INFOGRAPHIC: How Vertical Farming Could Help Cities Feed Themselves

View fullsize

INFOGRAPHIC: How Vertical Farming Could Help Cities Feed Themselves

As arable land decreases and urban populations increase, planners and designers worldwide have begun looking at vertical farming as a way to boost urban food security. Dickson explores vertical farming’s many benefits in an infographic packed with interesting data, including the estimate that a 30-story farm could feed 50,000 people a 2,000 calorie-per-day diet for an entire year. Click through to learn more about the advantages of vertical farming and some of the obstacles that are holding the non-traditional farming system back. 

View fullsize

It's Called Vertical Farming, And It Could Be The Future Of Agriculture

NOV 4, 2017

It's Called Vertical Farming, And It Could Be The Future Of Agriculture

Ronald Holden, CONTRIBUTOR   

View fullsize

A 20-foot vertical farm inside a climate-controlled cylinder.  Courtesy Plenty.ag

The concept sounds like science fiction: instead of spreading out across acres and acres, the farms of the future will grow lettuce and strawberries inside climate-controlled, light-controlled cylinders. Less land, less water, but year-round light and perfectly controlled moisture.

The California company behind this concept, Plenty, announced this week that it will open a 100,000 square-foot farm in Kent, Wash., south of Seattle, where it intends to grow pesticide-free, “backyard quality” produce for regional consumers. It's the start-up's first full-scale farm.

The plants (fruit, vegetables) grow in 20-foot tall towers inside a climate-controlled facility with LED lights without using pesticides, herbicides, synthetic fertilizers, or GMOs. Instead, thousands of infrared cameras and sensors collect data that is analyzed to optimize how the plants grow.

"Plenty claims its technology can achieve yields of up to 350 times greater than traditional agriculture while using 1 percent of the water and barely any land compared to conventional methods," according to a company press release.

This would sound like pie-in-the-sky wishful thinking, except that Plenty has the eye of some savvy investors, including Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon, who just spent $14 billion to take over Whole Foods.

Hydroponic farming already exists, albeit not on a large commercial scale.

"Research shows that hydroponic farming could well be the future of global agriculture, combining the benefits of local outdoor organic farming with the high yields of large-scale agricultural production," the company believes.

Backers of Plenty’s $200 million round, in July, in addition to Bezos, included SoftBank (via its Vision Fund); Alphabet Chairman Eric Schmidt (through Innovation Endeavors); DCM Ventures; Data Collective; Finistere Ventures; and Louis Bacon.

In an interview with GeekWire, Plenty CEO and co-founder Matt Barnard said Seattle’s "relative lack of access to local produce" and the region’s emphasis on healthy food made it a perfect place to expand.

“As we looked at the West Coast, Seattle was the best example of a large community of people who really don’t have much access to any fresh fruits and vegetables grown locally,” he explained.

But Seattle's extensive community of food lovers scoffed at the notion that the region does not have access to fresh, local produce.

"The Yakima Valley was known as America's fruit basket," one food writer complained and Puget Sound, the region surrounding Seattle, is one of the most fertile in the nation.

"I will personally organize a round table for the company with local farmers," said Audra Gaines Mulken, a photographer who works extensively with local farms. Her most recent book is the Female Farmer Project.

(By coincidence, I wrote just yesterday about experiments in Finland to incubate seeds in counter-top bioreactors.)

Ronald Holden is a Seattle-based food writer. His latest book is Forking Seattle.

I've lived and worked in the Pacific Northwest as a reporter and editor for the past 40 years, in print, broadcast, and online media. I've been writing reviews since I tasted my first Little League hot dog with yellow mustard; since then I've published five books about wine, and two about local food & drink. I think most food writers do a pretty good job describing flavors, but they don't pay enough attention to the bigger economic picture. (For example, Why suddenly all this kale? Why cider? Who's going to pick all those grapes?) Food is a business, and a big, global business at that.

The author is a Forbes contributor. The opinions expressed are those of the writer.

Farm Bill Discontent: Urban Ag Supporters Want Changes

View fullsize

Danielle Marvit is production manager for Garden Dreams Urban Farm and Nursery in Pittsburgh. She has serious concerns about conventional agriculture. Here, she talks with journalists during the recent annual convention of the Society of Environmental Journalists in Pittsburgh. (Jonathan Knutson/Agweek)

Farm Bill Discontent: Urban Ag Supporters Want Changes

By Jonathan Knutson / Agweek Staff Writer October 16, 2017

PITTSBURGH — Sonia Finn, Danielle Marvit and Raqueeb Bey are passionate about agriculture. And they believe U.S. farming practices are dangerously off course and need to be corrected, starting with the 2018 farm bill.

"The farm bill isn't right for agriculture. People need to get involved and work to change it," Finn said.

Finn is chef and owner of Dinette restaurant in Pittsburgh. Marvit is production manager of Garden Dreams Urban Farm and Nursery in Pittsburgh. Bey is project director of Black Urban Gardeners and Farmers of Pittsburgh Co-op, or BUGS-FPC, as the group calls itself.

They spoke with Agweek Oct. 4 at Garden Dreams Urban Farm and Nursery during the annual convention of the Society of Environmental Journalists. The event included a day-long session on the farm bill and urban agriculture; Finn, Marvit and Bey were among the presenters.

Though some in mainstream agriculture are skeptical of urban ag, attention is growing for the concept. U.S. local food sales totaled at least $12 billion in 2014, up from $5 billion in 2008, and experts anticipate the figure to reach $20 billion by 2019, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Urban ag consists of "backyard, rooftop and balcony gardening, community gardening in vacant lots and parks, roadside urban fringe agriculture and livestock grazing in open space," according to USDA.

Urban ag has at least one powerful champion.

Michigan's Debbie Stabenow, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Agriculture Committee and a key player in U.S. ag policy, last year introduced the Urban Agriculture Act of 2016. The proposal — at least some of which she hopes will be included in the 2018 farm bill — would increase research funding for urban ag, provide more access for urban farmers to USDA loans and risk management programs, and boost the development of urban farming cooperatives, among other things.

Get involved

Finn has both professional and personal interest in promoting urban ag; she grows much of the produce used by Dinette on the restaurant's roof and relies on local farms for as many ingredients as possible.

She's also determined to transform the farm bill, the centerpiece of federal food and agricultural policy. She's gone to Washington, D.C., repeatedly to lobby for her beliefs.

She insists that the existing farm bill — and mainstream ag in general — is tailored to the wants and needs of powerful corporate interests, not what's best for the overwhelming majority of Americans.

"Most people just don't understand how important the farm bill is," Finn said.

Marvit, for her part, is critical of much of America's conventionally raised food.

"It's not real food," she said.

The quarter-acre Garden Dreams Urban Garden and Nursery, established about a decade ago, seeks to promote urban ag, giving neighborhood residents more and healthier food options. It also wants to help community residents learn more about gardening and give them a peaceful place to visit.

The organic operation specializes in tomatoes, raising more than 70 varieties of tomato seedlings. It also has peppers, eggplant, flowers and other fruits and vegetables.

Local control

Bey stressed that urban agriculture gives residents of local neighborhoods greater influence over both their food supply and their lives in general.

"Neighborhoods need more control over what happens to them," Bey said.

Her own Pittsburgh neighborhood has been without a grocery store for decades, forcing its residents to travel several miles by bus to buy food, she said.

BUGS-FPC is establishing a 31,000-square-foot urban farm that will use hoop houses, also known as high tunnels, to grow food to sell at its farm stand and its farmers market, at restaurants and at a community cooperative grocery that it wants to open.

Though interest in, and awareness of, healthy food is growing, supporters of urban ag and local foods need to focus on improving the farm bill and making it friendlier to consumers, Finn said.

"It's just so important we do it," she said.

USDA's "urban agriculture toolkit" is a good starting place to learn more about urban ag: www.usda.gov/sites/default/files/documents/urban-agriculture-toolkit.pdf.

This Is Why Jeff Bezos Is Spending Millions on an Indoor Farming Startup

This Is Why Jeff Bezos Is Spending Millions on an Indoor Farming Startup

The results could very well change the way you eat fruits and vegetables

TEXT BY  TIM NELSON  |  Posted November 3, 2017

View fullsize

A look at one of the 20-foot-tall towers which, bathed in LED lights, have the ability to grow fruits and vegetables.  |  All images are courtesy of Plenty

With the amount of farmable acreage seemingly shrinking all the time, access to fresh fruits and vegetables can be hard to come by. Small-scale produce can be prohibitively expensive, and cheaper options from far-flung corners of the globe carry a hidden environmental cost. But one well-funded startup called Plenty believes that its technology harbors the secret to bringing “backyard quality” produce to the masses, and hopes that its newest indoor growing facility in Kent, Washington, will prove it.

