GreenMarket sustainable food production facility, United Arab Emerates

GreenMarket, UAE

The GreenMarket utilizes BrightFarm Systems pioneering rooftop and facade mounted, sustainable greenhouse designs, to integrate hydroponic food production into civic buildings. The layers of vegetation encased in the walls of the building provide shade for the building interior.

The interior of the building structure is designed to serve as marketplaces, recreation centers, meeting halls, or any function that can benefit from enclosed, naturally lit, shaded, conditioned or semi-conditioned space. In the Abu Dhabi climate, these spaces will be extremely appealing in the summer, but should also be very comfortable at all times of year.

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Already 13 gardens, 665 persons with direct benefit, 2,660 persons with indirect benefit, 48 professional training courses taught.

São Paulo, a superlative metropolis, boasting impressive numbers revealing of its grandeur, riches, and differences too. A city that together with other 38 municipalities forms the so-called Greater São Paulo, awarding it the title of the world’s fourth largest conurbation, with 19 million inhabitants, while São Paulo city alone is home to eleven million people.

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2nd July 1937: Children in the allotments of the London Children’s Gardens Fund at Clerkenwell take a break from gardening with their weekly bout of boxing. Larger image here.

Photo By Steve Bosch. Kent Mullinix is a sustainable agriculture specialist at Kwantlen College Institute for Sustainable Horticulture.

Instruction would be based on intensive farming on small plots.

By Larry Pynn
The Vancouver Sun – 29 Nov 2008

A school of urban farming — a North American first — is finding fertile soil in Richmond BC Canada.

Richmond’s parks, recreation, and cultural services committee has unanimously endorsed the concept of an urban farm school and directed staff to investigate city land for such a project, either at Terra Nova park at the west end of Westminster Highway, or the south end of Gilbert Road.

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Watch Plant Canteen – A Compost Heap – 1944 cartoon

1944 Cartoon – Ministry of Agriculture & Fisheries “Dig For Victory Leaflet No 7

Commentary – “Thanks Mr Middleton. Mr Middleton – Good Afternoon, we all expect vegetables to feed us but we’ve got to see that we feed them properly too. Suppose we get down to the root of the matter. Plants need food just as much as we do, and it must be in a form they can assimilated. This is where humas comes in. Humas is composed mainly of decayed vegetable matter.

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Photo from the Birmingham News: Casey Gustowarow and Daniel Bowman Simon are driving around the country in an eye-catching bus, topped with an organic garden, gathering signatures on a petition calling for President-Elect Obama to plant an organic farm on the White House Lawn.

By Thomas Spencer
Oct 14, 2008

Using the White House grounds to produce food is not a new idea. Eleanor Roosevelt planted a Victory Garden during World War 2 to encourage American to increase food production.

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The RUAF Foundation, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, International Development Research Centre, Urban Harvest (CGIAR), the Chinese Urban Agriculture Association and the Nanjing Agriculture and Forestry Bureau are organizing a networking event “Urban and Peri-urban Agriculture for Resilient Cities (Green, Productive and Socially Inclusive)” to take place on Wednesday, November 5th, 14.00-16.00 hours, in the Auditorium, at the World Urban Forum in Nanjing, China. There will also be a booth at the Exhibition and a tour to some urban and peri-urban agricultural sites.

See program flyer here.

1st prize: Eitan Abramovich, Peru
“Harvest of native potatoes”
International Year of the Potato World Photography Contest

The Urban Potato: It’s Time Has Come
By Jac Smit
October 29, 2008
From the Desk of Jac Smit

A few years ago I stood on the roof of a hospital in Port au Prince, Haiti. The surface was half straw and other half organic thrash and half potato foliage. A week later I visited a friend in Washington DC. He took me out to his porch and there was a bale of hay [wire bound] with potato foliage on three sides.

I soon learned that these two cases were examples of “Lazy Man Farming”. Lazy Man was invented in Germany in the 19th Century. Its most cited practice is roadside cultivation in Newfoundland Canada. There the farmers collect seaweed, off load it on the side of the road, and insert seedlings.

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“As the global food crisis drags on, urban farmers are on the rise. NBC’s Dawna Friesen looks at cutting costs by growing your own dinner.” 6 minute video.

The camera travels to many of the stories you see on this web site (cityfarmer.info) including London backyards, balconies, historical wartime footage, city farmers in Cuba, Chicago gardeners selling to restaurants, greenhouses on NY roofs, vertical farms, Royal Park and White House food gardens, and the Edible Estates author. This video reaches a huge worldwide TV audience.

Photo by Mike Rhodes

City of Fresno Wants to Destroy Garden to Make Way for Police Station

By Mike Rhodes,
Indybay, Oct 21, 2008

The City of Fresno is attempting to evict a group of Hmong gardeners from plots they have farmed for 13 years. The Hmong Community Garden, which sits on 4 acres of public land, provides food for 300 members of the Hmong community. Spokesperson Mai Summer Vue said that to the gardeners, the garden is “a way of life, a peace of mind, food for their family, exercise, therapy, stress relief, and it eases their mental health issues…caused by the Vietnam War.”

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The Film

HOMEGROWN follows the Dervaes family who run a small organic farm in the heart of urban Pasadena, California. While “living off the grid”, they harvest over 6,000 pounds of produce on less than a quarter of an acre, make their own bio diesel, power their computers with the help of solar panels, and maintain a website that gets 4,000 hits a day. The film is an intimate human portrait of what it’s like to live like “Little House on the Prairie” in the 21st Century.

