Urban Agriculture

Urban agriculture is the practice of growing and distributing crops inside the boundaries of cities and towns.

See also Main Food page and Sustainability, Food Scarcity, as well as Genetically Modified Organisms and Chemicals. For labor issues, see The Grapes of Wrath page.

Articles/Reports

Academic Search Complete search gives for example: Growing Urban Agriculture in North American Cities: The Example of Milwaukee. Broadway, Michael American Geographical Society's Focus on Geography; Winter2009, Vol. 52 Issue 3/4, p23-30, 8pp.

16 Initiatives Changing Urban Agriculture Through Tech and Innovation 1/20

Here's how local communities are turning vacant lots into thriving urban farms Cities across the U.S. are beginning to view vacant lots as opportunities to revive neighborhoods. 11/18.

Urban Farming Key in Fight Against Hunger and Climate Change: Solving for Pattern (see Paul Hawken's Blessed Unrest concluding chapter "Restoration") give us hope because by solving one poblem we solve many. 1/18.

How an Ecological Approach to Architecture Can Help Reinvent Urban Food Systems 12/17 By weaving together infrastructure, urbanism and ecology, architecture is a perfect medium to envision the sustainable food systems of the future. see food, see also Green Design.

This Isn’t Just Another Urban Farm—It’s a Food Bank for the Poor 10/17.

Why Shared Farms Are the Hot New Thing at Gated Communities 1/16.

Highway Billboard That Grows Organic Lettuce and Generates Drinking Water.

Food Forest is pretty much what it sounds like: “A woodland ecosystem that you can eat,”mimics how a wild forest works, but swaps in species that are edible or otherwise useful to humans and other animals. 3/15 surplus given away.

This former semiconductor factory is now the world’s largest indoor farm, producing 10K heads of lettuce per day Japan 7/14.

How A Rise In Backyard Beekeeping Can Help Teach City-Dwellers About Climate Change 6/14. See also Bees.

Turns out community gardens are basically Fight Club.

Trouble in Michigan 5/14.

How To Regrow Food From Scraps.

The basement of this vacant house is now an urban greenhouse.

Low cost greenhouses

Why guerrilla gardening won’t turn the world into “Blade Runner” hell 7/13

Cleveland's Green, Large-Scale Co-Op Model Gains Steam In A Decaying Economy. The Evergreen model draws heavily on the experience of the Mondragon Cooperative (see also Economics page)Corporation in the Basque Country of Spain, the world's most successful large-scale cooperative effort (now employing 100,000 workers in an integrated network of more than 120 high-tech, industrial, service, construction, financial and other largely cooperatively owned businesses). BBC audio and more, including aquaponic greenhouse. videoGreenhouse video.

UCB's Gillman Tract was used to study biological pest control and has been occupied. see Take Back the Track. 5/13 update. See also Activism

How to grow an avocado from seed

Whole Foods will grow rooftop greens in a Superfund site 4/13

Brooklyn police bust rooftop grow operation … of heirloom tomatoes

Seed library.

Chicago’s urban farm district could be the biggest in the nation 11/12. See also The Plant.

When trees die, so do we includes crime rate, report 1/13 How do gardens improve quality of life? air quality?

AmpleHarvest connects home gardeners to hungry people.

Detroiters Question “World’s Largest Urban Farm” from Yes Magazine.

Brooklyn community gardens are clearinghouse for Caribbean plants. 10/12.

A new report says half the food in US is wasted. But Bootstrap Compost is an entrepreneur who picks it up. Starbucks and others are looking to recycle it into plastic. 8/12

New San Francisco legislation will jump-start urban farming 7.12 Other cities not so much.

The Urban Kiwi" Gregory Dicum, origially published in the fine Orion Magazine.

Chickens How to raise them at UCSC's The Farm. The Story of an Egg video. Urban turkeys, Michael Pollan on Slow Food including, heritage turkeys.

How to Start an Urban Farm in a Post-Industrial City 6.12.

Seed Library, including East Palo Alto, supports urban agriculture. 4/12

Food Stamp Challenge. useful blog, including background. Record numbers of Americans are getting food aid from Federal government. In solidarity with the poor and for research, some people are voluntarily trying to live on this food. Example.

