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Urban Foods Systems Symposium In October Will Focus on Climate, Community, Security, Production And Distribution
All things food in and for urban areas will be in focus during the 3rd Urban Food Systems Symposium scheduled for virtual delivery on Wednesdays in October and hosted this year by Kansas State University and K-State Research and Extension
By urbanagnews
September 15, 2020
All things food in and for urban areas will be in focus during the 3rd Urban Food Systems Symposium scheduled for virtual delivery on Wednesdays in October and hosted this year by Kansas State University and K-State Research and Extension. 2020 Urban Food Systems Symposium online sessions will be offered from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. CDT every Wednesday in October. If you’ve got an interest in any aspect of urban food systems there’s a session for you and you are encouraged to attend.
The format for each Wednesday session includes one or more live keynote speakers supplemented by breakout discussions, poster sessions, and live breaks with sponsors.
Before September 18, registration is only $100 ($50 if you are a student). After September 18, registration goes up to $125 and $75 for students. Here’s the really good part about registration – all registered attendees get access to the breakout session presentations starting in September. They also get access to all live and breakout discussions as they occur each Wednesday in October, and they will have 24/7 access to all recordings of presentations through April 2021.
The organizers have lined up a diverse group of breakout session presenters and topics. Check out the UFSS website for all the details on breakouts. Keynote topics, speakers, and dates are:
• Oct. 7 – Urban Agriculture and Food Systems – Building Climate-Resilient Urban and Regional Food Systems, Jess Halliday, associate of RUAF Global Partnership on Sustainable.
• Oct. 14 – Urban Agriculture, Climate Change and Food Security: Potential Solutions and Synergies, Chuck Rice, Kansas State University Distinguished Professor of Soil Microbiology.
• Oct. 21 – The Role of Urban Farming in Nutrition Security, Elizabeth Mitcham, director of the Horticulture Innovation Lab, University of California-Davis.
• Oct. 21 – Food Justice is More than Growing Food and Feeding People, Karen Washington, farmer and activist with Rise & Root Farm and Black Urban Growers.
• Oct. 28 – Fixes That Fail: Using Community-Based Systems Modeling to Diagnose Injustice in the Food System, Jill Clark, associate professor, John Glenn College of Public Affairs, The Ohio State University and Jennifer King, assistant director of training and community education, Department of Population and Quantitative Health Sciences, Mary Ann Swetland Center for Environmental Health, School of Medicine, Case Western Reserve University.
• Oct. 28 – The Hydra-Headed Food System: Imagining the Whole and Connecting the Dots, Mark Winne, food policy expert, former executive of the Hartford Food System.
Register online today at the Urban Food Systems Symposium website. Got questions? Send those to the organizing committee at ufss@ksu.edu.
CombaGroup SA, A World Leader In Automated Mobile Aeroponics, Commits to Rigorous Standards of Social and Environmental Performance, Accountability, and Transparency
CombaGroup joins the rapidly growing movement of more than 3,500 B CorpsTM from 150 industries, across 74 countries including companies like Patagonia, Alpro, Alessi, Etsy, Innocent, Too Good To Go, Opaline, and Ben & Jerry’s
Molodin, Switzerland – 17 September 2020 CombaGroup SA today announced that it has officially become a Certified B Corporation®, utilizing the power of business to address society’s greatest social and environmental challenges.
CombaGroup joins the rapidly growing movement of more than 3,500 B CorpsTM from 150 industries, across 74 countries including companies like Patagonia, Alpro, Alessi, Etsy, Innocent, Too Good To Go, Opaline, and Ben & Jerry’s.
CombaGroup has been certified by B Lab as having met the rigorous standards for B Corp Certification that represent its commitment to achieving goals beyond shareholder profit. These include verified social and environmental performance, public transparency, and legal accountability to balance profit and purpose. B Corps are accelerating a global culture shift to redesign success in business and build a more inclusive and sustainable economy.
B Corp certification covers five key impact areas: governance, workers, community, environment, and customers. The certification process is rigorous, requiring a score above 80 and providing evidence of socially and environmentally responsible practices, including energy supply, waste and water use, workers' compensation, diversity, and corporate transparency. To complete certification, the company will legally embed their commitment to a purpose beyond profit in their company articles.
The recent focus on the agro-technology industry has made CombaGroup’s B Corp Certification a milestone and underlines a shift towards greater responsibility and transparency in the sector.
"B Lab is delighted to welcome CombaGroup to the B Corp community,” said Jonathan Normand, Director of B Lab Switzerland. “CombaGroup has been a pioneer in the field of mobile aeroponic growing solutions. CombaGroup has also been acknowledged as one of Solar Impulse’s 1000 Efficient Solutions for its ability to grow crops with minimal environmental impact for maximum profitability. I look forward to seeing CombaGroup inspire other companies to join the B Corp community and use business as a force for good.”
