekend community market, a greenhouse and small plots for non-professional gardening. It is a farm that is connected to its community and surroundings. Throughout the week, people can easily buy a range of eggs, plants and compost, as well as other locally made goods. Most of the other urban farms in the area follow a similar template, acting as hubs of community activity and knowledge exchange across central and greater London.

Read the complete article here.

An urban agricultural design project

Jenna has designed an efficient, sub-irrigated system for growing energy-packed plants (microgreens) in small, urban spaces. Her aim: to provide healthy greens to extraordinary people with ordinary incomes.

As an urban agricultural design project, she envisions a way to grow food in an anthropogenic landscape for all strata of citizens, but as an art project, she hopes to facilitate conversations about different values: convenience vs creative effort, regenerables vs disposables, neighbors vs strangers.

This participatory exhibition, which includes a series of “domestic microfarms” and a “farmstand”, explores, through interactions with gallery visitors, the value placed on food, community, and creative effort.

See more here.

The Incredible, Edible Jenna Spevack: 8 Extraordinary Greens

Amy Sung
Brooklyn Cleanplates
May 15, 2012

Excerpt:

Brooklyn-based Jenna Spevack is an artist, foodie and sustainability advocate who combines all of these passions simultaneously in her work.

Her ideas are conceived in a studio residing in a corner of a 45,000-square-foot space on the top floor of the seven-story building known as the Metropolitan Exchange, or MEx, on Flatbush Avenue. The building’s rich history boasts a variety of creative entrepreneurs who let their genius juices flow.

Read the complete article here.

And more here.

‘City Farmer News’ is now averaging over 100,000 pages-views per month

Back in 1994 when City Farmer began publishing on the web, we were excited to find each new country viewing our site. The Internet was in its infancy and many countries had not hooked up. As the decade closed and we’d seen over 200 nations visit, we stopped watching these statistics.

But it’s interesting to see how things look today. The statistics on the following page, show page-views per country for the past two and a half months, from Feb 25 – May 13, 2012. The top countries visiting ‘City Farmer News’, with over 2000 views are: United States, Canada, United Kingdom, India, Australia, Netherlands, Germany, Philippines, France, Italy, Republic of Korea, South Africa and Singapore.

‘City Farmer News’ is now averaging 100,000 pages views per months, which shows the explosion of interest in city farming.

With the same care and industry which you have bestowed upon your garden, cultivate your minds, and raise in them the lovely and unfading flowers of piety and virtue.

Published by S. Babcock
New Haven
1850

Excerpts:

Let me tell you, my dear young reader, about a happy little family of three brothers and three sisters, who lived in a pleasant home, not far from the great city of New-York.

They had a complete set of garden tools, just the right size for such little folks: spades, hoes, rakes, watering-pots, and a wheelbarrow. I assure you they did not let these tools lie idle. Their garden, which produced flowers of all kinds, and many varieties of fruit, always presented a neat and workman-like appearance. The boys usually took upon themselves the most laborious part of the work, such as digging, and hoeing, and raking, while their sisters planted and transplanted, and watered, and pruned and trimmed, as occasion required.

“My dear little ones,” said Mr. Howard, “let the care which you have bestowed upon this sweet little spot, and the success which has attended your efforts, incite you to higher and nobler aims, which will most certainly be rewarded with higher and nobler results. With the same care and industry which you have bestowed upon your garden, cultivate your minds, and raise in them the lovely and unfading flowers of piety and virtue. Root out from them the noxious weeds of vice and evil habits, and train all your thoughts upward to your heavenly Father and Benefactor. Assist each other in this mental cultivation, with the same kindness which you have all shown in cultivating your garden; be ready at all rimes to share with the poor and needy the blessings which you enjoy, as freely as you have this day shared the productions of your garden with your parents. Then, like the plants which you have here cultivated, you will bear fruit and flowers to bless and cheer your fellow-men; and when you are removed from earth you will be transplanted in heaven, and blossom forever in the Garden of the Lord.”

Read the complete article here.

Agriculture 2.0 designed by Appareil.

Evolo
May 2012

Excerpt:

It consists of a generative system for the design of the infrastructure for urban vertical farming, which can be used in any city of the world.

