Growing Power

GrowingPower 2008 022, originally uploaded by ausradesigns.

Will Allen has an amazing urban farm movement.

At the northern outskirts of Milwaukee, in a neighborhood of boxy post-WWII homes near the sprawling Park Lawn housing project, stand 14 greenhouses arrayed on two acres of land. This is Growing Power, the only land within the Milwaukee city limits zoned as farmland.

Founded by MacArthur Foundation “genius” fellow Will Allen, Growing Power is an active farm producing tons of food each year, a food distribution hub, and a training center. It’s also the home base for an expanding network of similar community food centers, including a Chicago branch run by Allen’s daughter, Erika. Growing Power is in what Allen calls a “food desert,” a part of the city devoid of full-service grocery stores but lined with fast-food joints, liquor stores, and convenience stores selling mostly soda and sweets. Growing Power is an oasis in that desert.[...]

Since 1993, Allen has focused on developing Growing Power’s urban agriculture project, which grows vegetables and fruit in its greenhouses, raises goats, ducks, bees, turkeys, and—in an aquaponics system designed by Allen—tilapia and Great Lakes Perch—altogether, 159 varieties of food.

Growing Power also has a 40-acre rural farm in Merton, 45 minutes outside Milwaukee, with five acres devoted to intensive vegetable growing and the balance used for sustainably grown hays, grasses, and legumes which provide food for the urban farm’s livestock.

Allen has taken the knowledge he gained growing up on the farm and supplemented it with the latest in sustainable techniques and his own experimentation.

Growing Power composts more than 6 million pounds of food waste a year, including the farm’s own waste, material from local food distributors, spent grain from a local brewery, and the grounds from a local coffee shop. Allen counts as part of his livestock the red wiggler worms that turn that waste into “Milwaukee Black Gold” worm castings.

Via La Vida Locavore.

Picture is of the vertical fish/watercress aquaculture. Pretty amazing! More pics here.

Time For A

White House Farmer.

Secretary of Food

Nicholas Kristof has a good column about the department of Agriculture, that should be renamed the Department of Food.

A Department of Agriculture made sense 100 years ago when 35 percent of Americans engaged in farming. But today, fewer than 2 percent are farmers. In contrast, 100 percent of Americans eat.

Renaming the department would signal that Mr. Obama seeks to move away from a bankrupt structure of factory farming that squanders energy, exacerbates climate change and makes Americans unhealthy — all while costing taxpayers billions of dollars.

“We’re subsidizing the least healthy calories in the supermarket — high fructose corn syrup and hydrogenated soy oil, and we’re doing very little for farmers trying to grow real food,” notes Michael Pollan, author of such books as “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” and “In Defense of Food.”

The problem is not American farmers. The problem is the farm lobby working on behalf of big agricultural firms. We subsidize CAFOs by not making them clean up their mess.

An industrial farm with 5,000 hogs produces as much waste as a town with 20,000 people. But while the town is required to have a sewage system, the industrial farm isn’t.

That is disgusting. It is really unbelievable. But if Obama wants to get his agenda through he needs to deal with agriculture in a fundamentally different way.

As Mr. Pollan told me: “Even if you don’t think agriculture is a high priority, given all the other problems we face, we’re not going to make progress on the issues Obama campaigned on — health care, climate change and energy independence — unless we reform agriculture.”

Ethanol, Bad!

Farmers are more and more reliant on ethanol production than food production.

Scott Irwin says agriculture’s fortunes are now tethered more to ethanol than food, making crop growers vulnerable to sharp price swings at filling stations rather than the typically slower cost shifts at grocery stores.

“We’re just experiencing the full brunt of this new source of volatility,” said Irwin, a professor of agricultural and consumer economics. “When food prices were the main trigger, recessionary impacts were much less direct and much more gradual. Now, there’s this new connection through energy costs that immediately gets translated to agriculture.”

With fuel prices coming down and the Wall Street credit crunch many ethanol plants may close. There never has been a natural market for ethanol. It is time to end it's subsidies.

