A lack of lush, rolling hills doesn’t mean organic farming is out of the question.

More humans are moving to cities than ever before in history. This trend is only expected to continue, with 70 percent of the world  population expected to live in cities by 2050. This will require drastic changes in how we develop our urban areas, and how infrastructure is planned.

According to some experts and forward-thinking designers, cities of tomorrow will see a resurgence of farms: not the vast tracks of crop land we currently associate with the word, but sophisticated urban farms that use closed-loop technology to make organic farming vertical instead of horizontal.

FarmedHere is a Chicagoland-based vertical farm that many consider to be the nation’s largest. Housed in a 90,000 square foot post-industrial building in Bedford Park, IL, the urban farming company grows fresh, vibrant produce that’s free from the bugs, diseases, pesticides, and weather-based challenges that plague outdoor farms.

The facility uses a combination of aquaponic and aeroponic growing technologies–often stacked on top of each other–to grow USDA certified organic greens. “Aquaponics is the combination of aquaculture (raising fish) and hydroponics (raising plants with nutrient rich water) in the same water system,” explains the FarmedHere website. “Aeroponic growing systems are an innovative way to hydroponically grow plants by keeping their roots in a nutrient rich mist. The aeroponic mist most efficiently supplies roots with all needed nutrients, required hydration, and adequate amount of oxygen.” This system ultimately allows the organic farming operation to recycle 97 percent of its water.

FarmedHere’s harvest goes directly from the warehouse farm to local restaurants and grocery stores. Instead of traveling more than 1,ooo miles from farm to table, the herbs and greens grown at FarmedHere typically travel less than 20.

And that’s not the only thing to love about this abundant organic farming operation secluded in a nondescript warehouse: FarmedHere recently became a zero organic waste facility by converting all of its organic waste into compost. The compost is then used in landscaping, horticulture and agriculture at other urban farms across Chicago.

Related on Ecosalon:

Foodie Underground: Should We Care About Organic?

The Stories (And Money) Behind 10 Of Your Favorite Organic Brands

Image: FarmedHere

The post FarmedHere: Zero-Waste Organic Farming Of The Future appeared first on EcoSalon.

A baker’s dozen of books to prep your lawn, balcony or fire escape for growing (and reap what they sow).  

We’re going to brazenly use the phrase Urban Homesteading here because not only is it perfectly descriptive (a perfect way to describe the pioneering antics of urban dwellers, who make up 80% of this nation, getting back to their agrarian roots, is it not?) but also because it rings true to the populist movement rocketing from city to suburb, and blooming at every fire escape in between.

To be an Urban Homesteader is to be the new American Gothic, except the old man farmer sports a hipster ‘stache and the spinster daughter is not a spinster, thank you very much, but a kick-ass and fully self-sufficient woman who can grow her own turnips and eat them, too.

Want to be just like her? Awesome. Except, how does one actually go about growing turnips? Here are 13 books on today’s fastest growing urban movement. Surely one of them will lead you to homegrown salad munching bliss.

The Urban Homestead : Your Guide to Self-Sufficient Living in the Heart of the City is considered an essential handbook for urban gardeners and farmers. The authors Kelly Coyne and Erik Knutzen founded the blog Root Simple and are responsible for sparking territory disagreements on the electronic frontier by challenging the Dervaes family on their move to trademark the term “Urban Homesteading” and, effectively, the movement.

Urban Farm Handbook: City Slicker Resources for Growing, Raising, Sourcing, Trading, and Preparing What You Eat by Annette Cottrell and Joshua McNichols teaches city-dwellers how to wean themselves off of commercial supermarkets.

Urban Homesteading: Heirloom Skills for Sustainable Living by Rachel Kaplan and K. Ruby Bloom offers a comprehensive how and why to backyard DIY, including worm bins, rainwater storage systems, medicinal herbs and more.

The Ultimate Guide to Homesteading: An Encyclopedia of Independent Living by Nicole Faires promises to teach you everything you ever wanted to know about self-reliance, preparedness, survival, and sustainable homesteading. A rather encyclopedic statement.

In The Essential Urban Farmer authors Novella Carpenter and Willow Rosenthal share their experience as successful urban farmers with practical blueprints.

Chick Days: An Absolute Beginner’s Guide to Raising Chickens from Hatching to Laying by Jenna Woginrich is about chickens. What more can we say? That’s deserving of an exclamation point: chickens! How to raise ’em, love ’em and (let’s be honest here) eat their eggs humanely.

The Backyard Beekeeper’s Honey Handbook: A Guide to Creating, Harvesting, and Cooking with Natural Honeys assumes a certain level of beekeeping experience, but gets into practical guidance on a back-to-the-earth beekeeping lifestyle and artisan cultivation of honey varieties.

Urban Farming: Sustainable City Living in Your Backyard, in Your Community, and in the World by Thomas Fox will, we quote,”walk every city and suburban dweller down the path of self sustainability” be it in a high rise apartment, community garden or itty bitty terrace.

The Integral Urban House: Self Reliant Living in the City is an older book (circa the 70s) that is considered by many of today’s homesteaders to be the bible of the urban agriculture movement. It teaches readers to treat their homes as a mini-ecosystem for growing fruit and vegetables, raising chickens, rabbits and fish, recycling waste and heating with solar energy, all within a typical 1/8-acre city lot.

Mini Farming: Self-Sufficiency on 1/4 Acre by Brett Markham, on the other hand, is for urban farmers with just 1/4 acre of land to work with.

The Backyard Homestead: Produce all the food you need on just a quarter acre! might be geared towards more of a suburban or sleeper community homesteading audience as it even offers advice on how to keep a cow in your backyard.