At just 100,000 square feet, Plenty’s new facility will be 99 percent smaller than a typical American farm. But Plenty’s goal is to optimize every inch of that available space for ideal cultivation. Fruits and vegetables grow on 20-foot-tall towers, bathed in LED lights and connected to a wealth of data-collecting microsensors

In essence, Plenty applies the latest in machine learning technology and big data processing to the age-old wisdom of crop science, continually optimizing the climate to ensure ideal flavor and nutrition. The end result is a yield of up to 300 different variants of pesticide and GMO-free produce that far outpaces traditional agricultural methods, all while using a fraction of the water or energy.

CEO and co-founder Matt Barnard hopes the new facility serves as further proof that Plenty’s mission to sustainably feed a planet of 7.3 billion is viable: “Seattle will be home to our first full-scale farm and help set the standard by which our global farm network makes locally grown, backyard-quality produce accessible to everyone.” The facility will be staffed by a team of around 50 indoor farming engineers, organic growers, and operations experts to make certain that the technological and agricultural sides of the facility work in concert.

View fullsize

Plenty's CEO and cofounder, Matt Barnard.  |  Francis Baker

While the concept of eating produce grown inside on a tower might strike the farmer’s market crowd as puzzling, a recent $235 million funding round from Bezos Expeditions (whose founder is Jeff Bezos, current CEO of Amazon and among the richest people in the U.S.) and other VC firms suggests that there might just be a future in internet of things-driven agriculture. How ’bout them apples indeed.

Urban Farming 2.0

07-11-2017

Supermarkets are finding new ways to show their commitment to locally-grown food.

Delhaize, the leading retailer in Belgium, has launched a vegetable garden and greenhouse on the rooftop of one of its stores in the Brussels area. The produce will be sold in-store and offer customers an opportunity to buy locally. Five kinds of lettuce are currently being grown and tomatoes, eggplants, and zucchini will be added next year. The farm will also serve an educational purpose, offering workshops to schools in 2018.

While urban farming has been discussed in the past, major supermarkets are now making these conceptual ideas a reality. There is a range of benefits to these kinds of farms. Indoor farming can give consumers access to fresh produce year-round—even those who live in dense, urban areas. In addition to greatly reducing carbon emissions, indoor farming also uses less water than traditional farming and doesn’t require pesticides.

“Developing a healthy and high-quality nutritional pattern…is one of the challenges of the Brussels region,” Brussels Minster for Environment and Energy Céline Fremault stated in a release. “This first city farm of Delhaize is therefore an excellent initiative, which fully fits into one of Brussels’ ambitions: to increase local production.”

View fullsize

Earlier this year, French retailer Carrefour revealed a similar rooftop initiative to Delhaize which is managed by students of a local agricultural school. Albert Heijn, the largest supermarket chain in the Netherlands, similarly launched a “Help-yourself Herb Garden” in one of its shops that allowed customers to pick fresh plants. Meanwhile in Canada, IGA became the first store to sell store-grown produce in Montreal, offering 30 varieties of vegetables. Even Target in the US is piloting vertical gardens in its stores.

Infarm, a Berlin-based start-up, is trying to make this a reality for every supermarket. The company created an indoor “herb garden” for supermarkets which houses plants in a protected, nutrient-rich environment. The customer-facing farm connects to an app that monitors important factors such as pH levels and temperature.

“Behind our farms is a robust hardware and software platform for precision farming,” Infarm co-founder Osnat Michaeli tells TechCrunch. “Each farming unit is its own individual ecosystem, creating the exact environment our plants need to flourish.” Los Angeles-based start-up Local Roots has taken a similar approach, using shipping containers to bring urban farms to grocers, universities, and community centres. Their goal is to create a network of community-based farms across the US.

View fullsize

Ethically-minded consumers are becoming more health conscious and starting to question where their food comes from and the effect it has on the environment. It’s imperative that brands respond to this concern and continue to implement initiatives that reduce emissions. Brands that are creative in reducing their carbon footprint will reduce costs, tackle climate change and ultimately attract more consumers looking for fresh, high-quality food.

Source: Jwt intelligence

Unique Indoor Farm In Manhattan Grows Over 150 Crop Varieties

View fullsize

View fullsize

‘Farm.One’ is a unique indoor farm in Manhattan using technology to bring flavor and rarity year round

Unique Indoor Farm In Manhattan Grows Over 150 Crop Varieties

Linked by ilovewushu  |  Excerpt:

Tour Manhattan’s only indoor hydroponic farm, growing more than 100 varieties of rare herbs, edible flowers and microgreens. Sip complementary sparking wine as you taste new and unique flavors from around the world. A unique, fun experience for any local foodie or tourist in New York.

Inside our new, secret, larger facility in Tribeca, our unique farm uses LED lighting and hydroponics to grow a huge variety of culinary plants, numbering over 200 to date. The indoor grow room uses no pesticides or herbicides, and uses around 95% less water than a traditional farm. The farm supplies Michelin-starred restaurants in the city, including Atera, Daniel, Jungsik, Chef’s Table and others.

In this one-hour tour, you will have the chance to taste dozens of rare plant varieties, most of which are never available fresh in New York City. With expert guidance from our team, you will uncover the science of how plants thrive in completely-controlled conditions, and experience new flavors and ways of thinking about culinary plants.

Their website.

An Ex-Tesla executive is Teaming Up With A Little-Known Vertical Farming Startup

An Ex-Tesla executive is Teaming Up With A Little-Known Vertical Farming Startup

• Leanna Garfield  | 10-16-17

A farmer at Plenty, a Silicon Valley-based urban farming startup that scored the largest ag-tech investment in history. Plenty

Kurt Kelty, Tesla's former director of battery technology, is moving into a very different sector of the tech industry: indoor agriculture.

He has joined vertical farming startup Plenty as the senior vice president of operations and market development, according to Bloomberg.

Kelty, who worked at Tesla for over a decade and left in early 2017, was one of the earliest executives at the vehicle startup founded by Elon Musk. Before that, he spent more than 14 years with the Energy Lab at Panasonic, a company known for consumer electronics (which also happens to run its own vertical farming division in Singapore).

At Tesla, Kelty worked on partnerships and material sourcing at the company's Gigafactory near Reno, Nevada, where it manufactures lithium-ion batteries for its cars. At Plenty, he will launch a mass production facility for growing produce in the US, he told Bloomberg.

Instead of growing greens outdoors, Plenty grows its greens on glowing, LED-lit 20-foot-tall towers inside a former electronics distribution center in South San Francisco. The towers don't require pesticides or even natural sunlight.

The technique is called indoor vertical farming — a type of agriculture in which food grows on trays or hanging modules in a climate-controlled, indoor facility. The process allows certain types of produce to be grown year-round,in small spaces. Produce could be delivered to consumers within hours of harvest.

Plenty, founded in 2014, claims to grow up to 350 times more greens than conventional farms of similar size, while using much less water and land. The goal, Plenty CEO Matt Barnard previously told Business Insider, is to revolutionize the way the world grows food — and sell that food for lower prices than typical produce. 

A $200 million investment in the startup, led by SoftBank Vision Fund in August 2017, could help make that vision viable. One of the biggest struggles for the company is the energy usage cost from the LEDs, though the lighting technology has become more of a commodity in the past several years. 

"I can’t predict what the venture industry will do, nor what the USDA will do given the current state of federal budgeting, but we’re confident that this will be a prominent form of agricultural practice for many crops much sooner than even we projected a few years ago," Barnard said.

SEE ALSO: Panasonic's first indoor farm can grow over 80 tons of greens per year — take a look inside

The Food Tower: Looking up to Solve the Global Food Crisis

The Food Tower: Looking up to Solve the Global Food Crisis

Surbana Jurong principal architect Owen Wee presents a novel concept, the Food Tower, which can solve several urban challenges for Singapore at once: overcrowding, food security, and the ever-present need for community cohesion.

View fullsize

As the world's population slowly but surely shifts to cities, urban farming has gained popularity as a solution to food security challenges. Image: Pixabay

By Owen Wee

5 October 2017

With the global population rising rapidly and expected to reach 9.7 billion by 2050, governments around the world are increasingly asking the simple but critical question: how will we feed ourselves in future? A radical new vertical farming model called the Food Tower could provide an answer.

Food, it seems, is all around us. In our homes; on our televisions; in our shops; on our streets. Yet, surprising though it may seem given this apparent proliferation, the question of how we continue to feed ourselves in future is set to become one of the biggest challenges facing the developed and developing world.

The combined impact of population growth, climate change and urbanisation, which in 30 years’ time could see some 70 per cent of the global population living in cities, means that we are running out of available space and resources to grow crops in traditional ways.

In short, we need to come up with new ways to farm; new ways to manage food production and delivery; new ways to reduce pressure on resources and sustain our environment and lifestyles.

The food production challenge is already seen in cities such as Singapore. With almost no arable land, Singapore is heavily dependent on food imports and faces a potential food security problem. While past investment has enabled water self-sufficiency to be achieved, the need for a sustainable locally-grown supply of food is now more important than ever.