Eater In Chief

This Lawn is Your Lawn from roger doiron on Vimeo.
We need to grow more food at home as a nation. A plea for Barack Obama to set an example by planting a garden at the White House.

Via Emptywheel

Saffron Crocuses

Crocus sauvages (Crocus sp)., originally uploaded by Emmanuel LATTES.

Saffron production has come back to Italy.

SAN GIMIGNANO, Italy (AFP) – Purple crocuses, the source of the precious spice saffron, are abloom once again in Italy's Tuscan hills, centuries after they vanished.

For the rest of the day, nimble fingers will extract the tiny red filaments which will become saffron, used chiefly in cooking but also for colouring and in some medicines.

"A machine could never do this laborious, delicate and above all lengthy work of extraction," said Paolo Pieraccini, who runs the farm with his sister Tiziana.

"You realise it takes 125,000 flowers to produce one kilogramme (2.2 pounds) of saffron!"

Each flower yields three pistils, or stigmas, which provide the reddish-coloured saffron, used as currency in the Middle Ages and still hugely expensive today.

After the fragile pistils have been removed, they are dried overnight at a temperature of 45 degrees Celsius (113 Fahrenheit), a process that removes 80 percent of their weight.

Then they are put into little sachets weighing a tenth of a gramme, a tiny fraction of an ounce, sold for 3.50 euros (4.50 dollars) each, making saffron worth 35,000 euros (45,000 dollars) a kilo, more expensive than gold.

I know you can grow them here. It would be interesting to try.

Urban Farming

Tokyo has added under ground and rooftop farms.

Kitazawa was one of many young people here left without a stable income as Japanese companies slashed jobs. But he finally ended years of job hunting when he found the position growing vegetables right in the middle of Tokyo.

"I felt a bit odd at first growing vegetables like this, but I've learned its merits," Kitazawa said.

The state-of-the art farm, known as Pasona O2, was created by Tokyo-based temp staffing agency Pasona Group Inc. The farm carefully adjusts temperatures, humidity and lighting so vegetables can grow under the ground.

Kitazawa grows a few different types of lettuce in one of the six "farms," which look somewhat like space laboratories divided by glass doors that slide open and shut automatically.

The other farming rooms grow rice, roses and vegetables such as tomatoes and pumpkins.

I do not think this type of farming will be cost effective in the US. Rooftop farms to cool the buildings from the heat island effect might be of use here.

Encouraged by environment-conscious Tokyo Governor Shintaro Ishihara, a number of building owners in the capital have introduced roof-top gardening as a way to prevent overheating.

In the "Green Potato" project launched by two subsidiaries of Japanese telecommunications giant NTT Corp., city farmers not only help cool down Tokyo but also harvest sweet potatoes in autumn.

"Sweet potatoes grow strongly in the tough roof-top environment of harsh sun and strong wind," said Masahiro Nagata, a staff member of NTT Facilities Inc.'s environment business department.

The plants are particularly good for roof-tops because their wide leaves can cover the whole surface and are efficient at transpiration -- evaporating water -- which has a cooling effect.

The temperature of a roof area not covered by potato leaves was as much as 27 degrees Celsius (48.6 degrees Fahrenheit) hotter than an area covered by the leaves, according to a survey taken on top of the NTT Facilities building.

All most fifty degrees!

At Their Peril

Ed from the Slow Cook.

Nations that neglect the health of their soil do so at their peril. North Africa used to be the breadbasket of the Mediterranean. Now it is desert. Today, humans have fooled themselves into thinking we can douse the soil with synthetic fertilizers and deadly poisons and reap an ever-expanding harvest. The latest global food crises proves otherwise. We are killing our soil at the same time we pat ourselves on the back over the purchase of organic milk with pictures of happy cows on the carton.

The idea of regenerating our soil is in direct opposition to the exploitative nature of industrial agriculture. Feeding the soil with compost takes the long view of fertility. Raising crops with noxious insecticides and fertilizers made from fossil fuels takes the short route to profits. Anyone who believes in organics, who believes in food that sustains rather than exploits this blue planet we call home, must embrace compost.

Organic Pays

A new study from England on organic farming.