Serge Gander, CEO of CombaGroup stated: “We are proud to be part of the B Corp community with aligned values and ways to change the world through conscious business decisions. By certifying as a B Corp, we have met the highest levels of verified social and environmental performance, transparency and accountability.
“This certification reconfirms our commitment to use our unique automated high-performance culture systems to bring efficiency, consistency, and profitability in the food supply chain with the least possible resources and minimum environmental impact.”
About B Lab
B Lab is a non-profit organization that serves as part of a global movement to redefine the notion of success in business so that one day all companies compete not only to be the best in the world, but also the best for the world.
Located on five continents, B Lab advocates for systemic change by providing a standard and tools to create a community of B Corporation certified companies.
About B Lab Switzerland
B Lab Switzerland is the Swiss branch of a global non-profit organization that supports a community of people using business as a force for good.
About CombaGroup
CombaGroup is a Swiss agro-technology company that provides farmers and industrialists with innovative mobile aeroponic farming solutions for growing fresh, environmentally- friendly, nutrient-rich vegetables.
CombaGroup’s patented technology significantly reduces water consumption and contamination risks while offering maximum productivity per square meter and minimizing environmental impact. Mechanized irrigation and spacing systems produce clean, quality, pesticide-free salads, cabbages, and aromatic plants all year round, thus providing consumers with healthy, responsible products.
For more information
contact@combagroup.com +41 21 545 99 25 www.combagroup.com
Media information online
Media information and images can be downloaded directly from combagroup.com Journalists can subscribe to our media mailings to receive information on CombaGroup’s aeroponic solutions and technology.
For the latest updates on CombaGroup, visit combagroup.com or follow on Instagram @combagroup_sa, Twitter @SmartLettuce, Pinterest, and LinkedIn
Turning Your Home Into Your Main Food Producer
The coronavirus has led countless Americans to rethink how they cook, eat and source food, both to expand their supply and connect to community
The coronavirus has led countless Americans to rethink how they cook, eat and source food, both to expand their supply and connect to community.
Gardening has long been a hobby for Jason McCune, which at least partly explains why the coronavirus pandemic has turned him into a thyme farmer.
It started in early March when coronavirus prompted a run on hand sanitizer and Mr. McCune, 39, happened across a YouTube video on the disinfectant qualities of thyme. He also learned, via a YouTube video sent to him by a friend, that the essential oil of thyme, an antiseptic, might help fight respiratory illnesses.
“I thought, if I grow a lot of thyme and drink thyme tea, it certainly won’t hurt,” said Mr. McCune, an engineer at a compost heat-recovery company who lives in Richmond, Vt. He and his wife, Ellen, an early-childhood educator, run a preschool out of their home, but with the school now closed indefinitely, they’ve moved out the children’s dining and play tables and converted the dining room into a thyme greenhouse with a 4-foot by 10-foot bed of seeds.
“I’ll dry the thyme, share it with friends and we’ll make an apocalypse tea blend,” he said.
As isolation orders across the country stretch into their second month and grocery stores race to restock shelves, Mr. McCune has joined countless Americans who are making changes to how they cook, eat and source food to expand their food supply and connect to community.
“Stores weren’t anticipating the sort of stocking issues they were going to have,” said Joseph Glauber, a senior research fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), partly because of hoarding, but also because so many people normally rely on restaurants to feed themselves.
“Fifty percent of what U.S. households spend on food happens away from their home,” Mr. Glauber said. “So all of a sudden, when they can’t eat away from home, they’re having to go to the grocery store and buy a lot more food.”
The research institute has reported that Covid-19 does not pose a threat to the global food supply, but shoppers have been stocking up nevertheless — sales of consumer packaged goods rose more than $8.5 billion during the two-week period ending March 21, according to the Nielsen Corporation, the global market research company.
Whatever the method, many Americans are looking for ways to expand and enrich what they normally eat. Google searches for the term “home farming” jumped 50 percent in March; “how to raise chickens” spiked 75 percent.
“I feel like I no longer know the availability of things from week to week,” said Kate Bertash, who lives in a two-bedroom apartment in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Venice Beach. An avid pickler, she now makes sure her regular C.S.A. box — a package of farm-sourced vegetables delivered each week — includes items that can be salted or preserved, and her “rot closet,” a dedicated kitchen cabinet for fermenting vegetables, is full. “Pickling and fermenting is really cool because you can be more flexible with what’s available,” she said.
Phyllis Davis, president of Virginia-based Portable Farms Aquaponics Systems, said its web traffic has doubled since the coronavirus outbreak. The company offers clients at-home farming kits, with online instructional courses on assembling its portable system and understanding aquaponics, a process of growing food using fish excretions as fertilizer. “Food security and sustainability are a very hot topic right now,” Ms. Davis said.