The built environment designers must now adopt a radically different approach to city planning to include food production within their thinking.

The Food Tower

Enter the Food Tower, a radical vertical urban farming concept that could be the innovative solution needed to solve to these challenges. With almost no arable land, Singapore is heavily dependent on food imports and will face a potential, yet undefined, future food security problem.

The Food Tower concept was mooted and tested by Surbana Jurong’s architectural team as a direct response to the growing pressure on sustainability of food production in Singapore.

While Singapore may not have vast land area, it is blessed with an abundance of sunshine and rainfall. The Food Tower concept attempts to maximise this natural potential by by stacking vegetable growing areas in an open, sunlight flooded high rise towers. This way, sunlight can be captured boosting growing yields across the 1 hectare site to some 400 times that of traditional farming.

The Food Tower concept takes a major step forward in large scale urban farming by using aquaponics—that is, where vegetables are grown on towers using the water and nutrients from a system of tanks in which Red Tilapia fish are reared. The vegetable towers are located on “wings” on higher floors that spiral upwards to maximise sunlight exposure; the fish farms are located at the lower floors where there is more shade.

The Food Tower also features a closed loop energy system, with onsite photovoltaics generating power, rainwater harvesting and wetland reed beds to purify and recycle waste water on-site. The wetlands can act as part of a garden for the larger community.

It is estimated that a 100-storey food tower on 1 hectare of land can provide sufficient meat and vegetables for just over 11,000 people per year.

How the Food Tower concept works. Image: Surbana Jurong

Policy support for the Food Tower

While the technology and design for high-rise farming in cities has been slowly maturing, there are a number of other factors which need to be addressed early so that Singapore can stay ahead of the curve and be ready to capitalise on the technology when it becomes viable.

One of the successful pilots that has been in operation is the first urban rooftop aquaponic farm, located at *SCAPE in the heart of Singapore’s shopping district, provides its fresh produce to nearby establishments.     

This starts with the physical planning and zoning of suitable sites for urban farms, in particular, to ensure that the immediate setback of buildings around the site enables sunlight to reach the crops.

Government agencies must be armed with well-researched and clear policies to ensure that this need is well understood and taken into account, and the tenure offered to the farmer or farming community for the land use must take into consideration the efforts put in to develop the farm.

Clearly, despite the predictability of the weather in Singapore, the availability of sunlight varies around and throughout the Tower. This must be matched to different types of crops to maximise yield. Land use zoning could designate that above a certain height, building space be developed as farms while lower floors are used for other commercial and retail purposes.

We need to come up with new ways to farm; new ways to manage food production and delivery; new ways to reduce pressure on resources and sustain our environment and lifestyles.

Crop yield per square meter would also need to be mandated to encourage developers to adopt best technology to maximise the efficiency of land use. For example, natural sunlight could be supplemented by artificial LED growing lights, powered by stored photovoltaic energy from panels on the structure – possibly creating 24-hour-a-day growing conditions in the tower and so maximising growing efficiency.

Creating a sustainable solution also means working with the community. Commercial farming revenue from food towers could be supplemented by sharing space which is not so well-suited for farming with other community and residential facilities.

These might include an environmental research centre, restaurant and a school plus other facilities such as Community Parks and wetlands to boost interaction with the local community.

A new way of farming will need a new breed of farmer; an urban-agriculturist. It is a role that currently does not exist, requiring knowledge of the specific technology and techniques needed to adapt modern intensive farming practice to a high-rise urban environment.

The Food Tower would also need a multitude of new skills to run the urban farm; understanding the internal drainage, water and electrical needs of a modern building, the external environment such as solar effects, winds flows plus the impact of dust and city pollutants on crops.

In the factory environment of a Food Tower, they would need to be thoroughly grounded in managing work flow and production process while also understanding and managing resource use and recycling of water, waste and energy so as to maximise productivity and output.

It is clear that globally, we must look at more sustainable ways of living. This means including food production in future planning policies as we define and design the increasingly urban, increasingly congested cities of the future.

Although the idea sets out to rethink mass food production, it also demonstrates that consumers can be supplied with fresher and safer food with a lower overall carbon footprint. The project has already shown that it has a viable commercial business model but it is also a model that can rejuvenate urban sites, engage the community in various levels and create local jobs.

However, the development of such projects will require major commitment and intervention by governments to cover the substantial start-up cost and to create the necessary governance to allow such high-density food production in urban areas.

Owen Wee is principal architect, Surbana Jurong. This article was written exclusively for Eco-Business.

Softbank and Bezos Backed Vertical Farm Startup Has Global Expansion Plans

Softbank and Bezos Backed Vertical Farm Startup Has Global Expansion Plans

brian wang | November 11, 2017

View fullsize

Plenty is a startup that has big vertical farming expansion plans $226 million in total venture funding. They plan to build a 100,000 square foot (2.3 acres) vertical-farming warehouse this year in Washington state outside of Seattle. That farm is expected to produce 4.5 million pounds of greens annually.

Plenty grows plants on 20-foot high towers with vertical irrigation channels and facing LED lights.

In June 2017, California-based vertical farming company Plenty, previously See Jane Farm, acquired Bright Agrotech in an effort to reach “field-scale.”

Bright Agrotech is an indoor ag hardware company that’s focused on building indoor growing systems for small farmers all over the world, in contrast to Plenty, which is aiming to become a large-scale indoor farming business and currently has a 52,000 sq. ft farm in South San Francisco.

Plenty claims to use 1 percent of the water and land of a conventional farm with no pesticides or synthetic fertilizers. Like other large soilless, hi-tech farms growing today, Plenty says it uses custom sensors feeding data-enabled systems resulting in finely-tuned environmental controls to produce greens with superior flavor.

Plenty claims to get 350 times the crop yield per year over an outdoor field farm.

With the backing of SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son, Plenty has the capital and connections build massive indoor farms on the outskirts of every major city on Earth, some 500 in all. In that world, food could go from farm to table in hours rather than days or weeks.

Bezos Expeditions, the Amazon CEO’s personal venture fund, has also invested. So Plenty could supply WholeFoods.

Early leaders in vertical farming (PodPonics in Atlanta, FarmedHere in Chicago, and Local Garden in Vancouver) have shut down. They had a mix of design issues and high hardware costs. Gotham Greens and AeroFarms have not been as successful with fundraising.

Researchers have documented a steady decline in the amount of calcium, iron, phosphorus, protein, and vitamins in today’s produce over previous generations, thanks to the ways in which modern agricultural methods have stripped nutrients out of the soil.

A landmark study on the topic by Donald Davis and his team of researchers from the University of Texas (UT) at Austin’s Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry was published in December 2004 in the Journal of the American College of Nutrition. They studied U.S. Department of Agriculture nutritional data from both 1950 and 1999 for 43 different vegetables and fruits, finding “reliable declines” in the amount of protein, calcium, phosphorus, iron, riboflavin (vitamin B2) and vitamin C over the past half century. Davis and his colleagues chalk up this declining nutritional content to the preponderance of agricultural practices designed to improve traits (size, growth rate, pest resistance) other than nutrition.

They are finding about 14-30% drop in various nutrients.

Why Eating Local Produce Just Got More Innovative

View fullsize

Why Eating Local Produce Just Got More Innovative

By Rebecca Spera

November 10, 2017  |  HOUSTON, TX

When Dish Society restaurant owner Aaron Lyons prepares his food for patrons, he knows that 75 percent of what's on the plate is from the Houston area.

"Locally sourced ingredients taste better, they're more nutritious, and we like to support the local economy," said Lyons.

His lettuce vendor is Sustainable Harvesters in Hockley.

"I love the fact that it's - the whole procedure is better for the environment," Lyons explained.

Sustainable Harvesters grow their produce in a greenhouse without the use of chemicals or pesticides.

"We're in about 12,000 square feet of space, that's a quarter of one acre of land. In that quarter acre, we can produce up to 7,000 heads of lettuce a week. That's a tenth of the land required for a traditional farm outdoors, but not only a tenth of the land. We use a tenth of the water," explained Sustainable Harvesters Co-Founder Matthew Braud.

They also save on labor.

"This entire system is run by a greenhouse manager and greenhouse technician," said Braud.

So, how is it possible to run an entire farm with only two people? It's because of the aquaponics technique they use.

"Aquaponics is the combination of aquaculture, or raising fish in a controlled environment, and hydroponics, which is growing plants in a soil-less environment," Braud said.

The process starts with over 2,000 tilapia in each tank fed a high-protein diet.

"That food ultimately gets consumed by the fish and converted into a waste product that we can use through filtration as a concentrated form of nitrate for them to take up," explained Braud.

The water then flows into two filters.

"From these filters, the water flows below these plants and gets consumed by the roots and then ultimately cleaned before that water flows back into the fish tank as a clean source of water," he explained.