Researchers from the University of Guelph followed farms that converted from conventional to organic dairy farming over five years to see if it really is viable and better for farmers; the answer appears to be yes. However the study notes that organic farms are more labour intensive and there is a lot of paperwork involved.

Milk production falls immediately, down 10.6%. (It would probably drop more in the USA where they allow bovine growth hormone) . However, chemical costs for fertilizers and antibiotics are wiped out, and veterinary costs are cut in half, saving almost $2,000 per cow.

Also, organic milk sells for 25% more than conventional milk, almost completely balancing it out.

In the Star: Ann Slater, a market farmer near St. Marys and president of the Ecological Farmers Association of Ontario, says soils continue to improve even after the transition is complete, and farmers get better at running their farms.

Colony Collapse Disorder

Tree Hugger has an interesting piece about Colony Collapse Disorder. It seems to the author Russ George, believes co2 levels are responsible.

First, they begin to fan their wings to circulate air through the colony and then, if that fails to lower the CO2 levels sufficiently, workers begin to sacrifice themselves one by one, flying to a lonely death. Curiously, 80 years ago bee scientists noted that CO2 was the controlling factor in bee colonies. Later scientists observed that bees exposed to high CO2 become incapable of performing their normally incredible navigation skills and become lost bees. It can be no wonder that with our recently imposed 44% higher CO2, - often 2-4 times higher locally - bees have no means to know that their time tested last gasp means to protect the colony will not suffice.

Mr George does not mention the moving of bees across the country. It seems to me that the colonies that collapse are from the large commercial operations that travel long distances on tractor trailers. Certainly, co2 levels are higher along the highways. IIRC, one large commercial operation has hired a second driver for cross continental travel, to reduce losses. Large mono culture farms can not support a local bee population.

Blaspheme!

Sharon Astyk of Casaubon's Book is a Blasphemer!

Now the nice thing about beer is that it is not required for human existence (ok, we know some people who will argue with us about this).

She shall hens forth be removed from the blog roll for saying things that would offend the Gods and Goddesses.

Actually, she has a great post about peak oil and it's likely effects on food production. I highly recommend it. We are going to have to get closer to our food. Physically and spiritually. In my opinion.

Petroleum has made possible the mechanization of much of the labor involved in agriculture. In 1900 roughly 38 % of the population of the United States was actively involved in growing food. By 1950 that number had been reduce to just more than 12 %.[xii] Today less than 2% of the American population does that work. This shift in labor was made possible largely by the harnessing of fossil fuels. Tractors and combines, among other machinery, replaced the human hand in the field. Pumps for irrigation rely on diesel fuel as does the vast network of intercontinental trucking that hauls, on average, each item of food over 1500 miles from where it is grown to where it is eaten.

Petroleum is also the feedstock for the pesticides used to support industrial agriculture and its vast fields of monoculture crops. Seemingly endless landscapes of corn, wheat and soybeans cover Midwestern America and are protected with a combination of chemicals that kill the pests. When you grow a thousand acres of just one type of plant, the bugs that like to eat that plant are drawn to those fields in swarms. Without the ability to fight off enormous numbers of such pests, this system of monoculture probably wouldn’t be possible.

Next there’s the matter of all the nutrients needed to grow our food. We eat an incredible amount corn in our country. A recent Corn Refiners Association study suggests corn is used as an ingredient in almost 4,000 products. This does not include the meat, dairy and eggs that are a derivative of corn used as feed or lots of paper products that include corn.[...]

Taken in isolation, the idea that we’ll prioritize energy for agriculture, or for any one thing or another does make a lot of intuitive sense - as long as we are talking about some discrete, neatly isolated thing. It is easy to think that the reprioritization of resources will be both logical and inevitable - but the problem is that intuitive responses aren’t always right. In actual working systems, there are a host of first priorities, all of them extremely difficult to triage.

The problem is that there are so many highest priorities in any society - do you cut back on police protection? Medicines? Ambulances? Heat for the freezing? Public transport? The transport of relief supplies? Military engagements? In times of radical shortage, prioritizing becomes the struggle of competing priorities, political interests, black markets and a host of other factors, none of which ever quite get what they need

Food Farming Fuel

Farmers are fighting high fuel and energy costs on the farm. Here is one Ohio farmers solution.