The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Urban Homesteading by Sundari Elizabeth Kraft because sometimes an idiot’s guide is the only fence between you and an edible  harvest.

Food Grown Right in Your Backyard by the boys from the Seattle Urban Farm Company breaks edible gardening down into digestible chunks with case studies and photographic montages, more of a 1-2-3 than an A-to-Z guide to homesteading in your own backyard.

This list should be rather exhaustive, but if there are any books you think we’ve missed, please feel free to add to our library by leaving a comment below!

Image: Elaine Faith

The post Build Your Homesteading Library With These Must-Read Essentials appeared first on EcoSalon.

Gardening stories that had us wanting to intensify our green thumb.

The urban homesteading movement gained serious speed this year, proving that you don’t need to move to the suburbs to enjoy the simple pleasures of growing your own vegetables, raising your own chickens, and starting your own bee colony. And despite some groups’ best efforts to kill the momentum, it doesn’t look like the trend is disappearing anytime soon.

One great offshoot of the urban homesteading movement is the spread of new, innovative ways to grow things indoors. Forget standard windowsill planters; this is the 21st century. Here, a sampling of Shelter’s favorite herb kits, terrariums, and other gravity-defying, thought-provoking indoor gardening objects from the past year.

It’s a very small world after all in these mini moss terrariums made from vintage glass and upcycled objects. Michelle Inciarrano and Katy Maslow specialize in miniaturizing scenes, and they take custom orders.

The Plantable concept table/planter from JAILmake reflects on “the distance we place between ourselves and the processes involved in making our food.”

These gravity-defying ceramic sky planters use Slo-flo irrigation technology to minimize water use.

It’s a greeting card! It’s a garden! The City Postcarden is both, with a little water and tending, of course.

The Eco Orb Terrarium kit from Tend Living lets you build your own miniature glass orb garden from a Tilliandis plant, reindeer moss, sand, and accents.

The Zozio from Pousse Créative might look like a “standard windowsill planter,” but it is so much more. This eco-friendly planter doubles as a bird feeder and is ideal for vertical gardens.

The Miroir en Herbe from h2O Architects blurs the boundaries between nature and culture.

Grow your own herbs from the comfort of your kitchen with a selection of indoor herb garden kits and accessories.

Wine bottles get a second life with these Growbottle Upcycled Hydrogardens from Potting Shed Creations, available in Oregano, Chives, Basil, Parsley, and Mint.

And finally, with the addition of Mike Lieberman’s 2012 series on Urban Gardening, expect good harvesting ahead and get your garden planned out now.

The post 2011 in Review: A Good Year for Gardening appeared first on EcoSalon.

But that’s the old model of city life. Crocodile Dundee wasn’t too far off the mark when he said cities must be friendly because so many people want to live together. They’re the biggest physical expressions of our social nature on this planet. They’re filled with people, every one of them an individual – and so in these eco-conscious times where everyone can step up and contribute, cities are where things happen.

Here are 10 urban trends that will shape of the cities of tomorrow.

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Keep The City Buzzing

Bees are on the wane, and we have no idea why. Entire populations are dying or disappearing as part of the baffling phenomenon known as Colony Collapse Disorder. Bad news in itself, but the sting in the tale is that without bees, many of our staple crops are doomed. While scientists search for the answers, the urban backyard remedy is obvious – and here’s how it works. Bee hives only need a little land to thrive – and you’d be following in the footsteps of committed enthusiasts like Scarlett Johansson and Samuel L Jackson. Further incentive needed? One word: honey.

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Urban Growth

Escalating food prices, and all that land out back? Put the two together and turning your place into an edible garden is a no-brainer. But even if you’re squeezed into a concreted corner or you’re halfway up a towerblock, there’s still room for some horticultural creativity. Agricultural skyscrapers are on the rise (as it were) but while city-planners develop a coherently green strategy, it’s all about self-expression. Snake some vines over your balcony or up the wall. Let your potted plants grab onto windows and railings. Make your city come alive!

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Up Where The Air Is Green

But whatever is done in the vertical is being done tenfold in the horizontal. Green roofs have captured the urban imagination like no other eco-craze, and it’s not hard to see why: they’re beautiful, they have a deeply practical element, and…did we say how beautiful? Of course there are new architectural challenges that come with having tons of topsoil and greenery piled on your ceiling – and there’s the usual amount of half-hearted bandwaggoning. (Yes, Astroturf is cheating). But wouldn’t it be nice to have a little less of the “concrete”, a little more of the “jungle”? I bet the local wildlife would think so.

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Seed-Bomb It Back To The Stone Age

If you’re heartsick of seeing drab, neglected patches of municipal land blighting your neighborhood…you could be a guerrilla gardener waiting to join the green revolution. “Fighting the filth with forks and flowers”, these law-skirting folk are on a mission to bring budding life to every corner of our cities by any means possible. They sneak out at night with seeds and trowel, beautifying furiously before daylight exposes their efforts to the cops, or they plant greenery while hidden in full view. Sound like your kind of thing? Sign up here (you rebel, you).

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Cleaning The Streets: Electric Cars and Friendly Rides

It’s been on the horizon for years (far too many of them) but now the electric car is starting to make headway in the place it’s best suited for – the urban grid. Where else is it practical to build recharging stations at the kind of density that suits the electric car’s shorter range? Ah, but that’s changing too – some of the models on our 2009 roundup hold enough juice to compare favorably to their gas-powered counterparts. These admirable advances aside, do you really need your own car? If not, and if braving the public transport isn’t an option, grab a lift with someone else – because urban carpooling is here to stay.