Then, the lettuce is delivered to vendors with the root still intact. Even when Hurricane Harvey hit the Houston area, the torrential rain and floods didn't affect their farm.

"This structure keeps us safe from not only floods, but also rain, bad weather including wind, and especially pests," said Braud.

So, for them, even after Harvey, it was business as usual, producing the freshest of lettuce so restaurateurs like Lyons could dish out the best-tasting entrees.

"It's a better product. It's a better quality product," said Lyons.

View fullsize

Student-Grown Salad In The School Cafeteria? These Kids Dig It

Student-Grown Salad In The School Cafeteria? These Kids Dig It

By Rachel Nania | @rnania  |  October 8, 2017

Download audio

WASHINGTON — School gardens are no longer a rarity.

These days, it’s common to spot pepper plants and tomato towers in schoolyards throughout the country, as more educators turn to dirt to teach lessons on healthy eating and the root of the food system.

But at Horace Mann Elementary School in Northwest D.C., instruction isn’t confined to a few cedar-raised beds. After leafy vegetables are planted and cared for, students harvest the crops, chop them up and serve them to more than 400 of their peers for lunch.

At Horace Mann Elementary School in Northwest D.C., gardening lessons are not confined to a few cedar-raised beds. After leafy vegetables are planted and cared for, students harvest the crops, chop them up and serve them to more than 400 of their peers for lunch. (WTOP/Rachel Nania)

Amy Jagodnik’s third-floor classroom, which is filled with seedlings and outfitted with a small kitchen, opens directly to the school’s rooftop garden. It’s there where a class of third-graders pick parsley and pak choi from commercial-grade garden towers on Monday mornings. (WTOP/Rachel Nania)

“It’s really fun having a conversation with them about whether they prefer the Swiss chard last week to the pak choi this week,” said Amy Jagodnik, who has been the school’s garden coordinator since 2004. (WTOP/Rachel Nania)

Architect Michael Marshall designed the rooftop farm, one of several gardens at Horace Mann elementary, during the school’s renovation three years ago. “The connection to the exterior is not an accident in this design. A lot of these young kids, when they grow up, rooftop gardens are going to be very common as far as sustainability and urban living. Why not prepare them?” Marshall said. (WTOP/Rachel Nania)

Garden coordinator, Amy Jagodnik, shows a student the proper way to cut greens on the elementary school’s rooftop farm. (WTOP/Rachel Nania)

An American University student helps a third-grader dry leaves of Swiss chard and pak choi on the roof of Horace Mann Elementary. (WTOP/Rachel Nania)

After the weekly harvest, students chop the greens and serve them to 400 of their peers in the school cafeteria. (WTOP/Rachel Nania)

“You’re laying the foundation for global stewards,” Amy Jagodnik said about the school’s investment in its gardening program.

“You want children to care about their environment. You want them to know how to eat healthy, where their food comes from and how to support that, even if they don’t become scientists or become environmentalists, they still have that foundation.” (WTOP/Rachel Nania)

At lunch, Jagodnik and a few helpers walk around the cafeteria and serve the salad du jour.

“So we’re going to each table and we’re engaging with each student and asking them if they would like a sample or if they would like a salad,” Amy Jagodnik explained. (WTOP/Rachel Nania)

“It’s really fun having a conversation with them about whether they prefer the Swiss chard last week to the pak choi this week,” said Amy Jagodnik, who has been the school’s garden coordinator since 2004.

Jagodnik’s third-floor classroom, which is filled with seedlings and outfitted with a small kitchen, opens directly to the school’s rooftop garden. It’s there where a class of third-graders pick parsley and pak choi from commercial-grade garden towers on Monday mornings.

Architect Michael Marshall designed the rooftop farm, one of several gardens at Horace Mann, during the school’s renovation three years ago.  

“The connection to the exterior is not an accident in this design. A lot of these young kids, when they grow up, rooftop gardens are going to be very common as far as sustainability and urban living. Why not prepare them?” Marshall said.

Once the greens are gathered and washed, they’re hand-chopped and thrown into large stainless steel bowls, where they’re tossed in a simple dressing of olive oil, apple cider vinegar, salt and sugar.

At lunch, Jagodnik and a few helpers walk around the cafeteria and serve the salad du jour.

“So we’re going to each table and we’re engaging with each student and asking them if they would like a sample or if they would like a salad,” Jagodnik explained.

It’s not uncommon to be met with resistance and a few creative excuses — Jagodnik has even heard students say they “already had something green for breakfast.” So she considers the program a success when the kids agree to try just one leaf.

“You’re laying the foundation for global stewards,” Jagodnik said about the school’s investment in its gardening program.

“You want children to care about their environment. You want them to know how to eat healthy, where their food comes from and how to support that, even if they don’t become scientists or become environmentalists, they still have that foundation.”

Like WTOP on Facebook and follow @WTOP on Twitter to engage in conversation about this article and others.

This Company Wants to Build a Giant Indoor Farm Next to Every Major City in the World

This Company Wants to Build a Giant Indoor Farm Next to Every Major City in the World

Vertical farming may finally be growing up.

Updated by David Roberts@drvoxdavid@vox.com  

Nov 8, 2017

Plenty ... of varieties.  |  Plenty

For as long as I can remember, people have been hyping vertical farming — growing crops indoors, using vertical space to intensify production.

Its virtues, relative to conventional agriculture, have long been clear. Indoors, the climate can be controlled year-round. Pests can be minimized, and with them pesticides. Water and nutrients can be applied in precise quantities. By going up rather than out, a vertical farm can produce more food per acre of land. And by siting close to an urban area, it can reduce long distribution chains, getting fresher food to customers’ tables, quicker.

Its drawbacks have become equally clear. They mainly come down to cost. Farming well requires deep know-how and expertise; it has proven extraordinarily difficult to expand vertical farms in a way that holds quality consistent while driving costs down. Optimizing production at a small scale is very different from doing so at a large scale. The landscape islittered with the corpses of vertical-farming startups that though they could beat the odds (though several are still alive and kicking).

Now a young Silicon Valley startup called Plenty thinks it has cracked the code. It has enormous expansion plans and a bank account full of fresh investor funding, but most excitingly, it plans to build a 100,000 square foot vertical-farming warehouse this year in Kent, Washington, just outside of Seattle, your author’s home town. That farm is expected to produce 4.5 million pounds of greens annually. Your author, in keeping with coastal elitist stereotypes, is a fervent lover of greens.

In part because I now have a personal stake in the matter, I thought I’d take a look at the company, its prospects, the environmental benefits it promises, and — perhaps most importantly — some of the unnerving social and political implications of a vertical farming revolution.

Plenty ... of veggies.  |   Plenty

Plenty wants to build a farm near your city

Plenty is at the center of a veritable hurricane of buzz at the moment.

It checks all the boxes: It recently got a huge round of funding ($200 million in July, the largest ag-tech investment in history), including some through Jeff Bezos’s investment firm, so it has the capital to scale; it is leaning heavily on machine learning and AI; it has endorsements from several Michelin-rated chefs (“I’ve never had anything of this quality,” a former sous-chef at French Laundry, Anthony Secviar, told Bloomberg); it is in talks with several large distributors in the US and abroad; heck, it even lured away the director of battery technology at Tesla, Kurt Kelty, to be executive of operations and development. (You’re nothing in Silicon Valley without an ex-Tesla exec.)

“I wanted to figure out where I would contribute to the next big wave,” Kelty told Bloomberg. “I see my next 10-year-run as growing Plenty."

So, what’s the big deal?

If you want to really dig in, Bloomberg has the best feature story on Plenty (see also Fast Company), but I’ll quickly run through what the company is up to. It’s helpful to read what follows against this list of nine reasons vertical farms fail, by Chris Michael, CEO of vertical-farming company Bright Agrotech. In a sense, Plenty is a response to previous failures.

The company is run by CEO Matt Barnard, a former private equity investor, and CTO Nate Storey, an agronomist who did his doctoral work in tower farming. (Storey also founded Bright Agrotech, which he left to join Plenty. In June, Plenty acquired the company.)

Plenty grows plants on 20-foot vertical towers instead of the stacks of horizontal shelves used by most other vertical-farming companies. Plants jut horizontally from the towers, growing out of a substrate made primarily of recycled plastic bottles (there’s no soil involved). Water and nutrients are fed in from the top of the tower and dispersed by gravity (rather than pumps, which saves money). All water, including from condensation, is collected and recycled.

The plants receive no sunlight, just light from hanging LED lamps. There are thousands of infrared cameras and sensors covering everything, taking fine measurements of temperature, moisture, and plant growth; the data is used by agronomists and artificial intelligence nerds to fine-tune the system.

The towers are so close together that the effect is a giant wall of plants.

Plenty ... of greens.