David Siegel, a dietitian who lives with his wife and 5-year-old son in a railroad-style apartment in Brooklyn, has begun hosting online chats about aquaponics. Mr. Siegel, 40, got a home fish tank a year ago, both to have something beautiful to look at and to fertilize herbs and vegetables. He initially tried tropical fish because of their bright colors, but found them too hard to care for. Now he has goldfish in a 20-gallon tank in the apartment’s central room, pumping nutrient-rich water into a multitiered system above with lettuce, basil, parsley and arugula.
Mr. Siegel said he doesn’t grow nearly enough food to feed his family, but as he has cut back on trips to the store, his fresh vegetables have made meals much tastier. “We say, tongue in cheek, that this is a pandemic hobby,” he said. “But right now we’re stocking up on frozen goods and canned and dry goods, and we’re able to supplement, especially with the herbs. It’s adding some much-needed freshness to our diet.”
For some, the pandemic has added a new immediacy to old hobbies. Stephanie Gravalese, a freelance writer in Delmar, N.Y., is quarantining with her partner, Max Clement, who is immuno-compromised and not leaving the house. Mr. Clement, 32, has always dabbled in baking. Now he’s making sourdough loaves every day to share with friends who have lost their jobs. The couple is also producing homemade vinegar, pastas, ricotta and liquors, much of which they trade for other goods. The couple’s front porch has become a contact-free swap zone, where they put out their creations for local bakers and farmers, who in turn leave them fresh meat, raspberry bars and lemon bread.
“Baking, and creating anything we can share is creating community for us right now,” Ms. Gravalese, 36, said. “It’s also turned the kitchen into a very special place for us. Right now, the center of our lives is in the kitchen.”
A version of this article appears in print on April 12, 2020, Section RE, Page 6 of the New York edition with the headline: Your New Main Food Producer? Your Home, Naturally.
By Debra Kamin | The New York Times | April 7, 2020
The Dallas Morning News features Dallas’ Central Market For Growing Their Own Salad
The Dallas Morning News features Dallas’ Central Market For Growing Their Own Salad
By urbanagnews April 10, 2017
Published by the Dallas Morning News
You want fresh? Dallas’ Central Market is growing salad behind the store
Fresh is a word that’s used loosely in the grocery business.
To the consumer, everything in the produce section is fresh. But most fruits and vegetables are picked five to 21 days earlier to make it to your neighborhood grocery store.
Central Market wants to redefine fresh when it comes to salad greens and herbs. It also wants to make available to local chefs and foodies specialty items not grown in Texas like watermelon radishes or wasabi arugula.
And it wants to be both the retailer and the farmer with its own store-grown produce.
The Dallas-based specialty food division of H-E-B has cooked up an idea to turn fresh on its head with leafy greens and butter lettuce still attached to the roots and technically still alive.
Beginning in May, the store at Lovers Lane and Greenville Avenue in Dallas will have a crop of about half a dozen varieties of salad greens ready for customers to purchase.
The greens will be harvested just a few dozen steps from the store’s produce shelves.
They’re being grown out back, behind the store in a vertical farm inside a retrofitted 53-foot long shipping container. Inside, four levels of crops are growing under magenta and other color lights. In this controlled environment, there’s no need for pesticides and no worries of a traditional farm or greenhouse that it’s been too cloudy outside.
Central Market has been working on the idea for about a year with two local partners — Bedford-based Hort Americas and Dallas-based CEA Advisors LLC — in the blossoming vertical and container farming business.
Plants are harvested inside a vertical farm in the back of the Central Market store in Dallas, Thursday, April 6, 2017. Central Market is trying out indoor growing, and the crops will be sold in the store beginning in May. (Jae S. Lee/The Dallas Morning News) Staff Photographer
“We’re the first grocery store to own and operate our own container farm onsite,” said Chris Bostad, director of procurement, merchandising and marketing for Central Market.
There’s a Whole Foods Market store in Brooklyn, New York with a greenhouse built on the roof, but it’s operated by a supplier, urban farmer Gotham Greens.
The difference, Bostad said, is that “we can grow whatever our customers want versus someone who is trying to figure out how to cut corners and make a profit.”
Central Market’s new venture is starting out with the one Dallas store, said Marty Mika, Central Market’s business development manager for produce. “But we’ll see what the customer wants. We can do more.”
This has been Mika’s project. He’s itching to bring in seeds from France and other far off places, but for now, he said,“We’re starting simple.” The initial crop included red and green leafy lettuce, a butter lettuce, spring mix, regular basil, Thai basil and wasabi arugula.
The cost will be similar to other produce in the store, Bostad said.
Why go to so much trouble? Why bother with lighting and water systems and temperature controls in what’s become a high-tech farming industry?
“Taste,” Mika said. “Fresh tastes better.”