Dull has since become an Ohio pioneer in green farming and renewable energy, and his efforts have garnered the attention of Ohio legislators, who turn to him for creative ideas on agriculture’s role in environmental protection.

“He is demonstrating through his farming practices that you can have a profitable farming operation while caring for the earth,” says Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland, who wants the state to rely more on alternative energy and is pushing a stimulus package that would earmark $150 million for advanced energy sources such as solar power, wind, and clean coal.

There are six wind generators on Dull’s 2,800-acre farm in western Ohio. In one building sits a machine that produces hydrogen made from electricity and water. Dull hopes it will soon replace the gas in his forklifts and supplant the propane that heats his pig barn. Dull’s office is geothermally heated and cooled. He dries his seed corn by burning rejected corn instead of propane, and he grinds corn cobs to sell as horse bedding and mulch.

It is even cost effective.

Dull spent $210,000 on his 120-foot-high windmills, 25 percent of which was bankrolled by a state grant. The windmills account for about 15 percent of the $40,000 worth of electricity required to run the farm each year. Dull spent about $100,000 on his corn-drying furnace; at current propane prices, it has saved him about $150,000.

Family Farmers

The Nation has an article about family farmers and the looming food crisis.

Looking for a responsible, moral and effective response to the global food crisis?

Start by sending money to a group that is working to get food to starving people. I'm especially impressed with the savvy approaches of Friends of the World Food Program.

Then support the work of smart groups such as the National Family Farm Coalition to change failed U.S. policies that harm farmers and consumers in the U.S. and around the world.

The National Family Farm Coalition has for years been warning that a global trading system designed to enrich agribusiness conglomerates while undermining the interests of working farmers in the U.S. and abroad would lead to precisely the disaster that is now unfolding.

And they've proposed the right response: a food a fair food system that ensures health, justice, and dignity for all by assuring the basic right of communities to choose where and how their food is produced and what food they consume. The international campaign for this new approach is known as the Food Sovereignty Movement, and the NFFC has worked hard to build support in the U.S. for it as an urgently necessary step to avoid catastrophe.

We need to change the farm bill to help Americans achieve food security.

In the U.S., the misguided policies of the Bill Clinton administration and the Republican Congresses of the 1990s -- as exemplified by the 1996 "Freedom to Farm Act" -- eliminated historic food-security provisions and handed over control of grain stocks to corporate agribusiness giants and commodities speculators.

This is a modest proposal, but it's a wise one -- and in some senses a radical one. The World Trade Organization, the World Bank and other champions of the corporate globalization have for many years discouraged nations from taking steps to assure that adequate food stocks will be available for their people. The Food Sovereignty Movement says that feeding the hungry is more important than removing barriers to agribusiness profiteering.

Establishing a Strategic Grain Reserve is a small step toward food sovereignty. But it is a step that the U.S. can take, and in doing so it can send an important signal to other countries. This is the right time to act: negotiators in Washington are putting the finishing touches on a new Farm Bill. And so it should come as no surprise that responsible farm, consumer, environmental and religious groups have signed on to the call.

Farmers are not receiving the high commodities prices due to rising cost of production(gas and fertilizer) and commodities speculators.

Peak Farmers

Heck, peak farmers was a long time ago. I have always been amazed by the abandoned farms on the ridges of the Appalachian Trail. Still visible are the stone walls from the stones farmers had to move to plow their fields. It must have been a hard life especially on the New England ridges with their short growing season and cold winters. Casaubon's Book has a guest post about what happened to America's farmers. It should be read in its entirety.

Joel Stein, the Angelino columnist said just last fall. “Agribusiness feeds us. Farmers are obsolete. They are one step above fire starters and cave painters”.

Now with food prices rising, food riots in 35 countries as of this writing and the concerns about peak oil, peak food, peak phosphorus, peak fertilizer finally crashing into mainstream consciousness it is surprising to me that no one connects the current crisis with a peak that was passed long ago.