Currently, Plenty is focusing on leafy greens and herbs — varieties of lettuce, kale, mustard greens, basil, etc. — but it says it can use the system to grow anything except root vegetables and tree fruits. Strawberries and cucumbers are coming up next. (It’s worth noting that anything beyond leafy greens requires more light and thus more energy, so the source and cost of an indoor farm’s electricity is of keen interest.)

There are virtually no pests in a controlled indoor environment, so Plenty doesn’t have to use any pesticides or herbicides; it gets by with a few ladybugs. The produce from Plenty’s San Francisco warehouse is certified organic, but leaders in the industry also like to stress that vertical farming is local, with an entirely transparent supply chain. (Why yes, you can also get that at your local farmers market.)

Bottom line: Relative to conventional agriculture, Plenty says that it can get as much as 350 times the produce out of a given acre of land, using 1 percent as much water. “It is the most efficient [form of agriculture] in terms of the amount of productive capacity per dollar spent,” Barnard has said. “Period.”

It’s worth reading those claims again, as they are pretty eye-popping. The next grandest claim in the industry is AeroFarms, a Newark, New Jersey company with nine indoor farms, which says it can get to 130 times the amount of produce per acre.

What’s more, Plenty says its products taste better than most of what customers now have access to. Around 35 percent of fruits and vegetables eaten in the US today are imported. Leafy greens travel an average of 2,000 miles to reach your plate. Some produce has been on ships and trucks for two weeks before it reaches the table — having lost, by some estimates, 45 percent of its nutritional value along the way. Produce is bred to survive that long journey with its aesthetics, but not necessarily its flavor, intact.

  Plenty... of miles.

Plenty plans to build warehouses, not inside major cities, but just outside them, next to distribution centers, to minimize the time its food spends in transit — it wants produce to go from harvest to table in hours, rather than days. If it can do that, the company will be able to grow and sell a wide variety of rare and heirloom breeds, which are more tender and flavorful than what’s available at the supermarket, but less resilient to long journeys.

In fact, Barnard says he will save more money on trucks and fuel than he spends on facilities and power.

The company’s goal is to build an indoor farm outside of every city in the world of more than 1 million residents — around 500 in all. It claims it can build a farm in 30 days and pay investors back in three to five years (versus 20 to 40 for traditional farms). With scale, it says, it can get costs down to compete with traditional produce (for a presumably more desirable product that could command a price premium).

If it can back up those claims in practice, Plenty might not revolutionize global agriculture, but it will sure as hell establish vertical farming as a real thing.

 Plenty... of CEO Matt Barnard.

Now, to be very clear: It would be a terrible mistake for anyone to take investment advice from me. I’m not an industry analyst. I have no idea if Plenty will ultimately succeed. It could face difficulty finding affordable urban land; it could have trouble replicating the carefully controlled conditions of its initial warehouse; quality could slip as it output rises; consumers could reject the products for any number of reasons. Many previous alt-farming startups got similar buzz, only to fail. Scaling up is full of peril.

But I do think, if Plenty is not the early Google of this space, some other company will be, soon enough. The traditional barriers of cost and energy that have blocked the industry from growing are crumbling. And the way it’s happening carries some fateful lessons.

Plenty is replacing stuff with intelligence

Entrepreneur Bill Gross said something in a talk once that I never forgot. Every commodity, he said, is finite, and is eventually going to get more expensive — except computing power. Computing power just gets cheaper and cheaper and cheaper. So to the extent you want to ensure low costs in the long term, he said, you substitute computing power for other commodities — intelligence for stuff, as I like to put it.

By intelligence I mean, roughly, the ability to gather data (through sensors), synthesize it (through computing power), and use it to optimize operations (through machine learning). Optimization wrings waste, i.e., extraneous stuff, out of the process.

I have argued before that the current energy transition may well move faster than previous transitions, precisely because it is driven by information technology. To put it crudely, if past energy transitions have replaced giant stuff with other giant stuff, this one is going to replace giant stuff, at least in part, with intelligence.

That same process is taking place in agriculture; that’s part of what vertical farming represents. Zack Bogue, a Plenty investor through Data Collective, a San Francisco venture capital fund, put it this way: “We’re pretty excited about that space because some of the hardest problems in agriculture are now lending themselves to an algorithmic or computational or applied machine-learning solution.”

As Barnard himself put it, agriculture is a “giant optimization problem.” The challenge is to use just the amount of energy, water, and nutrients necessary to produce food, and no more. Big Ag has struggled with optimization for decades, of course, but it remains extraordinarily wasteful — nitrogen runoff producing dead zones in the Gulf, methane and carbon emissions heating the atmosphere, profligate water use leaving water tables depleted, etc.

Plenty uses cameras and sensors to optimize light, temperature, and humidity levels. It is automating the growing process “as much as possible,” Barnard told Business Insider. It even has little robots (“Schleppers”!) that transplant seedlings, because the towers and plants are getting so dense that it’s difficult for a human to operate among them.

Part of what has convinced investors that Plenty has a shot is the radically declining costs of LED lighting. (The efficiency of LEDs puts Plenty on par with conventional agriculture, carbon-wise, at least for some crops, at least when distribution impacts are taken into account; Storey has said he thinks indoor agriculture will be more sustainable in the long haul, especially as the grid gets greener.)

But just as big, possibly bigger, are recent advancements in AI and machine learning. “Utility computing, [internet of things], machine intelligence, wasn’t effective enough five years ago,” Barnard told Fast Company, “much less affordable.” Now, those technologies have reached a level of cost and performance that enables Plenty to fine tune its process. In five more years, computing will be double again as powerful and half again as cheap, enabling yet more automation and optimization.

And that’s great! Mostly.

Plenty is also replacing people with intelligence

I’ve read about 30 articles on Plenty and not one of them has squarely addressed the elephant in the room. To wit: Plenty will succeed insofar as it eliminates food production jobs.

The reason is simple, and found among the aforementioned nine reasons vertical farms fail: “Labor is always your biggest cost.” In the same piece, Matt Liotta of Podponics, a company that tried growing produce in shipping containers and went bankrupt in 2016, is quoted putting it even more bluntly: “People are the problem.”

Industrial agriculture has made ruthless use of scale and automation to minimize labor, but labor remains a huge cost, especially in tasks like harvesting delicate crops like strawberries that can’t easily be mechanized. The same is true for indoor vertical farming: The biggest cost is people.

To compete with industrial ag, vertical farming will have to be even better at reducing the need for human planters and harvesters. In other words, to compete, it’s going to have to create as few jobs as possible.

Fewer ... of these.  |  John Moore/Getty Images

That’s basically the history of technology — getting more value out of less labor.

The great promise of Plenty is that through automation and optimization, it can make clean, low-input food cost competitive with (morally and chemically) unclean, resource-intensive food. That could potentially save an enormous amount of water and (insofar as it is electrified and powered by renewable energy) radically reduce the carbon emissions of the agricultural sector. Plus it could give millions of people access to fresher, more flavorful, more nutritious fruits and vegetables, making Michelle Obama (and the public health community) happy.

But to do any of that, it has to minimize labor.

Barnard is well aware of that, as is everyone in the industry. “Small-scale growing in 2017 is not a profitable enterprise, and there are a lot of systemic reasons for that that aren’t going to change,” he told Fast Company. “Growing at a small scale, you can’t get to the labor efficiencies that you need. It requires, in essence, too many people.”

“Too many people” is not a great message to communities who might host a farm, though, so Barnard is quick to say that a full-size warehouse like the one planned for Washington will employ as many as several hundred people at skilled, full-time jobs. “While robots can handle some of the harvesting, planting, and logistics,” writes Selina Wang at Bloomberg, “experts will oversee the crop development and grocer relationships on-site.”

Barnard also emphasizes that he’s not competing with traditional agriculture or small-scale urban farming, just adding to the portfolio, seeking to keep up with demand.

But if vertical farming scales as fast as Barnard expects, competing purely on price and efficiency, it will represent a familiar pattern in the US economy — a relatively smaller number of high-skill jobs replacing a relatively larger number of low-skill jobs. In the bigger picture, it is a good thing, to get more and better food for fewer labor and material inputs, but displaced workers tend not to care much about the big picture. And right now agriculture and related industries provide about 11 percent of US employment, according toUSDA.

Kevin Drum of Mother Jones recently published a big piece about robots taking all our jobs, thanks to the relentless advance of artificial intelligence. Lots of economists and pundits push back on that kind of thing, citing the lack of movement in productivity statistics.

Plenty ... of these.  |   Shutterstock

I have no idea how that will sort out. But I see automation coming for all drivers pretty soon — taxi, bus, garbage truck, delivery van, backhoe, you name it. And now I can see it coming for the agricultural sector. Whether unemployment will spike, as Drum says, or there will just be more and faster churn, there are going to be lots of angry people out of work.

And what are we going to do with all those truck drivers and agricultural workers? I don’t think either party has a good answer. Republicans stomp their feet and insist the jobs will return. Democrats wave their hands at “retraining.”