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Commute Yourself Slim

In the convenience-drugged city of tomorrow, the only sweat you’ll break is when you’re deciding which button to push. Utopian dream? We say: urban nightmare. We spend our day in the thrall of convenience technology…and then heads straight to the nearest super-expensive gym to compensate. With modern life in full swing, who needs The Onion? Luckily there are architects who recognise the danger and, like Nintendo, are sneaking gyms into our lives without us realising. Their thinking is: why consume electricity when calories can be burnt instead? So the urban fabric gets a healthy makeover, like the much maligned stairwell. Cars are zoned out of existence and replaced with their human-powered counterparts (saving you cash in all sorts of ways). Parks and paths are expanded, and everywhere can be reached by a sidewalk. Healthy commuter, coming through. For specifics, check out the New York City Department of Design + Construction’s Active Design Guidelines.

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One for Me, One for You…

My mum has a logistics problem. Thanks to some absurdly prolific fruit trees, her freezer is permanently half-full with surplus she has to freeze or it goes to waste. What she needs is a local fruit exchange – a social network (online and offline) that collects and distributes surplus produce for the good of the neighborhood. Take San Francisco’s version, Neighborhood Fruit, working like a foodie’s version of Freecycle – the goods are there for free, you collect them yourself, and first come is first served. If you like free food (ie. if you have a pulse) or want to reclaim your freezer, find your local fruit exchange…and if there’s none at hand, why not start one (pdf)?

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Serving the Needy (With Servings)

Gone are the days that it’s acceptable for shops to chuck unused food away at closing time (and having worked as a barista for a certain worldwide coffee chain, I’ve seen my fair share of that). While up to a third of household groceries still go into the trash, restaurants are acting rather more respectably by offering up their output to local charities and nonprofit organisations, or directly into the hands of the homeless on the street. Check out the National Restaurant Association’s food donation work, and their guide to doing it (PDF).

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It’s Cheaper Online (or, How We Killed The High Street)

Here’s a phrase to fill a shopkeeper with dread: “No, I won’t buy it here, I’ll get it on eBay / Amazon /Craigslist”. Online retailing is gargantuan business, simply because it’s usually the way to pick up the best goods from anywhere in the globe at the best price. Is it green? With minimal packaging and low overheads, you’t think so – except it’s also the quickest method of wiping out profits for urban retailers and for killing small traders. (Even the big ones aren’t safe – take the fate of Borders UK.) However, counter that with the fact that they’re billion-dollar recycling machines that often do a lot of good.

No matter your view, the bottom line is that online retailing is on the rise – and shopping is changing forever.

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Neighbors are a Big Deal

But why spend money at all? Before money there was bartering, and thanks to the people-connecting power of the Internet, it’s firmly back in fashion (although we wouldn’t say “money is dead” – merely looking a bit peaky). If it fits through the post, it’s being swapped: books, DVDs, clothes, gadgets, plant seeds and tons more. Yet cities are where this is taking place in person, exchanging goods and services and reinforcing social bonds. Bartering binds people together.

And for the more intrepid barterer – why not trade homes with a complete stranger?

Each week here at EcoSalon, the editors choose a post from the archives that we think you’ll love. The original post can be found here.

Images: telmo32, NNECAPA, axiepics, bbjee, ubrayj02, frankh, emrank, Alex E. Proimos, eHow and paul(dex) busy @ work

The post Where Cities Are Taking Us: 10 Urban Eco Trends appeared first on EcoSalon.

When I first started hearing the term “urban farming,” I’d think about either my grandparents’ stories about war-time “victory gardens” or of some crumbling dystopian city full of hungry citizens doing whatever they could to endure society’s epic demise. The former image was one of coming together for the cause, growing cukes in city lots to support “our boys” “over there.” The latter was all sci-fi survival, doing what you can with what you got, staving off impending doom.

Turns out, the advent of today’s urban farming movement is in very much in response to both of these veins. Consider that by mid-century, the human population will increase by about three billion people and nearly 80 percent of us will live in urban centers. It’s been estimated that if farming practices continue as they are, the amount of “new” land needed to grow food to feed all these people would have to be 20 percent larger than the size of Brazil. Already, parts of the developing world are facing of water and land shortages, so we’re talking pretty high stakes here. As we recently pointed out, the push for urban farming is here, and it’s here to stay. And the movement continues to grow up. Literally.

The idea for “vertical farming” resulted from a classroom challenge made to students by a Columbia University teacher of environmental sciences and microbiology. Professor Dickson Despommier asked his class to figure out how many Manhattanites they could feed a 2,000-calorie daily diet to – growing food on the island’s 13 acres of usable rooftops. When the answer came back to be about two percent of the 50,000 city dwellers, Despommier posited growing food vertically, inside multi-story and high-rise buildings. The students took it from there, eventually creating Verticalfarm to spread the idea.

Though the project began in 2000 (we actually gave it some coverage a couple years back), the concept’s finding some new traction in the media, at least, with a recent piece in Smithsonian magazine’s 40th Anniversary issue, and Despommier’s new book, The Vertical Farm: The World Grows Up, soon to be released.

There are many advantages to this approach, according to Despommier and his team. For starters, there’s year-round crop production, no weather-related failures, all food can be grown hydroponically with no herbicides, pesticides or fertilizers, and you get the elimination of agricultural runoff by recycling black water. As for its impact on regular old “horizontal” farming, the method would provide for the return of existing farmland to nature, which is always a plus. Add fossil fuel-free food production and even feeding methane from composting back into a city’s electrical grid and, well, maybe they have something here.

Not everyone’s convinced that such an approach makes sense, and some say that cost and resource issues make the efficiency of such grand-scale endeavors to be no more than pie in the sky thinking. But the facts on the ground remain regarding populations, pollution and climate issues being on a collision course scheduled to meet up sometime in the not-too-distant future. It’s never too early for creative thinking. Especially when we’re going to need some unique solutions to, perhaps, get us off the ground.