New study shows living near farmer's market affects health 8/11. New Stanford study of effect on food production. 5/11

"Is Junk Food Really Cheaper?" by Mark Bittman, NY Times food columnist 9.25.11 NYT op ed. Julie Guthman, a UCSC Community Studies prof., is quoted.

How to be a locavore (that is, eating food locally produced) link

Food deserts in CA Central Valley. 3/11.

Cuban organic (and urban) agriculture.

Websites

Local Food Systems, promoting strong local economies by building business ecosystems rooted in agriculture.

Roots of Change works for sustainable food systems.

Community Food Security represents a comprehensive strategy to address many of the ills affecting our society and environment due to an unsustainable and unjust food system.

Growing a Greener World (PBS) has info and video, including growing for the hungry which includes Ampleharvest.org, an app to get food to foodbanks and other community.

The International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD) did a report asking "How can we reduce hunger and poverty, improve rural livelihoods, and facilitate equitable, environmentally, socially and economically sustainable development through the generation, access to, and use of agricultural knowledge, science and technology?"

Aquaponics combines fish with organic gardening. TEDtalk video.

Vertical Farms(images), (going pink) including skyscraper with trees) and green roof gardens, which cut the urban Heat Island Effect. videos of NYC. Re-purposed shipping containers.

Live Real Now was created to unify and amplify this movement, as a platform for young people across the US to shape a radically different food system through policy and practice. Navina Khanna navina(AT)liverealnow.org Five10-393-4905.

Books

Will Allen, is the recipient of MacArthur’s 2008 Genius Award; sustainable urban farmer and entrepreneur, founder of Growing Power. Allen's new autobiography, The Good Food Revolution video(, chronicles his unexpected journey from ABA basketball player to Procter & Gamble marketing executive to urban farm activist. extended video interview another extensive talk.

Agro-ecology overview by UCSC's Steve Gliessman explains problems of conventional factory farms and the potential of organic.

The Dirty Life: On Farming, Food, and Love Kimball chucked life as a Manhattan journalist to start a cooperative farm in upstate New York with a self-taught New Paltz farmer she had interviewed for a story and later married. The Harvard-educated author, in her 30s, and Mark, also college educated and resolved to "live outside of the river of consumption," eventually found an arable 500-acre farm on Lake Champlain, first to lease then to buy. In this poignant, candid chronicle by season, Kimball writes how she and Mark infused new life into Essex Farm, and lost their hearts to it.

Breaking Through Concrete: Building an Urban Farm Revival, includes a visit to Santa Cruz Homeless Garden project.

Farm Together Now portraits of the new food movement.

Farm City is about urban gardening in Oakland Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer By Novella Carpenter (includes excerpt and audio interview).

Terra Madre: Forging a New Global Network of Sustainable Food Communities by Carlo Petrini, with a foreword by Alice Waters Chelsea Green, 155 pp., $20.00 (paper)

The Greening of Cuba: A National Experiment in Organic Farming by Peter Rosset, Medea Benjamin of Global Exchange (Go Slugs!)

Black, White, and Green is one of the first books to carefully theorize the green economy, to examine the racial dynamics of food politics, and to approach issues of food access from an environmental-justice perspective. See Environmental Justice

Videos

See Food section on Environmental Films page.

Growing Cities new documentary 10/14.

Food Forward is a new PBS series on the food revolution. The first episode is on urban agriculture. Highly recommended. ***

Green City Growers opened a gigantic greenhouse last year in a troubled Cleveland neighborhood. Larger than three football fields, the facility — which replaces a large swath of vacant lots — is now producing millions of vegetables hydroponically; that is, without soil. Green City Growers is the third of three businesses run by Evergreen Cooperatives of Cleveland. See also BrightFarms in Philly.

A Former Chicago Meatpacking Plant Becomes a Self-Sustaining Vertical Farm: Tenants include aquaponic farms (think vegetables on water beds flourishing under colored UV lights), a tilapia fish farm, beer and Kombucha tea breweries, a mushroom garden, and a host of independent bakers and caterers that will work together in a communal kitchen space. Future plans include living walls and rooftop gardens. But the most ambitious part of the building is its focus on producing "net-zero waste" in its 93,500-square-foot space. Spent grains from the beer brewery will feed the tilapia. The waste produced by the fish will feed the mushroom garden or be converted nitrates to feed the hydroponic plants. Those plants will clean the water through natural processes and be cycled back into the fish tanks. Taken together, the system will make the building completely self-sustainable. website ***

Growing a Greener World (PBS) has info and video, including growing for the hungry which includes Ampleharvest.org, an app to get food to foodbanks and other community.