We better figure it out. We will eventually teach robots to grow our food in giant climate-controlled buildings, optimizing production using AI and machine learning that we can’t yet fathom.

Plenty wasn’t possible five years ago. What will be possible in five more years

Panasonic's First Indoor Farm Can Grow Over 80 Tons of Greens Per Year — Take a Look Inside

Panasonic's First Indoor Farm Can Grow Over 80 Tons of Greens Per Year — Take a Look Inside

• Leanna Garfield

A worker handles crops inside Panasonic's first and only vegetable farm in Singapore.Reuters/Edgar Su

Panasonic may be known for its consumer electronics, but the Japanese company is also venturing into indoor agriculture.

In 2014, Panasonic started growing leafy greens inside a warehouse in Singapore and selling them to local grocers and restaurants. At the time, the 2,670-square-foot farm produced just 3.6 tons of produce per year. The farm's square footage and output have both more than quadrupled since then, Alfred Tham, the assistant general manager of Panasonic's Agriculture Business Division, tells Business Insider.

Panasonic's greens are all grown indoors year-round, with LEDs replacing sunlight. The growing beds are stacked to the ceiling in order to achieve a higher yield in the limited space.

Take a look inside.

Panasonic's vegetable farm resides in an inconspicuous warehouse in Singapore.

Reuters/Edgar Su

The farm's 20 workers put on hairnets, face masks, gloves, and hazmat suits before handling the produce to make sure they don't contaminate it.

Reuters/Edgar Su

The farm potentially produces 81 tons of greens per year at full capacity — 0.015% of all produce grown in Singapore. The hopes to eventually raise that percentage to 5%.

Reuters/Edgar Su  |  Source: Ag Funder News

There are currently 40 types of crops in the warehouse, including mini red radish, mini white radish, rocket lettuce, mizuna, Swiss chard, romaine lettuce, and rainbow chard.

Reuters/Edgar Su

To plant the greens, Panasonic's workers place tiny seeds on growing beds. Unlike many vertical farms, Panasonic's grows its greens in soil.

Reuters/Edgar Su

Everything grows under LEDs instead of sunlight. The lights come from a local company and waste less energy than typical light bulbs.

Reuters/Edgar Su

Panasonic's farm likely still has high energy costs, however, since the LEDs are on 24-7. Even the best LEDs have only a 50% efficiency rate, meaning half the electricity is turned to heat, not light, The New York Times reports.

The LEDs shine at a specific frequency that encourages the plants to grow quickly. The farmers also control the warehouse's climate, including its humidity and temperature.

Edgar Su/Reuters

Once the seeds begin to sprout, the farmers transfer the plants to small pots.

Reuters/Edgar Su

Small nozzles feed nutrient-rich water to the crops.

Reuters/Edgar Su

The farm's goal is to increase the amount of produce grown in Singapore, which imports over 90% of its food. The island nation has a shortage of arable land, so indoor farming could become a viable way to grow more greens, Tham says.

Reuters/Edgar Su  |  Source: Agri-Food and Veterinary Authority of Singapore

Each 3-ounce bowl of salad greens from the farm sells for about $5 (USD) in Singapore's grocery stores, under the brand Veggie Life. In mid-2014, Panasonic also started selling greens to local restaurants.

Reuters/Edgar Su

Panasonic's indoor agriculture project is part of its Factory Solutions division, which creates industrial machines and systems. Given the division's experience with engineering and manufacturing, Panasonic sees indoor agriculture as a profitable extension of its business, Tham says.

Reuters/Edgar Su

"We foresee this business to be a potential growth portfolio, given the global shortage of arable land, increasing populations, climate change, and demand for high quality and stable food supply," Tham says.

Reuters/Edgar Su

SEE ALSO: Kimbal Musk — Elon's brother — just opened a shipping container farm compound in New York City

Signal of Change / Radical New Vertical Farming Model Could Provide The Answer to Urban Food Resilience

Signal of Change / Radical New Vertical Farming Model Could Provide The Answer to Urban Food Resilience

BY MARTA MELVIN / 11 OCT 2017

One of the biggest challenges facing the developed and developing world: how will we continue to feed ourselves in future with the global population rising rapidly and expected to reach 9.7 billion by 2050. In addition, in 30 years’ time we could see some 70 per cent of the global population living in cities.

Designers of our urban built environment will need to adopt radically different approaches to city planning to include food production within their thinking. Planning and zoning of suitable sites for urban farms will be needed to ensure that sunlight can reach the crops as a result of immediate setback of buildings around a site. Ideas for high-rise farming in cities such as Singapore are slowly maturing and beginning to be piloted.

The Food Tower concept has been tested by Surbana Jurong’s architectural team as a direct response to the growing pressure on sustainability of food production in Singapore.

Vegetable growing areas are stacked in open, sunlight flooded high rise towers. Growing yields across the 1 hectare site are boosted to some 400 times that of traditional farming.

It's a whole system: vegetables are grown on towers using the water and nutrients from a system of tanks in which Red Tilapia fish are reared. The vegetable towers are located on “wings” on higher floors that spiral upwards to maximise sunlight exposure; the fish farms are located at the lower floors where there is more shade. A closed loop energy system, with onsite photovoltaics generating power, rainwater harvesting and wetland reed beds to purify and recycle waste water on-site. The wetlands can also act as part of a garden for the larger community.

It is estimated that a 100-storey food tower on 1 hectare of land can provide sufficient meat and vegetables for just over 11,000 people per year.

Resource links:

• http://www.eco-business.com/opinion/the-food-tower-looking-up-to-solve-the-global-food-crisis/

Urban Agriculture: Utilizing NYC’s Underused Spaces to Grow Local Food

Urban Agriculture: Utilizing NYC’s Underused Spaces to Grow Local Food

By Phyllis Huang

October 31, 2017, 3:54 pm

On Thursday, City Council held a public hearing on a new bill to develop a comprehensive urban agriculture plan that addresses land use policy and other related issues to promote the expansion of urban agriculture in the city

View fullsize

Urban rooftop farm Brooklyn Grange at the Navy Yard. Photo: Brooklyn Grange

In a congested place like New York City, it may come as a surprise that there are underused spaces. The truth is: the city has 14,000 acres of unused rooftops; the neighborhood of East New York alone has more than 45,000 square feet of publicly-owned, unused land. What should New Yorkers be doing with these spaces? With a new bill, Introduction No. 1661, the New York City Council attempts to provide an answer to the question: Grow food on them.

On Thursday, the Committee on Land Use held a public hearing on Introduction No. 1661. Councilmember Rafael Espinal of the 37th District, and David Greenfield of the 44th District, who is also the chair of the Committee on Land Use, are spearheading the new legislation which would require the Department of City Planning (DCP) to develop a comprehensive urban agriculture plan that addresses land use policy and other issues to promote the expansion of urban agriculture in the city.

During the hearing, representatives from the DCP answered questions regarding the application of the bill, and members from various advocacy groups including Teens for Food Justice and New York City Community Garden Coalition, as well as agricultural innovators and urban agriculture practitioners such as Jason Green ofEdenworks, raised their voices and expressed their support for the new legislation.

View fullsize

Councilember Espinal, sponsor of Introduction No. 1661

The bill aims to address, but is not to be limited to, the following issues:

• change of land use policies to promote the expansion of agricultural uses in NYC;
• cataloguing existing as well as potential spaces suitable for urban agriculture uses;
• the integration of urban agriculture into the city’s conservation and resiliency plan.

The bill comes in the nick of time as the nascent hydroponic farming industry is expanding and can be seen as a call for the city to “officially recognize” urban agriculture as an industry. Such an acknowledgement, so the hope, would help to support and promote the growth of the urban agricultural business sector by providing clear legislation, and thus a solid foundation to start-ups and entrepreneurs.

The need for clear regulations of how spaces and buildings can be used for urban agricultural purposes is evident. For example: Currently, rooftop farming is only allowed on top of commercial buildings, but not on residential buildings. Or: Existing regulations prohibit growing and selling produce on the same lot, regardless of what the lot is zoned for. As Councilmember Espinal explained: ‘The vegetable grown on the roof of a building cannot be sold on the stoop of the same building.” 

Such regulations may not only be confusing, they are also at odds with people’s increasing needs and wants for local food, food that is grown in a space as close to them as possible. Corresponding to that need, the bill also calls for urban agriculture to be used as a means to tackle the lack of access to healthy food in neighborhoods identified as food deserts.

According to a 2016 report by the Food Bank NYC, Brooklyn has a food insecurity rate of 20 percent, the only borough with a rising trend since 2009. The paradox: there is a plethora of bustling farmers markets in New York City. Yet, there are few if any in the communities that would benefit from it the most.

In some of Brooklyn neighborhoods the occurrence of diseases commonly caused by malnutrition and low-quality food is so high that now there is a type of diabetes calledFlatbush diabetes. The name reveals all and calls for a solution the bill could provide: if farmers markets don’t go to the people who need them the most, the city should provide institutional support for the people to grow their own food.