Peak farmers.

But that peak should not be a surprise to anyone.

For the last 100 years there has been a world-wide effort to get rid of farmers…
Some were eliminated for political reasons the way that Stalin starved the Ukrainians to death and shipped the kulaks off to Siberia.

It is worth reading in its entirety.

Rice Terraces of The Philippine Cordilleras

rice terraces, originally uploaded by dudz torres.

If people thousands of years ago could create these massive agricultural projects, I think we will manage to get through our food problems. It will probably be small scale farming And low tech too. Large corporations are out to make money. Do not believe that they are looking out for your best interest. From wikipedia

The Banaue Rice Terraces (Tagalog: Hagdan-hagdang Palayan ng Banaue) are 2000-year old terraces that were carved into the mountains of Ifugao in the Philippines by ancestors of the Batad indigenous people. The Rice Terraces are commonly referred to as the "Eighth Wonder of the World". It is commonly thought that the terraces were built with minimal equipment, largely by hand. The terraces are located approximately 1500 meters (5000 ft) above sea level and cover 10,360 square kilometers (about 4000 square miles) of mountainside. They are fed by an ancient irrigation system from the rainforests above the terraces.

The Banaue terraces are part of the Rice Terraces of the Philippine Cordilleras, ancient sprawling man-made structures from 2,000 to 6,000 years old. They are found in the provinces of Apayao, Benguet, Mountain Province and Ifugao, and are a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Locals to this day still tend to the rice and vegetables on the terraces, although more and more younger Ifugaos do not find farming appealing, often opting for the more lucrative hospitality industry generated by the Rice Terraces^{[citation needed]}. The result is the gradual erosion of the characteristic "steps", which need constant reconstruction and care.

Via deputydog

Politics Of Food Is Politics

Surfing the net today, I saw both $7.00 and $10.00 gas in our future. We as a society are not ready for it. We need to fundamentally change our relationship with our food supply. De Clarke and Stan Goff write about food politics.

The airline industry has been very forthright about their problems. They are saying, "We were neither tooled nor organized for $120-a-barrel oil." Most of us get this, because we associate transport technology with fossil hydrocarbons. We drive cars; and we buy the gas to put in those cars. Planes run on No. 1 Jet Fuel and if oil prices go up, so does the cost of jet fuel. Most of us are less likely to associate is oil prices with food prices.

We buy food at the supermarket; so we don't generally experience -- directly -- the association between fuel and food. The connection, however, is every bit as central in the current food production regime as the link between aircraft engines and their fuel. Industrial monocropping for global distribution is "neither tooled nor organized for oil at $120-a-barrel." It is not just the far-flung food transport network (much of it refrigerated and fuel-hungry) that creates the intimate dependency on oil; it is the whole scheme called industrial (or corporate, or "modern") agriculture.

This oil/food link -- during the onset of what some call the Peak Oil event -- has resulted almost overnight in steep food-price inflation, hitting peripheral economies like a tsunami.

Sustainable agriculture produces more food per acre than mono culture factory farms. They do not however produce large profits like the mono culture farms.

Many well-substantiated studies show that intensive biotic polyculture -- that is, the cultivation of many species of food plants in a small footprint, using biotic soil amendments and nutrient recycling -- produces far more food per hectare than factory farming; uses far less water; and builds, rather than destroying, topsoil.

Although more human ingenuity, care, and attention are required, the adoption of permaculture principles and techniques reduces the drudgery of food production considerably; the permaculturist is assisting food to grow rather than forcing it to grow (or more hubristically, "growing" it), which is much less work all round than our cartoon cultural memory of dawn-to-dusk backbreaking peasant labor (which became backbreaking to pay "tribute" and debts to people with weapons and ledgers, not survive).

What intensive biotic polyculture does not do is maximise money profits, minimise labour inputs, or facilitate large-scale extractive cash-cropping.

For these reasons -- not for any failure to produce food for eating -- it is derided by industrial agribiz "experts" as impractical, inefficient, inadequate, etc. In fact, poly/permaculture's abundant success in producing food for eating is one of the things that makes it a frightening prospect for those who control people by controlling people's access to food.