The post Encouraging City Growth: Urban Farming Grows Up appeared first on EcoSalon.

Are the bees all right? Maybe, Maybe not. But possibly the trend of urban beekeeping can save them.

As colony collapse continues, sparking speculation that cell phone radiation may be one of the culprits, and a certain native bumblebee was recently formally petitioned to be protected under The Endangered Species Act, it looks as if our pollinators are in trouble.

This could be devastating for our food supply. Honeybees are used to pollinate commercial plantings of almonds, cucumbers, squash, melons, strawberries and many other crops. With colony collapse disorder continuing to be a problem, some farmers are using native bumblebees to pollinate greenhouse crops like tomatoes.

At the same time, beekeeping and honey sales are up in both the U.S. and Europe.

The British Beekeepers Association (BBKA) said there are now more than 80,000 hives registered in Britain, compared to 40,000 in 2007.

Beekeeping is such a craze in Germany that beekeepers are stealing hives from one another.

And in the United States, beekeeping is a hot trend, that some forward-thinking cities like Dayton, OH, are beginning to work bees into planning and zoning regulations, even while the practice remains illegal in cities like New York.

Can small-scale beekeepers save our pollinators? It’s quite possible. One study found that urban bees are more productive than rural bees and are healthier because they are not exposed to the same levels of damaging pesticides as rural bees.

Perhaps you’re ready to go beyond living in harmony with the bees in your yard and graduate to raising your own colony.

Where do you start? I caught up with urban beekeeper Staci Valentine to get the goods on raising bees. Staci, a year into her adventure, is relatively new to the art of beekeeping herself, making her the ideal person to introduce beginners to beekeeping.

Staci is a chef, professional photographer, and urban farmer who lives in a house located just below the Hollywood sign. Her backyard is unusually large, hence, the farm. Staci can usually be found creating glorious dishes for her private chef business clients from the organic ingredients foraged on her urban farm, tending to her ever-growing number of beehives and photographing the wonders of life. She will soon launch her pop-up bakery in Los Angeles.

What was the spark that first got you into beekeeping?

It really started at age five when my grandmother slathered honey on my morning waffle. I distinctly remember my senses awakening. The scent of the honey mixed with the melting butter on the crisp waffle and then the flavor exploding in my mouth. I was hooked at that moment and somehow knew that bees would play an important role in my life. However, it wasn’t until about five years ago when a colony of bees built their home in my garden wall. When I learned that my landlord was set to exterminate them because he was told they were “˜killer bees’, I called a local beekeeper to help me move them from the garden wall to my newly purchased house. Many exterminators use the term “˜killer bees’ as a scare tactic.

How long have you been keeping bees?

It’s been a year now. I currently have four super busy hives and have empty hives waiting for when I get a call to pick up a swarm.

What is your favorite fact about bees?

Gosh, there are many but one that is not too well known is that the scent of bananas is similar to a bees alarm pheromone. So the scent could very well trigger them to sting. Needless to say, I don’t seem to be eating too many bananas these days.

Is it true that the girl bees do all the work? Do you think that applies to life as well?

It is indeed true that the girl bees do all of the work because the worker bees are all female. The hive consists of the queen, her workers, and drones (the male bees). The workers are the ones that make most things happen in and out of the hive. The key responsibility of the male is to wait in designated drone “˜meeting areas’ and mate with a virgin queen from a different hive. Once they mate, his privates are ripped from his abdomen and he plunges to his death. Not a fun fate.

I do believe that in many cases, the female makes everything run like clockwork in a home.

Have you been stung and have you ever panicked when the bees swarmed?

I have been stung but not since I’ve been keeping bees. I always wear my protective gear when working with them, which consists of a veil, gloves and white coveralls, which are tucked into gardening boots. I’ve never panicked when bees are swarming. This is when they are the most docile because they are looking for a new home. Once they settle at a location they send scout bees out to find a suitable new location. There is typically a short window before they find their new home and this is the time that I get calls to pick up a swarm.

I have heard the behavior of bee colonies be compared to “one mind” is this true in your experience?

I think bees function as an amazing cooperative and people should learn more from them. At various steps of their short lives, the workers graduate to different tasks in and out of the hive. There is no resentment, just a shared responsibility to create a thriving colony.

What is the most amazing thing you’ve ever seen bees do?

I was emptying a box of 40,000 bees into their new home. First, I placed a white sheet in the area I was working so that if the queen fell onto the ground, I could spot her and place her inside the hive. Once the queen is safely inside the hive, appointed worker bees will raise their little tushies in the air at the entrance to the hive and fan furiously. This releases their queen’s pheromones into the air and all of the bees belonging to the colony start marching into their new home. It’s an amazing sight to behold.

For people interested in keeping bees, what kind of time and monetary investment can they expect?

I say before even spending any money, observe another beekeeper to see if it is indeed something you’d like to do. You can then decide whether or not you want to purchase the protective gear, which I highly recommend. I’ve listed approximate prices.

When I first started I purchased the following:

Veil: I purchased a veil separate from the coveralls. They do make some veils that attach to the coverall.  This is all a matter of preference. ($30 – $75.00)

Thick fabric gloves $20.00

White coveralls: White is good because it’s reflective and it can get darn hot in the suit. $70.00

Smoker: (this is what you use to smoke the bees so they remain calm)

Hive tool: (to open the lid and separate hives/frames that are sticky with propolis) $6.00

Bee brush: $5.00

Hive boxes with tops, bottoms and frames: The price of these is all dependent on if you buy them unassembled or assembled and the size of the boxes. If you’re handy it’s definitely cheaper to buy unassembled. I like to paint my boxes (only the exterior never the interior) because this helps prevent them from weathering as quickly.