Community gardens also play a crucial role in transforming food deserts. Currently, there are more than 600 community gardens in NYC. East New York Farms, among other community gardens-turned-farms, play a key role in providing healthy food for the residents in so-called food deserts. A representative from the New York Community Garden Coalition made a plea for the preservation and support of community gardens; in times of gentrification, also community gardens are  targeted by real estate developers and landlords, as the example of Bushwick City Farm shows which has been facing eviction since August. At the hearing, the representative from Bushwick City Farm asked the city to buy the land so that the farm can be kept.

Bushwick City Farm Photo: DNAinfo

In conclusion, DCP pointed out that not all of the requests fall into the department’s jurisdiction, but agreed to continue the conversation with other government agencies to find a solution. The department would be required to deliver such plan to the mayor and the speaker of the City Council by July 1, 2018.

“The bill will be reviewed and amended with consideration of the public testimony. At this time, the administration would like to have a discussion with stakeholders about the best way to move forward. But I believe this bill must ultimately become law to ensure the appropriate resources are put in place by the city to make this a reality,” said Espinal.

There has been a trial on the grassroots level to use agriculture as one way to revive formerly decrepit urban spaces and to serve underprivileged communities in New York City. Introduction No. 1661 could help the government to recognize what has been already achieved and create more to continue on that path. 

A Complete Guide To Urban Farming In NYC

A Complete Guide To Urban Farming In NYC

Did you know:

With 17.8 MILLION people in the NYC metro area, New York City is the 2nd largest urban area in the world. 

For a city this huge, how can anyone know about all of the urban farming going on in NYC? (there's A TON)

Well: 

This article provides a full overview of all aspects of urban agriculture in NYC, from companies to job opportunities to social impact projects.

We will cover: 

- Some of the largest urban farming companies in NYC
- Where can you find urban farming jobs in NYC
- Where can you find NYC urban agriculture classes
- What are some key urban farming social impact projects going on in NYC
 

Ready to get the run-down on any of these subjects? 

Read on to learn more! 

NYC Urban Farming Companies

Gotham Greens

View fullsize

Gotham Greens Facility Source

Gotham Greens, founded in 2008 by Viraj Puri and Eric Haley, has three urban greenhouses in New York:

- 15,000 sq ft in Greenpoint Brooklyn (Opened 2011) 
- 20,000 sq ft greenhouse in Gowanus, Brooklyn (Opened in in 2013)
- 60,000 sq ft greenhouse in Jamaica, Queens (Opened in 2015)

Gotham originally focused on growing: Butterhead lettuce
Red leaf lettuce
Green leaf lettuce
Basil

More recently their crops have grown to include
- tomatos
- baby kale
- arugula
- bok choy
- swiss chard

Follow Gotham Greens on Twitter Below: 

Brooklyn Grange

View fullsize

Brooklyn Grange (Source)

Brooklyn Grange is a two and half acre rooftop organic farm in New York City. 

Currently this acreage is split between 2 facilities in NYC: 

- 43,000 sq ft facility between Astoria and Long Island City
- 60,000+ sq ft facility in the Brooklyn Navy Yard

Brooklyn Grange is also the largest apiary(beehive for honey production) in New York City, producing over 1500 lb of honey annually.

Follow Brooklyn Grange On Twitter Below:

Riverpark Farm

Riverpark Farm is the largest and possibly the most unique commercial rooftop farm in Manhattan - and they farm entirely in repurposed milk crates!

Founded in 2011, Riverpark Farm is a 15,000 sq ft rooftop farm located in Kips Bay, Manhattan. 

The farm provides fresh produce to the Riverpark restaurant and is owned by chef Tom Collicchio.

Over 100 different types of vegetables, herbs, and flowers are grown using over 7,000 re-purposed plastic milk crates.

Follow Riverpark NYC on Twitter below: 

North Brooklyn Farms

View fullsize

North Brooklyn Farms (Source)

North Brooklyn Farms is an urban farm and public space in Williamsburg, New York City.

Their mission is to: 

"Transform vacant city spaces into urban farms where people can engage with their community, connect with nature and get local, organic, sustainably-grown produce"

Like North Brooklyn Farms (NBK Farms) on Facebook below: 

Eagle Street Rooftop Farms

View fullsize

Eagle Street Rooftop Farm (Source) 

Eagle Street Rooftop Farms is a located in Greenpoint Brooklyn. 

They have over 6,000 sq feet of organic vegetable production on their rooftop farm.

Eagle Street Rooftop Farm Video Overview

NYC Urban Farming Jobs

Gotham Greens Jobs

Follow this link for job opportunities at Gotham Greens: http://gothamgreens.com/contact-us

Brooklyn Grange Jobs

At the time of writing Brooklyn Grange does not have any open job positions. To check their jobs page for updates follow this link: https://www.brooklyngrangefarm.com/jobs/

Eagle Street Rooftop Farms Jobs

Although Eagle Street Rooftop Farms website does not have a specific jobs page, they do have an "Apprenticeship program". 

For more information, check out this Rooftop Farm Apprenticeship Google Doc

NYC Urban Agriculture Classes

Grow NYC

Grow NYC fosters environmental stewardship by running programs for over 30,000 students each year with the goal of providing "meaningful interactions with the environment".

Grow NYC provides courses for students of all ages. One of their most relevant programs to urban farming and gardening is Grow To Learn, a city wide initiative with the goal of: 

"Facilitating and Supporting Sustainable Teaching Gardens in Every NYC Public School"

- Goal of Grow To Learn Initiative by GrowNYC.org

Grow NYC has aided in the development of over 100 community gardens to date (Source)

View fullsize

For those who have a potential backyard farming space in New York City, you can also help with initiatives like Grow To Learn by volunteering your space to use as a teaching garden.

For more details visit this urban garden sign up page and click on "New Garden".

The Battery Urban Farm

View fullsize

The Battery Urban Farm NYC (Source)

The Battery Urban Farm is a "teaching" urban farm that was started in 2011 in New York City. 

It organizes farming classes for New York's students, residents, and visitors that teach sustainable urban farming techniques.

Urban Farming Social Impact Projects in NYC 

Green Bronx Machine

Green Bronx Machine In Action (Source)

Green Bronx Machine is a 501(c)(3) based in Southern Bronx that focuses on engaging students grades K-12 in urban agriculture programs. 

The goal of the programs is to promote positive social change, such as increased school attendance rates, higher performance, and healthier diet choices.

Founded by school teacher Stephen Ritz, the program has evolved from an after-school program to a wide set of programming including summer camps, a learning garden, and health wellness and learning center.

NYC Parks Greenthumb Program

The NYC Parks Greenthumb Program is a non for profit initiative to support urban gardening in New York City. 

Greenthumb supports over 500 volunteer coordinated community farms in New York City, across all five boroughs. 

Support typically comes in the form of organization support, funding, and monthly workshops that take place in NYC. 

For more information on Greenthumb NYC, check out the YouTube Video below, or follow this link to join a garden or volunteer.

Conclusion

After reading this article, you should know just about all there is to know about urban farming in the big apple. 

If you got this far in this article, you may like our other articles. 

To access our other content, visit www.urbanvine.co/blog or sign up for our email list in the sidebar! 

Article Sources: 

All sources linked in within article! 

View fullsize

https://www.urbanvine.co

Proposal Would Grow Central City Farms

Proposal Would Grow Central City Farms

Two Milwaukee legislators envision urban farms rising in 30th St. Corridor.

By Graham Kilmer - Oct 31st, 2017 01:16 pm

View fullsize

Aerial view of the 30th Street Corridor. Photo courtesy of the Redevelopment Authority City of Milwaukee.

A pair of state legislators rolled out bills Monday that would transform Milwaukee’s post-industrial central city into a hub for urban farming.

State Rep. Evan Goyke and State Sen. LaTonya Johnson are sponsoring four pieces of legislation in their respective chambers of the legislature. The legislation seeks to create a $10 million educational institution focused on urban agriculture, and greater access to resources for community organizations that work on urban farming projects throughout the city.

“The design and the dream with these bills is that they’re farming areas in the heart of central city and revitalizing the 30th Street Corridor,” Goyke said.

Urban agriculture is one way to work on combating food deserts and shortages in cities. The press conference Monday was held in the Merrill Park neighborhood, which itself is a food desert, said Sherrie Tussler, Executive Director of Hunger Task Force.

Johnson said impediments to residents accessing healthy food require innovative thinking and solutions. Urban farming is one such solution, that can help ensure fresh produce and food for the families that live in areas plagued by food deserts, she added.

“Eating healthy should just be a basic human right,” Johnson contended, “and this legislation is a start in that direction.”

