Currently browsing posts about: Urban-farming

I am staying out of New York City’s campaigns for Mayor, but one of the candidates, Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams, is exceptionally interested in food issues.  He, in partnership with NYU’s Stern Center for Sustainable Business, the Cornell University College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, and many other food-and-farm groups has produced a report titled The New Agrarian Economy, which outlines why urban agriculture is good for the economy and what needs to be done to support it better.

In the press release, Adams says:

The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the fragility of our city’s economy and the deep inequities embedded in our food system. Urban agriculture has the potential to revolutionize our urban landscape and play a significant role in an equitable recovery process, helping us to become a greener, healthier, more prosperous city after the pandemic. Our new report lays out a roadmap for achieving that, proposing steps that build on my previous advocacy efforts in Brooklyn. As the past several years have shown, there is tremendous economic potential in this promising sector — we just need the political will to invest the necessary resources to encourage its growth. I thank all of the advocates and industry leaders who offered their input into this report, and look forward to continuing our advocacy to turn our concrete jungle into a green oasis.

This is a serious report, worth serious consideration.  The recommendations in this report are grounded in reality.  I think it’s great that a Borough President/candidate for Mayor cares about food issues in such a constructive way.

“Turn concrete jungles into a green oasis.”  Yes!

Here is the press conference for the report’s release:

The International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems (IPES) has issued a new report with five case studies on successful urban food policy.  lead authors are Corinna Hawkes and Jess Halliday.

the five:

• Belo Horizonte—food security
• Nairobi—urban agriculture
• Amsterdam—healthy weight
• Golden Horseshoe (Ontario, Canada)—food and farming
• Detroit—urban agriculture

It’s wonderfully written and illustrated.

And it is highly instructive about what has to be in place to put these policies in action (the report calls them enablers).

You want a food policy in your town?  This will help.

Michael Ableman.  Street Farm: Growing Food, Jobs, and Hope on the Urban Frontier.  Chelsea Green, 2016.

Chelsea Green publishes books on “the politics and practice of sustainable living,” and its catalog gets better all the time.

Michael Ableman’s latest book is beautifully designed, packed with wonderful color photographs, and a must have for anyone even remotely curious about whether urban farming is worth a try.

Ableman was asked to start urban farms in the toughest areas of downtown Vancouver.  His book is a series of thoughtful, personal, and remarkably frank essays about how he turned vacant lots and parking lots into vegetables while engaging with the locals, coping with the city bureaucracy, dealing with landlords desperate for more parking space, and managing the hazards of trying to make this work among people beset by poverty, alcohol, and drugs.

But he did make it work and this book explains how you too can do this.

Street Farm is an elegant how-to manual on using farming to do real community work with populations classically “hard to reach” but thriving on such initiatives.

Kristin Reynolds and Nevin Cohen.  Beyond the Kale: Urban Agriculture and Social Justice Activism in New York City.  University of Georgia Press, 2016.

This wonderfully titled book is about how urban agriculture can do plenty to help address race and class inequities:

Moving ‘beyond the kale’ means looking beyond the trendy aspects of growing food in the city to see people who have been using urban agriculture to make the food system less oppressive and more socially just.

The authors did extensive interviews with urban agriculture activists: farmers, gardeners, and organizational leaders.  Their book links food studies to agriculture and human values and provides ideas and resources for teachers, students, and anyone else who wants to get out there and dig—as a means to change the world.

Because transportation from rural areas is expensive and trucks are few and far between (one result of the U.S. embargo), the Cuban government is promoting urban agriculture.  Our Food First tour group went to a small organic farm and store (Organopónico) in Havana:

The farm grows a wide variety of vegetable crops, some outdoors but some under mesh.  The sun is hot.

The farm sells produce to local residents.  I watched a steady procession of people coming to shop, only to be disappointed at the scarcity of items available.  It’s too hot to grow much this time of year.

The board lists prices in pesos (indicated by $)—$4 to $10 a pound.