Once can also purchase bees, but I found the best way to get them is picking up a swarm. Swarms to be quite plentiful in the spring.

What is the most useful piece of advice you wish someone had given you when you were first starting out?

When you are setting up the frames in your hives you either use frames that come with starter beeswax or you buy empty frames and make your own strips. The starter beeswax has its advantage because the bees have less to build before drawing out honeycomb.

The reason I decided to not go with the pre-made beeswax frames was because I could not verify that the beeswax was “˜clean’ i.e., did not have any chemicals in it.

And so I took a different approach. Someone had told me that all I needed to do was cut thin strips of cardboard or wood, glue them into the tops of the frames and the bees would start making their own comb on the cardboard or wood. What I later learned is that “˜painting’ the cardboard or wood strips really is what does it. I think my first bees left because they didn’t want to build honeycomb on raw cardboard. I’ve tried the “˜painted’ method now in several hives and it seems to have done the trick.

There is still so much in the news about colony collapse disorder, and recently, the story about cell phone radiation being a possible cause. Then there is the decline in native bee populations. It’s interesting considering the rising tide of individual, small-scale beekeepers. Do you think individual beekeepers can save our pollinators?

I think if enough people become interested in beekeeping it can make a difference. It’s about putting a voice to something and that is why education is so incredibly important. People like Michael Pollan and films like Food Inc. make an impact. I feel that much of the problem is because of all of the horrific fertilizers and pesticides that we are putting on our crops. Of course it’s hurting the bees – and it’s hurting us as well.

This is the latest installment in Vanessa Barrington’s weekly column, The Green Plate, on the environmental, social, and political issues related to what and how we eat.

Images: Staci Valentine

The post Q&A with Los Angeles Beekeeper, Staci Valentine appeared first on EcoSalon.

Urban farming has the potential to help us take charge of the foods we eat, green our cities, build community, and increase food security for urban residents.

Everyday, there’s articles about backyard chickens, bee keeping, or urban yard sharing. Clearly urban agriculture is at the top of the trend pile. But is it just a trend, or a part of a sustainable future?

Last week I attended a panel discussion in San Francisco at The Commonwealth Club (presented by INFORUM), about how today’s urban farming movement began and where it’s going. Attendees were treated to a variety of perspectives from four pitchfork-toting farmerpreneur leaders of the urban farming movement in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Panelists included Jason Mark, co-manager of Alemany Farm; editor-in-chief, Earth Island Journal, Novella Carpenter, author of the book Farm City about her farm Ghost Town Farm, Christopher Burley, founder, Hayes Valley Farm, and David Gavrich (aka The Goat Whisperer), founder of City Grazing. The panel was moderated by Sarah Rich, writer; editor; co-founder, The Foodprint Project; and co-author, Worldchanging: A User’s Guide for the 21st Century.

The panel started off with a discussion about the most recent “back to the land” movement and how it differed from today’s urban farming movement.

Back in the 60s and 70s young people migrated back to the countryside to make a go of farming. Novella Carpenter’s parents were part of that movement. But it didn’t last. People found that growing food is very hard and rural life can be extremely isolating. The motives of today’s generation of farmers are different, and more communitarian. They’re not trying to drop out. They’re trying to engage more fully with the world around them.

“We’re realizing that maybe there is a different way. We can stay in the cities and grow food where we live and it can serve as a model for sustainability, said Jason Mark. “There’s not enough room for all of us in Sonoma.”

“We’re all trying to find balance and bring the rural environment into the urban environment. We’re trying to find that niche that we live in. Everyone who plants a seed is sowing a bit of sustainability,” added Chris Burley.

Though the movement is young, things are changing rapidly. According to David Gavrich, the goat whisperer. When his business, City Grazing, put an ad in Craigslist for “goat herder, San Francisco,” they got 200 applications, and half of the applicants actually had goat experience. According to Gavrich, “people are yearning to get away from their desks”.

Urban farming does seem to be helping to revitalize neighborhoods and foster community. For example, Burley, of Hayes Valley Farm, who was featured here in a Q & A a couple of weeks back said that he was amazed to find that 50 people will consistently show up on a Thursday to shovel horse manure for four hours. Sunday work parties regularly attract 100 folks.

Jason Mark says, “community is what distinguishes this from the back to the land movement.” Alemany Farm is completely volunteer run and over the years has built up a core group of volunteers that are friends and together make up a vibrant community.

For Novella Carpenter, the community happened more by accident. Her farm begin as a personal project but has evolved into one in which neighbors are involved in various ways. The involvement started with people picking her produce without permission. Describing herself as “not a do-gooder” but saying that. “If my neighbors are hungry and I know how to grow food how can I not feed them?” she says, “everybody gives what they can.” This includes everything from the wagon proffered by the neighbor who likes her mustard greens to goat butchering lessons from the Yemeni liquor store owner.

What about bureaucratic hurdles to farming in urban areas?

They do exist but each panelist had different experiences. Gavrich has said he’s had no problems in enlightened San Francisco but recommends anticipating problems and getting everything in writing. He has a “goat clause” in his agreement with the railroad line he maintains stating that all landscape is done by natural means.

Mark echoes that San Francisco has been extremely supportive and that the mayor has laid out a food policy proposal that is sweeping and visionary. He does cite “getting the city staff to connect with the mayor’s policies” as a hurdle.

Burley said that the city came to his group to develop Hayes Valley Farm, so they have the full blessing and support from the authorities. He also said that a bottom- up approach to urban farming that utilizes people’s backyards has worked.