What they don't want us to know is that it works. Eisenia hortensis -- the European nightcrawler (earthworm) -- under ideal worm-farming (vermiculture) conditions double their volume through reproduction every 90 days. Each individual worm can eat approximately half its body weight each day. A pound of E. hortensis, then, can consume a half-pound of non-oily, vegetable kitchen scraps each day. The majority of that mass is excreted as an extremely high quality compost, with a bit of fluid (worm tea) left over (considered by many to be the organic uber-fertilizer). So, potentially, one pound of worms can convert around 180 pounds of kitchen scraps each year into the highest quality organic soil additive. Every five pounds of worm-castings can convert one-square surface-foot of soil into a super-producer for a four months. So one pound of worms can sustain 12 square surface-feet of garden throughout the year for the highest levels of productivity.

Via Avedon.

Who Is A Farmer?

Gristmill has a great piece on farming. It was written by Sharon Astyk and should be read in its entirety. I believe small scale farming is going to be necessary in the near future. Here are a few graphs I liked.

I have a strong opinion on this subject (gee, could you have guessed?). I think -- and yes, all the real farmers yell at me, and I don't entirely blame them -- that "farmer" should be the umbrella term for remunerative food production. That is, I think you are a farmer if you grow food for sale, for barter, or as a large portion of your own personal economy -- that is, I think we call them "subsistence farmers" for a reason. If farming either provides a significant part of your income or your diet, I think we should use the words "farm" and "farmer."[...]

Ninety-five percent of all farms in many parts of the former Soviet Union are under 1 hectare, and they provide the majority of all agricultural production, a total of 52 percent of all food eaten in the region. The U.S., as of the last ag census, contained over 66,000 small farms under 2 hectares. Which just goes to support Kiashu's well-taken point here that about half of the world's food already comes from small farms. Add to that Helena Norberg-Hodge's observation that 2 billion people live almost entirely on subsistence agriculture that is low-input and largely organic (because they can't afford the alternative), and we can see that agricultural norms are simply different than what we North Americans think of.[...]

Interestingly, it seems that in both South Asia and the former Soviet Union, the trend that economic development generally creates toward larger farms does not seem to be the case -- that is, the Handbook of Agricultural Economics cited above notes that as of 2004, neither Russia nor South Asia seems to be following the pattern of getting bigger as they get richer.

In Russia, the authors speculate, it may be because of the powerful impact of the 1990 collapse of the Soviet Union, where consumers now associate small farms with food security.[...]

First, that small farms are normal, and that the majority of the world's farmers are small farmers of less than 5 acres. That is, it is hard to claim that someone farming a comparatively small piece of land is not a farmer if they constitute a majority -- in fact, perhaps it would be more accurate to call many large scale farmers (as some prefer) agribusinessmen and -women, and leave the term farmer to the majority.[...]

A farmer is not someone who never does any work off the farm, then. She is not someone who owns a lot of land, or necessarily sells much or any food in the market place. (And by the way, it is a "she" -- the majority of the world's farmers are women, and many poor nations have long traditions of agriculture and land ownership in women's hands.) So what distinguishes farmers from gardeners? Not much.

I really enjoyed the article. I hope you do to.

Roof Top Gardening

DSCN3757, originally uploaded by antifa173.

Some more pictures here.

Why Bother?

Micheal Pollan Author of “In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto” talks about why we should do the right thing about global warming. To no one surprise he thinks gardening is important to fight it.

A great many things happen when you plant a vegetable garden, some of them directly related to climate change, others indirect but related nevertheless. Growing food, we forget, comprises the original solar technology: calories produced by means of photosynthesis. Years ago the cheap-energy mind discovered that more food could be produced with less effort by replacing sunlight with fossil-fuel fertilizers and pesticides, with a result that the typical calorie of food energy in your diet now requires about 10 calories of fossil-fuel energy to produce. It’s estimated that the way we feed ourselves (or rather, allow ourselves to be fed) accounts for about a fifth of the greenhouse gas for which each of us is responsible.