Another of the many Cuban contradictions: Cuba has two currencies, pesos and CUCs (Cuban Convertables).  A CUC is roughly equivalent to one dollar, or 24 pesos.  Salaries are paid in pesos.  Markets sell in CUCs or, recently, both.  This system, designed to take advantage of tourist dollars, is slated to end soon.

To put vegetable prices in context: the average Cuban salary is about 470 pesos a month, or $20 (but note that Cubans are given free food rations, education, and health care).

We also visited the much larger 25-acre farm in Havana’s Alamar neighborhood.

You can see the surrounding apartments in this photo, but not the next one.

With no money for gas or tractors, plowing gets done with oxen.

This farm also has a store.

I waited on a long line to buy a glass of freshly squeezed sugar cane juice.

This was incredibly delicious and totally worth the wait.

How much sugar is in this?  I searched for, but cannot find reliable Nutrition Facts for fresh cane juice.  If you happen to know where to find this, please send.*

On Monday, I’ll file the last of these Cuba posts, this one on food availability.

Note: the resumption of diplomatic relations and agreement to reopen embassies yesterday should make travel much easier.

*Answer to query: Thanks to Andy Bellatti and Cara Wilking for sending this link to a Nutrition Facts label for cane juice.  No wonder it was so good: 30 grams of sugar in 8 ounces!

Megan Paska: The Rooftop Beekeeper: A Scrappy Guide to Keeping Urban Honeybees.  Chronicle Books, 2014.

Megan Paska sent me a copy of her new book and I’m so glad she did.  I know lots of people who want to try raising bees in their home towns but don’t know how to start.

Now I know what to tell them.  Read this book.

It covers what bees are, why they matter, why you should raise them, why cities are great places to raise them, how to start, what you need—hives, nets, food, and the like—where to put them, and how to take care of bees in every season.

And it provides recipes for doing wonderful things with the overabundance of honey your bees are likely to produce.

I particularly like this section:

What to say to your neighbors.

Bee stings hurt.  It’s easy to see why many people assume that they’re going to die when they get stung by a bee…The fact is that bees already live with us, even in a city…Next time you are at a park or see a planted flowerbed on the street, consider not only the honeybee but also other wild pollinators you will likely see there, drifting from flower to flower…As beekeepers, it’s part of our job description to enlighten others to this simple fact: Bees are not so different from us.  They live for one another, and they can’t thrive without community.

This appeared in my e-mail.  I tried to find out where it came from, but no luck.  Can anyone tell me its source?

Atina Diffley, Turn Here Sweet Corn: Organic Farming Works, University of Minnesota Press, 2012.

I blurbed this one, with much pleasure: “Turn Here Sweet Corn is an unexpected page-turner.  Atina Diffley’s compelling account of her life as a Minnesota organic farmer is deeply moving not only from a personal standpoint but also from the political.  Diffley reveals the evident difficulties of small-scale organic farming but is inspirational about its value to people and the planet.”  The book comes with an insert of glorious photographs illustrating the history she recounts.  The political?  The Diffley’s fought to keep an oil company from running a pipeline through their property—and won.

David Hanson and Edwin Marty, Breaking Through Concrete: Building an Urban Farm Revival, University of California Press, 2012.

Wonderfully photographed visits to a dozen urban farms all over America from Seattle (P-Patch) to Brooklyn’s own Annie Novak’s Eagle Street.  The authors asked hard questions and got honest answers.  This is a great resource for anyone who wants to get started, and the beautiful farms and farmers are well worth a look.

Jennifer Cockrall-King, Food and the City: Urban Agriculture and the New Food Revolution, Prometheus Books, 2012.

Cockrall-King went international.  She visited cities in the U.S., England, France, Canada, and Cuba to see what urban farmers were doing to create alternative food systems.  They are doing plenty.  This looks like a great excuse for ecotourism, dropping by, seeing for yourself, and getting to work.