Most of the panelist agreed that policy changes that support urban farming are important because (though many of the non-profit farms and farms located in private backyards don’t run into problems) when an urban farm is commercialized, all it takes is one neighbor to complain about commercial activity in a residential area for a farmer to get cited.

And as Burley said, “We need to advocate for farms in residential areas because 60 percent of land is in people’s yards.”

Can urban farming help us rebuild our food systems and increase food security?

Urban farming can certainly increase access to fresh fruits and vegetables to city dwellers but we need to look at how the food is distributed and find creative ways to get the food to the people who most need it. The most sustainable way of all to provide food is to teach people how to grow their own.

For example, Alemany Farm is right next to public housing. The farm runs youth programs and provides plots to nearby residents where they can grow their own food. The farm once held a farmers market where nearby residents could purchase produce on a sliding scale. The farm is no longer allowed to sell the food, which means they have to give it away. Yet all the panelists agree that a charity model is too top-down and not sustainable.

Things are shifting as policy makers realize that urban farming can be both a green solution to city ills and perhaps even a green jobs solution. Novella Carpenter is working on a project in San Lorenzo that is part of the city’s green job training program and is funded by the sheriff’s department.

All panelists agreed that the movement needs to network, share information and resources and build the system from the ground up.

According to Chris Burley, an urban agriculture alliance is forming. And indeed for urban agriculture to ever become more than isolated individuals working on scattered city plots, we need concerted organization efforts that can both demand and work with government backing.

Panelists were asked what role education plays in the movement

Chris Burley says it’s crucial. In fact Hayes Valley Farm’s mission is not even so much to produce food, but to serve as an urban agriculture resource that provides education and advocates behavioral changes. “We can’t change what we don’t know. We need to become more aware of our impact. Food is the gateway drug to a more sustainable lifestyle. Through learning about food, little by little, we’ll become more connected and thrive as a community,” said Burley.

Novella and her co-worker/owners run an urban farming store at Biofuel Oasis in Berkeley. All day they educate people on beekeeping, chicken coops and more. They teach classes on bee and goat keeping, preserving, and other topics as well. With a trend like urban farming, it is necessary to make sure people know what they are getting into or the movement will not develop in a sustainable way.

I wonder if the Internet existed during the 60s and 70s, giving people access to information and ready support from fellow travelers, if the back-to-the-land movement might have survived.

In conclusion: here are the panelist’s best 60-second ideas to change the world.

David Gavrich – “Get leadership and political people to think holistically. Think about the impact beyond what we see. Look at externalities. If we do that, it will be clear that we’ll be better off farming in our communities.”

Chris Burley – “Crop mob. Get together and transform a backyard. Have a potluck.”

Novella Carpenter – “Every city should have a demo farm. It could be a cool tourist thing with a person managing it and showing people how to raise chickens and bees and how to can and process vegetables. There should be an “˜office of urban farming.'”

Jason Mark – “Find a little bit of land and a little water, find a friend and find someone to help. Connect with you neighbors doing the same thing. Personal actions alone don’t do it. Progress happens collectively.”

This is the latest installment in Vanessa Barrington’s weekly column, The Green Plate, on the environmental, social, and political issues related to what and how we eat.

Image: Jessica Reeder

The post Is the Urban Farming Movement Here to Stay? appeared first on EcoSalon.

You’re relaxing in your backyard when you hear that ominous noise: the unmistakable buzz of a swarm of bees. The sight of a writhing mass of wild stinging insects is enough to turn almost anyone into a shrieking horror movie heroine, but whatever you do, don’t harm them! Natural care of feral bees could be a key to overcoming Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD).

They’ve yet to pinpoint the exact cause, with guesses focusing on everything from tiny mites to pesticide overload, but one thing scientists do know is that we need the bees to pollinate, since a third of our food crops are rapidly disappearing. But treating honeybees with even more chemicals is just fueling the fire, according to one subset of beekeepers.

“We’re “˜Backwards’ because we rely on observation and natural practices rather than pesticides and other chemicals to keep our bees thriving,” write the self-proclaimed Backwards Beekeepers, a group of organic beekeepers in Los Angeles who are determined to help local bee populations thrive.

While CCD has hit commercial bees hard, wild bees seem to be doing just fine – and Backwards Beekeepers believe their health is due to their more natural way of life. The Backwards Beekeepers trap feral swarms of bees, transfer them to new hives and provide organic chemical-free support while allowing nature to do most of the work.

Conventional beekeepers place sheets made of plastic or wax in their hives for their honeybees to build upon, but the problem is, bees aren’t too fond of plastic and the wax is contaminated by chemicals and pesticides. The hexagonal cell pattern on the sheets is often too large, encouraging the growth of oversized bees that may gather more pollen and make more honey, but are also more susceptible to mites and thus require chemical treatment.

The Backwards Beekeepers – made up of Kirk Anderson, Charles Martin Simon and Michael Bush – believe that this just plain unnatural system is adding unnecessary stress to bee populations. Their own system relies on wood strips painted with chemical-free beeswax taken from their own previous harvests.

Simon outlines the 10 Principles of Beekeeping Backwards, explaining that observation, working with nature and above all supporting the health of the bees are the most important things you can remember, adding “Beekeeping is not about honey – it’s not about money – it’s about survival.”

Want to get started as a Backwards Beekeeper? Check out our primer, ‘How to Keep Bees: Basics of Bee Keeping for Beginners‘ and then bone-up on natural beekeeping methods at Beehuman.blogspot.com.

Image: hr.icio

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Q & A With Chris Burley, Cofounder of Hayes Valley Farm

Earlier this year, while speeding down a busy San Francisco street in the passenger seat of a friend’s car, I spotted a bunch of people scurrying around atop a concrete slab. They were moving dirt the hard way – using wheelbarrows and shovels.