It is defined as a parametric model which necessitates three pieces of information as inputs to produce the local design for the vertical infrastructure:

The climatic conditions of the city in which it is to be inserted.
The area of the city, in m², to be covered in vegetable production.
The specific site on which the tower is to be constructed.

The building itself is composed of a support structure for plant incubators which travel down the full height of the tower. Their journey last the necessary time of the plants’ growth from crop to maturity. 45 days in the case of the lettuce. The incubator is an expandable 4-8 m² closed pool which contains a controlled environment collecting rain water, regulating sunlight, temperature, air quality and CO2 concentration. Although limited in terms of species, the agricultural production include most lightweight crops such as lettuce, tomato, peppers, eggplant, marrow… In its largest and most dense version, a single tower can reach a production rhythm of 42 kilograms of vegetables per day, which can cover a city area of approximately 1.5 km².

Read the complete article here.

From Patrizia Pozzi’s new book ‘Contemporary Landscape’

“Kitchengarden” Event in conjunction with the “Fuori Salone” Design Week in Milano (2006 and 2007)

An outdoor event held in Milan to accompany the Fuorisalone, “Kitchengarden” at the Vivaio Ingegnoli, was an installation by the architect Patrizia Pozzi with the scenografer Angelo Jelmini( Studio Aaahhhaaa) for the Villegiardini magazine, where the world of the garden connected with the world of the Kitchen.

With humour the garden was about food, the plants consumed as part of life. The result was a contemporary design, a “sustainable garden of delights”, where vegetables mixed with flowers.

As an ecological manifesto, promoting homegrown food, “Kitchengarden” was an example of a better world, an experiment designed to make people think about an environmentally compatible way of life, foster dialogue, and stimulate an intense relationship between us and nature, which needs to happen in our cities.

Contemporary Landscape – New tales and new visions

By Patrizia Pozzi
a cura di/ edited by
Luca Molinari & Viapiranesi

Skira EditorePress
28th February 2012

An invitation to reflect on eco-friendly life to promote the dialogue between mankind and Nature.

Contemporary Landscape, curated by Luca Molinari for Skira Editore, is the new book by Patrizia Pozzi, now in bookshops.

In Italy, few texts deal with Landascape, the design of open spaces. More than 300 colour images tell us about Patrizia Pozzi’s thirty years experience, about her Studio and her team of consultants. This book highlights the new international trends, many of which are still unknown, in our country.

The book describes the key issues examined in this field so far, and at the same time, it is a reflection about what still can, and must be done. It is an educational guide for the younger generation approaching this field, to learn the trends of the near future.

Luca Molinari states, in his introduction, that in the last sixty years, there has been an unreasonable consumption of lands without fully assessing the potential impact that all of these decisions have had on the environment and on our lives. A sad example is the last terrible environmental disaster in Italy, in the Liguria Region, last October.

See the book here.

Biography:

Patrizia Pozzi is a landscape architect, she won several competitions for the design of public green areas and for the redevelopment of parks. She is interested in creating low impact environmental projects, through LEED certification standards, as well as, improvements for public and private works, landscape rehabilitation and redevelopment.

She teaches at the Master course, Outdoor Experience Design, at the Politecnico university of Milan. Her works are published in international books and magazines and were shown in the last three editions of the Barcelona European Landscape Biennial (the Rosa Barba Prize 2006, 2008, 2010).

In all her works, Patrizia Pozzi tends to make connection between daily life and Nature. With device and irony, the environment becomes malleable through a clever design, which implies a deep knowledge of Nature and the site, the atmosphere, wind, smell, colour, changing light, fog, botanic of course, and much more.

Visit her website here.

Forbes: The New Green Revolution: A Vision For Small-Scale Urban Farming

The Good Food Revolution: Growing Healthy Food, People, and Communities
Gotham Books
Publication Date: May 10, 2012

Excerpt from Forbes magazine:

On three city acres in the heart of an inner-city Milwaukee neighborhood, we grow enough food year-round in our greenhouses to feed ten thousand people. At our facility five blocks from Wisconsin’s largest public housing project, we are taking city waste that would otherwise end up in a landfill-beer mash, food waste, coffee grinds-and composting it to create healthy soil. We are feeding this compost to millions of worms, who create a natural fertilizer. We are using this rich soil to grow intensively more than 100 varieties of vegetables. We are also raising 100,000 fish in “aquaponics” systems that resemble natural streams.