Yet the sun still shines down on your yard, and photosynthesis still works so abundantly that in a thoughtfully organized vegetable garden (one planted from seed, nourished by compost from the kitchen and involving not too many drives to the garden center), you can grow the proverbial free lunch — CO2-free and dollar-free. This is the most-local food you can possibly eat (not to mention the freshest, tastiest and most nutritious), with a carbon footprint so faint that even the New Zealand lamb council dares not challenge it. And while we’re counting carbon, consider too your compost pile, which shrinks the heap of garbage your household needs trucked away even as it feeds your vegetables and sequesters carbon in your soil. What else? Well, you will probably notice that you’re getting a pretty good workout there in your garden, burning calories without having to get into the car to drive to the gym. (It is one of the absurdities of the modern division of labor that, having replaced physical labor with fossil fuel, we now have to burn even more fossil fuel to keep our unemployed bodies in shape.) Also, by engaging both body and mind, time spent in the garden is time (and energy) subtracted from electronic forms of entertainment.

You begin to see that growing even a little of your own food is, as Wendell Berry pointed out 30 years ago, one of those solutions that, instead of begetting a new set of problems — the way “solutions” like ethanol or nuclear power inevitably do — actually beget other solutions, and not only of the kind that save carbon. Still more valuable are the habits of mind that growing a little of your own food can yield. You quickly learn that you need not be dependent on specialists to provide for yourself — that your body is still good for something and may actually be enlisted in its own support. If the experts are right, if both oil and time are running out, these are skills and habits of mind we’re all very soon going to need. We may also need the food. Could gardens provide it? Well, during World War II, victory gardens supplied as much as 40 percent of the produce Americans ate.

But there are sweeter reasons to plant that garden, to bother. At least in this one corner of your yard and life, you will have begun to heal the split between what you think and what you do, to commingle your identities as consumer and producer and citizen. Chances are, your garden will re-engage you with your neighbors, for you will have produce to give away and the need to borrow their tools. You will have reduced the power of the cheap-energy mind by personally overcoming its most debilitating weakness: its helplessness and the fact that it can’t do much of anything that doesn’t involve division or subtraction. The garden’s season-long transit from seed to ripe fruit — will you get a load of that zucchini?! — suggests that the operations of addition and multiplication still obtain, that the abundance of nature is not exhausted. The single greatest lesson the garden teaches is that our relationship to the planet need not be zero-sum, and that as long as the sun still shines and people still can plan and plant, think and do, we can, if we bother to try, find ways to provide for ourselves without diminishing the world.

Via the Ethicurean: Chew the right thing.

Urban Farming

view of urban farm in Red Hook, originally uploaded by ambienttraffic.

I think we need to see more urban farming people need to be close to their food. It is good for the heart and soul. I found this post from Jennie Love at Eat. Drink. Better.

So what is an urban farm? Since they’re often the size of large gardens due to land constraints within city limits, let’s first define the difference between a “farm” and a “garden”. According to Webster, a farm is “a tract of land…on which crops and often livestock are raised for livelihood.” A garden, on the other hand, is “a plot of ground…where flowers, shrubs, vegetables, fruits, or herbs are cultivated.” While one is a tract and the other a plot, the real difference between a farm and a garden is the expectation of turning a profit from the produce being grown. Thus, an urban farm can be loosely defined as an agricultural pursuit taking place within the boundaries of a city with the intent to sell what it harvests.

Still thinking the idea of a farm in the middle of the city is a little odd? While it has required some unconventional/creative methods, farming in the city really isn’t that unusual. Urban agriculture has been used by the United Nations in many developing countries to encourage a healthy food chain and to generate jobs in the poorest cities of the world. Conversely, a few enterprising Canadians started farming their backyard and their neighbors’ backyards two decades ago with the mission of reconnecting North Americans to sustainable farming methods. As a direct result of their labors, new methods for intensive planting and harvesting in order to generate much greater yields from small plots of land (called “SPIN” farming) have been developed to make farming in the city not just possible, but quite often profitable.

Read it all.