Psychological Effects of exposure to nature explored in Last Child in the Woods.

Earth Focus: Growing food in cities. Entrepreneur and filmmaker Ian Cheney (King Corn) on why truck farms (new video) are catching on in New York. In Sweden, Plantagon, a leader in vertical urban agriculture, plans to feed tomorrow's mega cities with skyscraper farms. And with more droughts and water shortages likely, scientists at Penn State University are finding new ways to help plants adapt to tough conditions.

Meet Your Urban Gardener series. Local example

TEDtalks

Ron Finley: A guerilla gardener in South Central LA his website.

Beauty matters: Edi Rama was the mayor of Tirana Albania, where he implemented a series of reforms to take back the city for the people, including paint.

Stephen Ritz is a South Bronx teacher/administrator. With the help of extended student and community family they have grown over 25,000 pounds of vegetables in the Bronx while generating extraordinary academic performance. His Bronx classroom features the first indoor edible wall in NYC DOE which routinely generates enough produce to feed 450 students healthy meals and trains the youngest nationally certified workforce in America. Stephen has consistently moved attendance from 40% to 93% daily, helped fund/create 2,200 youth jobs, captured the US EPA Award for transforming mindsets and landscapes in NYC,... His speech at Columbia University, "From Crack to Cucumbers," along with the release of a You-Tube Video (Urban Farming NYC) resulted in a national following including an invite to the White House Garden. For more information, visit www.greenbronxmachine.com.

Vertical farming by Dickson Despommier TEDtalk, The Plant in a former Chicago metapacking plant that has a highly refined closed loop approach *** (short video overview). (see sustainability)

TEDtalks on food are great. a sample. For example:

Sharing powerful stories from his anti-obesity project in Huntington, W. Va., TED Prize winner Jamie Oliver makes the case for an all-out assault on our ignorance of food. Link **** Segment on pink slime in meat.

Roger Doiron: My subversive (garden) plot looks at converging trends (TEDtalk).

Edible City (online)is a fun, fast-paced journey through the Local Good Food movement that's taking root in the San Francisco Bay Area, across the nation and around the world. Introducing a diverse cast of extraordinary and eccentric characters who are challenging the paradigm of our broken food system, Edible City digs into their unique perspectives and transformative work, finding hopeful solutions to monumental problems.

To Make a Farm explores the lives of five young people who have decided to become small-scale farmers. They face daily challenges and set-backs, but their work and optimism inspires hope for the future. An intimate and practical exploration of farming and local food. See also 'Greenhorns.

Open Source farm tools.

Britta Riley wanted to grow her own food (in her tiny apartment). So she and her friends developed a system for growing plants in discarded plastic bottles -- researching, testing and tweaking the system using social media, trying many variations at once and quickly arriving at the optimal system. (TEDtalk video).

Fresh (The Movie) about food production trailer. Shown in College 8 green film course. An inspiring film about the sustainable agriculture movement featuring Michael Pollan, who wrote a couple articles used in the College Eight Core Course Reader. Among several main characters, FRESH features urban farmer and activist, Will Allen, the recipient of MacArthur’s 2008 Genius Award; sustainable farmer and entrepreneur, Joel Salatin, made famous by Michael Pollan’s book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma; and supermarket owner, David Ball, challenging our Wal-Mart dominated economy.(2009, 72 min.) McHenry Media Center DVD7665.

"The Garden" trailer (director Scott Hamilton Kennedy, the Academy Award winning documentary). The Garden is the unflinching look at the struggle between urban farmers and the City of Los Angeles and a powerful developer who wants to evict them and build warehouses interview/excerpts

Urban Roots is a new documentary on farming in Detroit. 3/12 trailer. interview with director, includes food deserts. except.

TEDxZurich - Roman Gaus - Urban Farming.

Building Community with Greenspace. Yale students work together with many different urban New Haven neighborhoods to create green spaces, urban rehabilitation, safety and pride.