With the help of a broad solar array and a bio-digester, we are also slowly eliminating our reliance on fossil fuel.

Most private investment and government support for agriculture in the past century went to making large-scale agriculture more “efficient.” I think our energies in this century should be devoted instead to making small-scale farming economically sustainable.

See Forbes article here.

See the book on Amazon here.

See “Urban Farming Pioneer Will Allen is Leading a Food Revolution” here.

New York photographer Rob Stephenson spent last year documenting farms in New York City.

By Ariella Cohen
Next American City
05/10/2012

Excerpt:

Whether on a Manhattan rooftop or in an abandoned lot in the Bronx, these experiments in urban agriculture hold the power to change the way the city feeds itself. His lush, large-format photographs tell the story of this growing movement to farm the five boroughs. We interviewed Stephenson about his series, From Roof to Table,which is now on display at The Storefront for Urban Innovation.

Next American City: What inspired you to create this series?

Stephenson: I received a fellowship from the Design Trust for Public Space. They are currently working on The Five Borough Farm initiative examining urban agriculture in the New York City and the work produced during my fellowship was meant in part to supplement that project.

NAC: How did you select sites to photograph?

Stephenson: I spent hours researching possible gardens and farms in the city using google maps. Most of the work was shot on an 8×10 camera and, combined with the tripod and film holders, the setup weighs around 30 pounds. Having a good idea of where I was going to shoot beforehand was really important.

Read the complete article here.

The city selected two abandoned lots in Dorchester, an ethnically diverse neighborhood known as a food desert.

By Noelle Swan
Seedstock
May 10, 2012

Excerpt:

Aside from a little referenced law dating back to the 19th century allowing public grazing for sheep and cattle on Boston Common, Boston zoning laws make no mention of agriculture. In absence of zoning permissions, most agricultural activities are in effect forbidden. “That’s not to say that the city is out there policing people with vegetable gardens,” says Tad Read, project manager of the Urban Agricultural Zoning at the Boston Redevelopment Authority. He adds that without a legal support to lean on, farmers can be penalized if neighbors file nuisance complaints, such as odors from compost and manure application, or squawking of hens laying eggs each morning.

Mayor Thomas A. Menino aims to change that. Last fall he announced a pilot zoning project that would legalize farming on two plots of land that would serve as an experimental model for future integration of agricultural zoning laws across the city. For the pilot, the RDA created what is known as an overlay district. Essentially new zoning laws allowing additional uses were superimposed on top of existing multi-family, residential zoning, Read explains.

Read the complete article here.

Farm to grow organic produce on former Expo lands

By Zoe McKnight
Vancouver Sun
May 11, 2012

Excerpt:

We’re demonstrating this can in fact be considered a serious enterprise for urban areas. We’re not talking about community gardens any more. We’re taking it up a level,” said Ableman, who founded the Centre for Urban Agriculture in Santa Barbara, Calif., in 1981 and now farms on Saltspring Island.

After a half- million- dollar expansion this summer, Solefood will have five farm sites in Vancouver: an existing half- acre farm adjacent to the Astoria Hotel on East Hastings Street; three on property provided by the city — one on Main Street at Terminal Avenue, another at First Avenue and Clark Drive, one at the Olympic Village — and the new site.

A small crew, including co- director Seann Dory, started transforming the False Creek lot this week, hauling in wooden shipping pallets and “collars” — wooden frames a foot high that fit on the pallets — to create raised garden beds filled with trucked- in organic matter and mushroom compost. On Thursday, about 300 boxes had been filled with soil — only 2,500 to go.

Read the complete article here.

$475,000 from the charitable Radcliffe Foundation and a $175,000 loan from Vancity

Metro newspaper
May 10, 2012

Excerpt:

A vacant lot next to BC Place is getting a long-awaited makeover, with a two-acre urban farm that will provide training and work for people with barriers to employment.