The image did not fully compute. I did a double-take, thinking I’d just hallucinated, and interjected a query along the lines of, “Did you see that? Wasn’t that one of the old freeway ramps?” We were in Hayes Valley, one of San Francisco’s more densely populated neighborhoods. Situated west of the Civic Center, the neighborhood was once dominated by a raised freeway structure. But after the 1989 Loma Prieta Earthquake damaged the roadway, the city tore it down. The site I caught a glimpse of, bordered by Octavia, Fell, Oak, and Laguna Streets, was in fact, once a freeway ramp. There are a handful of others like it strewn around the neighborhood.

Said friend and I were deep in conversation so all I got in answer to my question was a vague, “don’t know.” I wanted to stop the car, jump out and investigate but I wasn’t driving so I filed the vision away in the area of my brain reserved for all things food and farming (it’s cavernous and messy in there) and vowed to check it out later.

Well, it’s later now and today Hayes Valley Farm is holding classes and work parties, and operating a fledging nursery that sells dwarf fruit trees especially suited to San Francisco’s chilly climate. The farm is still a ways away from producing food for folks to eat directly because there’s pretty much nothing more DIY than turning a slab of concrete into a farm.

After testing the site for contamination, you have to build enough soil to support plant life. Hayes Valley Farm managers and armies of volunteers started by layering cardboard, mulch, and manure atop ivy and dirt, with the goal of generating two to three feet of organic matter. Cover crops like fava beans and clover were planted to fix nitrogen in the soil and make it fertile enough to support food crops. The concrete slab will house potted plants and trees.

Growing food in the soil is a couple years down the road, but for now the farm functions as sort of a community space, education center, and demonstration garden for neighbors or anyone interested in volunteering and learning to grow food. Classes on garden design, composting, and Permaculture are available regularly. And for those who just want to get their hands dirty, there’s always a work party. Some days over 100 people have shown up to volunteer!

Originally driven by neighborhood residents who had been petitioning the city to do something with the vacant land, the farm is a fiscally sponsored project of the San Francisco Parks Trust. The lot, and others like it, are currently owned by San Francisco’s Build Inc., a development agency. But due to the economic downturn, the lots are not being developed, so the San Francisco Office of Economic and Workforce Development organized an alliance of urban farmers, educators, and designers to make up the Hayes Valley Farm Project Team.

Funded by a city grant as an interim use agreement, the farm is currently operated by Chris Burley, one of the original founders of My Farm (a now defunct garden installation business), David Cody a leader of the San Francisco Permaculture Guild, and Jay Rosenberg, volunteer coordinator of the San Francisco Permaculture Guild, and longtime community organizer, volunteer and educator in sustainable agriculture.

I caught up with Chris Burley, the co-founder and co-director of the farm to ask him a few questions about the farm and his and his fellow organizers’ vision for its future.

Q: This is an amazing project because it’s a huge undertaking, yet the city could decide to develop the site in as little as two years. Is that correct? How do you feel about that?

A: There is the imminent possibility of the site being developed sooner than later. I personally believe this site is a huge opportunity and urban agriculture will thrive because of its existence. Despite the inevitable development plans Hayes Valley Farm will steward the site until further notice, all while building soil and building community to its greatest potential.

Q: Water access is always a tough issue. Do you irrigate? If so, where does the water come from?

A: We do irrigate, but we also go through great lengths to SINK water into the ground so we can store it into the ground reservoirs and use it later. The ultimate goal of our efforts is to use none to very little water from the public water system. The more we can sink, the more we can recycle from the plants into the environment and back into the plants to meet our needs.

Q: Can you explain what Permaculture is for a lay audience? And tell how this project fits into a vision of Permaculture.

A: Permaculture is a theoretical and practical framework for how to produce food, build shelter, and approach all other aspects of life in a way that gives back to the planet as much as it takes out. Imagine if we were to give back more than we consumed? Imagine the regeneration, the abundance, and the sheer beauty that would ensue.

Q: Tell me about the potato tower. It’s fascinating. Can you explain how it works to folks who may have never grown potatoes?

A: Potato towers are vertical structures that provide a practical, no-dig, high-yield way for folks to grow and harvest potatoes in limited space. And who doesn’t love potatoes right? Potatoes are a high-calorie crop too, which means they can feed a lot of people while using little of the earth’s resources. In fact, they are also a great way to build soil because as they grow they help break down organic matter in the soil, which makes additional nutrients available for other plants.

Potatoes are tubers, which are storage containers for starches, or plant energy. Tubers aren’t seeds themselves, but they can act as seeds when buried, using their energy to propagate a new plant. So bust out that 5-gallon bucket (or make your own tower), drill plenty of holes in the bottom to ensure great drainage (potatoes hate to be wet), plop a few potatoes on top of 6-inches of compost and cover with another few inches. When the plant reaches 12 inches tall, gently cover the first six inches with compost and then repeat until you have filled the bucket to the brim. When the leaves of potatoes are covered, they turn into roots and form more tubers! Then water them as needed and harvest your bounty when the plants die off and turn brown.

If you want to learn how to make a more productive tower check out our blog for a detailed article on tuberous towers.

Q: Are there other cool ways of growing food in small spaces that you will explore?

A: First, we encourage people to just grow. It’s not rocket science, it just a matter of planting a seed that will produce a future 3-course meal. Second, Check out Sixty-Six things you can grow in containers – everyone can grow, even Ronald McDonald statues.

Q: What is the best possible outcome you can imagine for this project?