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Photo by Donald Street Farms

Entrepreneurs set out to farm unused residential yards – and make money to boot

By Moira Dann
The Globe and Mail
October 20, 2008

VICTORIA — It all started in June for Deb Heighway with a call from her brother, Craig, proving that good ideas grow roots and flourish quickly. He had declared himself CPO – “chief pitchfork operator” – of an urban farming venture in Vancouver, and he urged her to give the concept a try.

“The timing was right, as I had just finished a contract,” said Ms. Heighway, who works helping people who have suffered brain injury. “And I said: ‘Why not?’ ”

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Photo by Novella Carpenter. Larger image here.

Novella Carpenter is the author of the forthcoming book FarmCity: The Education of an Urban Farmer (Penguin Press). “I studied under Michael Pollan at Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism for two years. My journalistic work reflects my interests–in farming, food, the environment, and culture. In a nutshell, I like to tell stories about people who follow unconventional paths.”

Novella blogs her life on her urban farm at ‘Ghost Town Farm’. Here is an early blog entry by the author.

Feb 16, 2007

I first started farming in the city of Seattle in 1998. At the time, I was a book editor at Sasquatch Books, and one of our favorite authors was Carla Emery. She wrote a book called the Encyclopedia of Country Living. One day I was flipping through the newsprint pages of the book (this is how editors procrastinate) and happened upon a section called How to Build a Chicken House.

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Photo by Cynthia Price. Larger image here.
MetroAg co-coordinators Joe Nasr, James Kuhns and Martin Bailkey, with Marielle Dubbeling of RUAF and Joe’s mother in Philadelphia for the event.

MetroAg promises to bring support and recognition to growing urban agriculture movement

Article by Kristin Reynolds in ‘Urban Grown’ the Newsletter of the Kansas City Centre for Urban Agriculture. Link to all ‘Urban Grown’ issues here.

Excerpt:
In conjunction with the annual Community Food Security Coalition Conference, a newly-formed organization held its first official forum on urban agriculture at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia on Saturday, October 4th, 2008.

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Girl in garden, early 1900’s. Larger image here.

Julian Cribb, author of ‘The Coming Famine’, said:

“This intensive urban vegie culture is an entirely new industry and will need a new professional – the urban farmer who can grow food on the roofs and sides of buildings, in intensive biocultures and by other novel methods to feed the megacities of 30 million-plus inhabitants.

“If we don’t, by 2050 we will have more than three-quarters of the human population – almost 8 billion people – living in places where they are totally without the means or the knowledge of how to feed themselves. Our giant cities will be gigantic death traps, at the mercy of even quite minor glitches in regional or global food supplies.”

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25 minute video by Peak Moment TV
Yuba Gals Independent Media production partners Robyn Mallgren and Janaia Donaldson have been producing local video programs for community access television since 2002.

Landscape architect Owen Dell has a vision: transforming suburban neighborhoods into shared “foodsheds” with food-bearing and native plants, and even chickens. Neighbors can start by finding edible plants already growing in their yards, maybe remove fences, plant what works best in each location.

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“All users have to do is click their location on the website map and choose their veggies. Once a person has started a garden, he or she can add a small carrot representing that garden to the World Map of Small Food Gardens. This map is configured to let browsers find ideas or connections with other gardeners for sharing tips, seeds, recipes, and whatever else they need to know or swap in quest of the perfect small vegetable garden.”

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Horseradish – Fresh Today From Our Garden from Michael Levenston on Vimeo.
Also see alternative HD High Definition version on YouTube.

Maria pulled up a horseradish root today, cleaned and grated it, added a touch of white vinegar and let me taste it just minutes from the ground. Wow! If you like the flavour of horseradish on oysters, prime rib, or steaks, why wouldn’t you have a patch growing in your garden.

Blogger Durgan’s web page on processing horseradish root here.

How to harvest horseradish here.

How to plant horseradish here.

from Makerere University Press, 250 pages
Editors: Donald Cole, Diana Lee-Smith and George Nasinyama (Will be going to press in the next few weeks.)

“In an era of global urban food crises and rapid, unplanned
city growth, how can urban agriculture be transformed from a
potential source of health risks into a vehicle for healthier
urban households and local environments?”

• A novel guide to integrating agriculture and public health into urban policy
• “Policy dialogue” to engage researchers and policy makers in support of agriculture-based livelihoods of low income urban families
• A science-based approach to dealing with public health and food safety concerns
• Essential reading for professionals and academics involved in agriculture and the environment, public health, and urban planning and management

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Land ruling could be a tipping point – The decision on Richmond’s Garden City Lands will have far-reaching implications for agricultural lands

By Wendy Holm, The Vancouver Sun
23 Sept 2008
Wendy Holm is an agrologist, economist and farm columnist.

Excerpts from the article:

The use of the land for urban agriculture was dismissed out of hand (“not commercial agriculture”).

What nonsense. Enlightened communities around the world are racing to develop strong urban agriculture within their cities. Terms that five years ago were unheard of are today in common use: Food security, food democracy, food sovereignty, food miles, slow food. The community interest is clear.

Urban agriculture is the new darling of cities around the globe for good reason. Vancouver, blessed with good climate and good planning, has the land base, human capital and infrastructure capacity to quickly catch up — offering new models for Lower Mainland communities, the rest of Canada and the world.

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