The SOLEfood project, being built on land leased from Concord Pacific with more than $475,000 from the charitable Radcliffe Foundation and a $175,000 loan from Vancity, currently smells of manure, as workers fill 3,000 pallets with fertilizer.

“We have two primary goals,” said Michael Ableman, co-founder of Cultivate Canada, the charity running the project. “One is a very important social goal, which is to provide meaningful employment and training to individuals primarily from the Downtown Eastside… but we also have a goal of providing a fairly significant model of urban agriculture for Vancouver.”

The produce will go to farmers markets, restaurants, wholesalers, and directly to consumers, and the farm is expected to employ 25 people this year.

Read the complete article here.

More at Awesome Vancouver.

It’s been around since 3,500 BC when Mesopotamian farmers began setting aside plots in their growing cities

The Dirt Blog – American Society of Landscape Architects
05/09/2012
First in a series of posts about Food and The City, a symposium at Dumbarton Oaks.

Excerpt:

In Israel, the early Zionist settlers in the 1920s saw small urban farms as critical to the development of a new Israeli society. By 1942, there were more than 4,600 urban farms, most of which were between 1,000 and 1,999 square meters, said professor Tal Alon-Mozes, a professor at Technion, the Israeli Institute of Technology. She described how many of these communities were comprised of women’s settlers associations that were key to “women’s empowerment.” Out farming in virgin territory, the women experienced “a sense of self-fulfillment, personal regeneration, and new hope.”

Early on, then, urban farms were ideological and connected with the goals of the Zionist movement. In the first master plan of Israel in 1951, urban farms had a “protected” place. However, Alon-Mozes said, eventually the Kibbutzim, rural farms separate from urban areas, dominated, becoming more prosperous and closely associated with Zionism. “They overshadowed small urban farms.” Kibuttzim were essentially the winners, and “history is written by the winners.”

Read the complete article here.

Reinventing urban agriculture

Editorial
News4Jax
May 10, 2012

Excerpt:

Owning a chicken requires a permit, which requires a fee. The fee for allowing farm animals was originally set for people who wanted to keep a horse. When the fee was set, the amount was created with a Horse and stable in mind. Since then, hens have become less and the only fee which allows them to be legally placed in your backyard is the old one set aside for horses.

That fee is $750 every year. That’s a hell of a lot of eggs to make up even slightly for the egregious amount that you have to spend.

The alternative is simply to go guerrilla (like almost everyone in the city has) and risk fines of thousands of dollars. Similar codes and city policies have pushed urban aquaculture, community gardens, rooftop gardens, and aquaculture all but impossible for the regular family ever to be able to afford. Springfield is working on changing that.

Led by every single group representing the historic district a move is afoot to examine making code changes which allow for the same kind of urban ag uses that are sweeping the country and which used to be the norm here in every neighborhood of Jacksonville.

Read the complete article here.

President Hugo Chavez approved a further Bs 97.6 million (US$ 22.7 million) to support urban agriculture.

By Tamara Pearson
Venezuelanalysis.com
Mérida, May 9th 2012

Excerpts:

Venezuelan Vice-president and minister for land and agriculture, Elias Jaua, said over the weekend that the program is also aiming to create 21,000 more productive units dedicated to urban agriculture this year, as well as 125 greenhouses, 44 nurseries, 16 artisanal seed units for producing certified seeds, 6 organic fertiliser units, and 40 aquaculture (water farming) units. So far, 19,000 urban agriculture units have been constructed, and these include family, community, and school gardens.

Jaua made his comments while touring the Agro-productive Socialist Base of Urban Agriculture in the Valles del Tuy, Miranda state, where he said 1,200 families have received training and are now cultivating crops in their small yards or patios, as well as small communal spaces, for the consumption of the community.

One urban garden in in Miranda state, Los Charavares, involves 17 Venezuelans, who are using agro-ecological techniques to plant a range of crops including tomatoes and capsicums. The area they plant on used to be rubble and a rubbish dump, until it was recovered by the national government.

Read the complete article here.