A: The best possible outcome would be that Hayes Valley Farm becomes a launching point for regenerative agricultural practices in the city, the region and in the nation. We begin to realize that food production is a source of life, both physically, emotionally and spiritually. As a Japanese master in regenerative agriculture named Masanobu Fukuoka says, “Natural farming is not just for growing crops,” he says, “It is for the cultivation and perfection of human beings.” When all know the value of our mother earth, and how the caring for their own garden of abundance bears delicious fruit, I will see this project as a great success.

For research on this article I relied on information from this article by Madeline Lynch in San Francisco State University’s online publication, [X]Press

This is the latest installment in Vanessa Barrington’s weekly column, The Green Plate, on the environmental, social, and political issues related to what and how we eat.

Images: Hayes Valley Farm

The post From Fumes to Fava Beans: San Francisco Freeway Gets a New Life appeared first on EcoSalon.

Cities across the nation suffer from some of the same ills regarding poor quality food and inequitable distribution of healthy, fresh produce and other unprocessed foods. But New York City has a bold plan that could very well serve as a model for the rest of us.

Communities in every urban area include pockets or neighborhoods that have higher rates of diet related diseases than neighboring communities, little or no physical access to healthy, fresh foods, or lack of money to buy the fresh food that is available. Our broken food system contributes to our national health problems, but it’s also a huge contributor to climate change and other environmental problems. Additionally, employment in the food sector – whether you are a farmer, farmworker, or service industry worker – often means scraping by on less than a living wage and living without health care.

How do we fix our food system and reform it into something that actually serves us?

If we want to build a decentralized food distribution system that serves the people equally, the best way is to start at home with a clear vision and concrete policy recommendations. NYC’s model for a better food system, if adopted, could be replicated in other cities across the nation, creating jobs and providing better food for more people.

In February, Manhattan Borough President Scott M. Stringer released “FoodNYC: A Blueprint for a Sustainable Food System,” calling it “the most comprehensive effort to date to unify and reform New York City’s policies regarding the production, distribution, consumption, and disposal of food.” (The report was produced as a result of the New York City Food and Climate Summit held in December (09) in partnership with the non-profit Just Food.)

Of all the ideas presented, the blueprint chose to outline 10 bold ideas for the future. Cities everywhere take notice!

1. Urban Agriculture: Urban agriculture can reduce rainwater runoff and pollution, reduce the heat-island effect in cities, and absorb and sequester carbon. New York’s blueprint calls on the city to create a citywide urban Ag program that will identify land that is available for urban agriculture, such as vacant lots owned by the city, foster community gardens by giving them park status, and ease regulations and provide incentives to pave the way for green rooftops and other innovative urban farming programs.

2. Regional Food Production: Small regional farmers struggle to survive and compete with cheap overseas produce and heavily subsidized produce from industrial farms. When this happens, farmland dwindles and the farming population shrinks while urban consumers remain hungry for local foods. One task of the plan is to assess the capacity of a regional foodshed, facilitate connections among upstate farms and downstate consumers, and develop a long-term strategy towards preserving current farmland.

3. Food Processing and Distribution: When local food has to be shipped off somewhere else to be processed, it’s not really local food anymore. Relocalizing processing can create jobs along with a greener, more equitable food system. The plan recommends increasing distribution capacity of fresh, regional foods by expanding the existing Hunts Point Wholesale Produce Market and building other smaller wholesale produce markets in different areas of the city. Another recommendation is to invest public funds in local food processing plants.

4. New Markets: It’s all about access. Neighborhoods that have access to healthy, fresh foods suffer lower incidences of diet related diseases. The plan recommends fostering the development of non-traditional food outlets such as farmers’ markets by investing in increasing their capacity, offering long-term leases for public markets, and taking other actions that lower the barriers to increasing the number and type of alternative (non-grocery store) food venues in every neighborhood.

5. Procurement of Regionally grown Foods: Municipalities have huge buying power and can really move the needle toward change. By investing public money in community-based food, governments are creating jobs and bettering the health of local citizens. The recommendations focus on requiring publicly-funded schools, hospitals, senior centers, homeless shelters, and jails to mandate the purchase of regionally produced food.

6. Education: Kids don’t necessarily learn how to eat well at home, any more than they might learn algebra there. The blueprint recommends fostering lifelong good eating habits through requiring food curriculum in schools, exposing children to farms and gardens, and instituting meatless Mondays in New York City schools.

7. Food Waste: Rotting food creates methane, a powerful greenhouse gas. The plan recommends that the city lower food waste by decreasing the amount of food that goes uneaten through better procurement practices and by investing in municipal and individual composting programs.

8. Plastic Water Bottles: We live in a country with safe tap water, yet plastic bottles remain ubiquitous and have terrible environmental consequences. In New York, only 10% of plastic water bottles are recycled. The blueprint recommends banning sales of bottled water on city property and encouraging the use of water canteens.

9. Food Economy: Food fares well even during a recession. Focus the city’s economic development strategy on food businesses, creating good jobs and better food at the same time, through zoning, kitchen incubators and other programs. The plan also calls on New York State to protect the rights of farmworkers.

10. Government Oversight: Everybody eats and we already know that food has huge environmental and personal health impacts. Why not give food its due and treat it like transportation, education, and sanitation by creating a Department of Food and Markets to oversee and lead the reform of the city’s food system? That’s what the panel recommends.

When faced with gigantic problems like creating a food system that works for everyone, it’s helpful to break down the issues into smaller parts and offer concrete recommendations that build a new vision, like this blueprint does. You can read the entire report here and then get involved in a food policy council near you. They have been springing up everywhere. This handy map provides a list of all food policy councils in your state.

This is the latest installment in Vanessa Barrington’s weekly column, The Green Plate, on the environmental, social, and political issues related to what and how we eat.

Image: wwarby

The post NYC’s Bold Blueprint for Building a Better, Greener Food System appeared first on EcoSalon.