Urban Gardening. Jesse DuBois - The Urban Farming Revolution TEDx. An English major in LA, the CoFounder and currently serves as the Chief Eclectic Officer for two start-ups: Farmscape, an urban farming maintenance company, and Agrisaurus, a web-based polyculture gardening assistant.

Charlie Price, a social entrepreneur with Aquaponics UK, explores the role aquaponics can play in the future of our collective food supply. He provides an insight into both the applications for aquaponics but more specifically a new approach to urban agriculture, turning wastes into resources and transforming disused urban spaces to provide not only food, but resilient communities.

Audio

Home Grown, a song about urban farming by Keith Cross.

Just Harvest audio documentary 9/13. alt link other related stories.

How to Raise your own chickens audio and text

In Boston, Patti Moreno, the self-proclaimed Garden Girl, grows so much food in her backyard that she opens up a small farmer's market each summer. LOE.org 5/10.

DIY window farms.

Challenges of bringing fresh food to the inner city. loe.org npr 5/10.

Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer By Novella Carpenter. includes excerpt and audio interview. More interviews.

UCSC People and Local Organizations

UCSC has been a pioneer in organic farming movement. See also here

Cultivating a Movement is oral history. A new book published by the UCSC Library’s Regional History Project offers a sparkling window into the 40-year history of how UC Santa Cruz--and California’s Central Coast—became leaders in the organic farming and sustainable agriculture movement. Archive. Audio of San Farr talk.A Timeline

Agroecology in Action: Agroecology is a scientific discipline that uses ecological theory to study, design, manage and evaluate agricultural systems that are productive but also resource conserving. UCSC is a pioneer. CASFS Food Links

Agroecology: Prof. Gliessman works with communities to increase yields in rainforests without harming it. Affiliated organizations: CAN offers internships. He co-edited Confronting the Coffee Crisis: Fair Trade, Sustainable Livelihoods and Ecosystems in Mexico and Central America. McH Stacks HD9199.M62 C66 2008

Sean Swezey's (Core course instructor) research interests emphasize the practical application of pest management theory and on-farm research to production of organic strawberries, apples, and other California organic crops.

Center for Agroecology & Sustainable Food Systems (offers apprentice opportunities)

PICA (Live and work in The Village)

LifeLab teaches kids about sustainability nd food through school gardens.

Other food-related opportunities available at UCSC with Food, What?!

Tim Galarneau was recently profiled in Mother Jones news on sustainable food.

Julie Guthman researches organic agriculture. audio interview on her new book Weighing In: Obesity, Food Justice, and the Limits of Capitalism UC Press, 2011.

Melissa Caldwell, food policy expert, presented at the global food crisis at international conference sponsored by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Nancy Chen breaks down divisions between food and medicine, and she underscores that medicinal foods are the "front line of healing."

Melanie DuPuis is the author of the book Nature's Perfect Food: How Milk Became America's Drink (McHenry GT2920.M55 D86 2002) and numerous scholarly articles on food and food-related topics. She is currently co-editor of an issue of the current special "politics of food" issue of Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture

Steve Gliessman works to improve organic agriculture and Fair Trade. City on a Hill article on his work with coffee. Also excerpts from his book Agroecology : The Ecology Of Sustainable Food Systems / Steven R. Gliessman 2007 S&E Stacks S589.7 .G58 2007.

Lopez, Anna A , who obtained her PhD in Environmental Studies from UC Santa Cruz, wrote The Farmworkers' Journey brings together for the first time the many facets of this issue into a comprehensive and accessible narrative: how corporate agribusiness operates, how binational institutions and laws promote the subjugation of Mexican farmworkers, how migration affects family life, how genetically modified corn strains pouring into Mexico from the United States are affecting farmers, how migrants face exploitation from employers, and more. (also Google book).

Bay Area

UCB's Gillman Tract was used to study biological pest control and has been occupied. see Take Back the Track.

Oakland's Institute for Food and Development Policy/Food First shapes how people think by analyzing the root causes of global hunger, poverty, and ecological degradation and developing solutions in partnership with movements working for social change.

Urban Tilth does great work in SF East Bay. Founded by Iron Triangle native Doria Robinson, by way of Tibet.audio interview 4/18/14. Part of Richmond's Greenway.

Live Real Now was created to unify and amplify this movement, as a platform for young people across the US to shape a radically different food system through policy and practice. Navina Khanna navina(AT)liverealnow.org Five10-393-4905