And the company wants to be more responsive to chefs who want to reproduce recipes but don’t have ingredients like basil leaves grown in Italy that are wide enough to use as wraps.
Tyler Baras, special project manager for Hort Americas, said with the control that comes with indoor farming there are a lot of ways to change the lighting, for example, and end up with different tastes and shades of red or green leafy lettuce.
Butter lettuce is harvested inside a vertical farm in the back of the Central Market store in Dallas, Thursday, April 6, 2017. Central Market is trying out indoor growing, and the crops will be sold in the store beginning in May. (Jae S. Lee/The Dallas Morning News)Staff Photographer
In Japan, controlled environment container farms are reducing the potassium levels, which is believed to be better for diabetics, Baras said. “We can increase the vitamin content by controlling the light color.”
At Central Market, the produce will be sold as a live plant with roots still in what the industry calls “soilless media.”
Central Market’s crops are growing in a variety called stone wool, which is rocks that are melted and blown into fibers, said Chris Higgins, co-owner of Hort Americas. The company is teaching store staff how to tend to the vertical farm and supplying it with fertilizer and other equipment.
“Because the rocks have gone through a heating process, it’s an inert foundation for the roots. There’s nothing good or bad in there,” Higgins said.
Farmers spend a lot of time and money making sure their soil is ready, he said. “The agricultural community chases the sun and is at the mercy of Mother Nature. We figure out the perfect time in California for a crop and duplicate it.”
Growers Rebecca Jin (left) and Christopher Pineau tend to plants inside a vertical farm in the back of the Central Market grocery store in Dallas, Thursday, April 6, 2017. Central Market is trying out indoor growing, and the crops will be sold in the store beginning in May. (Jae S. Lee/The Dallas Morning News) Staff Photographer
He called it a highly secure food source and in many ways a level beyond organic since there are no pesticides and nutrients are water delivered.
Glenn Behrman, owner of CEA Advisors, supplied the container and has worked on the controlled environment for several years with researchers at Texas A&M.
“Technology has advanced so that a retailer can safely grow food. Three to five years ago, we couldn’t have built this thing,” Behrman said.
Mika and Bostad said they also likes the sustainability features of not having trucks transport the produce and very little water used in vertical farming. They believe the demand is there as tastes have changed and become more sophisticated over the years.
The government didn’t even keep leafy and romaine lettuce stats until 1985.
U.S. per capita use of iceberg, that hardy, easy to transport head of lettuce, peaked in 1989. Around the same time, Fresh Express says it created the first ready-to-eat packaged garden salad in a bag and leafy and romaine lettuce popularity grew.
In 2015, the U.S. per capita consumption of lettuce was 24.6 pounds, 13.5 pounds of leafy and romaine and 11 pounds of iceberg.
AgriPark, in Fishers, Indiana, Connects Urban Community To Agriculture
AgriPark, in Fishers, Indiana, Connects Urban Community To AgricultureAgriPark Connects Urban Community To Agriculture
Farm to raise produce for local food pantries
- Erica Quinlan | AgriNews Publications
-
- Mar 22, 2018
FISHERS, Ind. — A 30-acre city park in Fishers will serve as a functioning farm in 2018.
The Fishers AgriPark will be the largest park in the country that’s dedicated solely to a working farm.
The park will feature crops, livestock, aquaponics, an outdoor classroom, farmers market and eating area, as well as beehives. Volunteers will help to plant and harvest produce.
It also will fill a need in the community by donating a third of the produce raised to food pantries.
Jonathan Lawler, executive director of Brandywine Creek Farms, will operate the park’s farm.
“A third of the produce will go to Hamilton County Food Pantry, as well as food deserts in Indianapolis,” he said. “We’re hoping to produce half a million pounds on the property. It has the potential to produce more.
“We’re estimating close to 50,000 visitors to this park in the first year. This is a huge educational opportunity. It’s free to get in. There are low-cost classes you can take, as well.”
Lawler is on the lookout for sponsors to help the farm thrive.
“The more sponsors who step up, the easier our job will be,” he said.
Mayor Scott Fadness said that the park will help enhance quality of life and reduce hunger in the city.
“It also will provide opportunities for volunteers to get their hands dirty and help grow food that will be donated to local food pantries,” he said. “It’s an asset unlike anything we have.”
“Many Hoosiers are several generations removed from farming and give little thought to where their food comes from,” Lawler said. “This will be a very approachable place to reconnect with the land and to get involved in efforts to end hunger in our communities.”
The park will be located at 113th Street and Florida Road. It will be open dawn to dusk during the growing season.
Learn more at: https://in-fishers2.civicplus.com/1000/Fishers-AgriPark.
Erica Quinlan can be reached at 800-426-9438, ext. 193, or equinlan@agrinews-pubs.com. Follow her on Twitter at: @AgNews_Quinlan