One of the bills directs the Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection to create the Office of Urban Agriculture. Another bill directs that new office to help urban farmers, and community organizations like the Hunger Task Force, with guidance and training and educational and promotional resources. This is something the state already does for industries like soybeans, dairy, corn and others, Goyke said. And with offices already existing for minority and veteran famers, he thinks an office for urban farming is warranted.

The other two bills being proposed should “cement Milwaukee’s position as a national leader in urban agriculture,” Goyke said.

These bills would create a School of Urban Farming and Nutrition. The new institution would be a space for universities and colleges in the Milwaukee area to research and provide education and degrees in urban farming for students. The ideal location for the school is somewhere in the central city along the 30th street corridor.

“I look at areas around Center Street, North Avenue, Burleigh where you have these large, multi-acre industrial sites that could be remediated and brought back to life,” Goyke said.

Michael Carriere, a professor at Milwaukee School of Engineering, said that urban farming projects, like that being championed in the new legislation, can be tools for community and economic revitalization. They can also be an incredible educational tool, he said. MSOE students are working in communities around the city on engineering problems related to urban agriculture, Carriere noted.

Bonnie Halvorsen, the founder and executive director of the Institute for Urban Agriculture and Nutrition, said that she and her colleagues have traveled to countries like Japan and Cuba where strides are being made in urban farming because of supportive political leaders.

Now that Goyke and Johnson have introduced the bills, they are looking to gain cosponsors and build a favorable coalition as the proposals head through the legislative process. If passed, the project for the school heads to the building commission where it will join a queue of projects jockeying for funding.

Goyke said if the bills pass, the project likely won’t be underway within the next year, but with support it could be realized in the next few years. “The building commission has a line of projects and there’s always politics involved,” he said.

Goyke believes anyone that looks at the urban farming that’s already happening can easily see it’s a positive for the communities. “I don’t think anybody needs convincing,” he said.

“The difficulty is building a broad coalition around the state,” he said, “So that communities outside Milwaukee can see the benefit.”

Jeff Bezos-Backed Indoor Farming Startup Plenty Opens 100K Square-Foot Facility in Seattle Region

Jeff Bezos-Backed Indoor Farming Startup Plenty Opens 100K Square-Foot Facility in Seattle Region

BY TAYLOR SOPER on November 3, 2017 at 7:04 am

View fullsize

Plenty CEO and co-founder Matt Barnard. (Photos via Plenty)

An indoor farming startup backed by some of the biggest names in tech that wants to change how people eat fruits and vegetables has arrived in Seattle.

Plenty grows its plants in 20-foot tall towers inside a climate-controlled facility with LED lights.

Plenty today announced that it will open a 100,000 square-foot farm in Kent, Wash., where the 3-year-old company will grow pesticide-free, “backyard quality” produce for consumers in Seattle and Vancouver, B.C. It’s the first time the startup has expanded beyond its home markets in South San Francisco and Wyoming; it will also be the company’s first “full-scale” farm.

Plenty grows its plants in 20-foot tall towers inside a climate-controlled facility with LED lights. It does not use pesticides, herbicides, synthetic fertilizers, or GMOs. There is plenty of technology used, with thousands of infrared cameras and sensors collecting data in the farms that is then analyzed with machine learning to optimize how the plants grow.

Plenty said its technology can achieve yields of up to 350 times greater than traditional agriculture while using 1 percent of the water and barely any land compared to conventional methods. Plenty’s farms can also grow plants — up to 300 variants of produce — all year-round, regardless of seasonality changes, which helps increase efficiency; its proximity to cities also means that produce doesn’t sit in trucks for days and weeks on end before ultimately arriving on your kitchen table.

Investors are bullish about the company’s potential. Backers of Plenty’s $200 million round it raised this past July include folks like SoftBank (via its Vision Fund); Alphabet Chairman Eric Schmidt (through Innovation Endeavors); Amazon founder Jeff Bezos (through Bezos Expeditions); DCM Ventures; Data Collective; Finistere Ventures; and Louis Bacon.

In an interview with GeekWire, Plenty CEO and co-founder Matt Barnard said that Seattle’s lack of access to local produce and the region’s emphasis on healthy food made it a perfect place to expand.

“As we looked at the West Coast, Seattle was the best example of a large community of people who really don’t have much access to any fresh fruits and vegetables grown locally,” he explained.

View fullsize

Plenty will hire 50 people at the farm in Kent, and expects to double the size of its team, Barnard said. Fresh produce will start shipping to a few restaurants initially in mid-2018, and then to other buyers that will be announced at a later date. It also plans to open more farms across the country and eventually around the world.

Plenty, which has raised $238 million to date, is not the first company to try and build a business around indoor farming. Local Garden Vancouver, a similar crop-yielding greenhouse concept, declared bankruptcy a few years ago and other startups in the space have struggled over the years.

But Barnard, who started the 100-person company Nate Mazonson and Nate Storey, said that costs of indoor farming have lowered enough while the technology has advanced to the point where Plenty can promise “Whole Foods Quality at Walmart Prices,” as this Bloomberg headline noted last month. Barnard called it a “giant optimization problem.”

“We give plants the perfect environment to both grow fast and taste the best,” he added.

View fullsize

Barnard noted that the percentage of fruits and vegetables eaten by U.S. consumers and grown outside of the country continues to rise due to rising labor and land costs — up to 35 percent today, from zero a few decades ago. There is also shrinking available land that is fertile enough to grow high-quality produce, he said.

“This isn’t a matter of a zero-sum game, and it’s not a matter of competitors,” Barnard added. “It’s a matter of, how do we meet this unmet demand and how do we add a new set of agricultural practices to our portfolio as a society to be able to address demand and these secular trends of essentially declining agricultural capacity.”

Plenty’s business model “will be relatively similar to what people know,” Barnard said, but he hinted that the company is thinking of new ways to make revenue.

“We are always working to figure out how to get food into people’s hands and onto their tables in as few minutes as possible,” he said.

Barnard’s interest in creating a new way to grow food started at an early age when he grew up on a commercial food farm in Wisconsin.

“There were whole crops that we couldn’t grow on the farm in Wisconsin that I didn’t even know I liked until I moved to California,” he recalled. “I couldn’t understand why in the world people loved watermelon so much because all I knew was the stuff I had in Wisconsin, which was pretty gross because that stuff was exhausted and spent a week on a truck. Watermelons aren’t meant to spend a week on a truck.”

Barnard, who previously spent time working in utility technology infrastructure and cellular smart grid production, has also dealt with an autoimmune condition while his wife was later diagnosed with stage-4 breast cancer four years ago. Both of those personal life events made him realize the importance of eating healthy and he ended up conducting research into how our food affects health.

“While we don’t know as much as I would love for us to know in 2017, one thing we do know is that a nutrient-rich diet generally leads to a happier, healthier life for people — and we get most of our nutrients from fruits and vegetables,” the CEO said.

Love space and science? Sign up for our GeekWire Space & Science email newsletter for top headlines from Alan Boyle, GeekWire’s aerospace and science editor.

Taylor Soper is a GeekWire staff reporter who covers a wide variety of tech assignments, including emerging startups in Seattle and Portland, the sharing economy and the intersection of technology and sports. Follow him @taylor_soper and email taylor@geekwire.com.

Futureworld: The IoT-Driven ‘Vertical Farm’

Futureworld: The IoT-Driven ‘Vertical Farm’ 

October 26, 2017 by Doug Black

View fullsize

Source: Aerofarms

Imagine a farm without herbicides, insecticides or pesticides; a farm that cuts water consumption by 95 percent; that uses no fertilizer and thus generates no polluting run-off; that has a dozen crop cycles per year instead of the usual three, making it hundreds of times more productive than conventional farms; a farm that can continually experiment with and refine the taste and texture of its crops; a farm without sun or soil. That’s right, a farm where the crops don’t need sunlight to grow and don’t grow from the ground.

Such a farm – an “indoor vertical farm” – exists, it’s located in that grittiest, most intensely urban of inner cities, Newark, NJ, in a former industrial warehouse. Visiting there, you go from a potholed, chain linked back street into a brightly lit, clean (visitors wear sanitary gowns, gloves, masks and head coverings), 70,000-square-foot facility. Walking in, you get that rare, uncanny sense of having stepped into the future. Way into the future.

The farm consists of large, flat platforms stacked 10 levels high (“grow towers”) of leafy greens and herbs thriving in seeming contentment under long rows of LED lights, irrigated with recycled water that sprays the exposed roots hanging, suspended, from the crops, under the watchful “eye” of IoT sensors that, with machine learning algorithms, analyze the large volumes of continually harvested (sorry!) crop data.

Aerofarms began developing sustainable growing systems since 2004, and has adopted a data-driven technology strategy that’s a showcase for the IoT and deep learning capabilities of Dell Technologies.

View fullsize

By building farms in major population centers and near major distribution routes (the Newark farm is a mile from the headquarters of one of the largest supermarket chains in the New York City area), the company radically shortens supply chains and lowers energy resources required to transport food from “farm to fork”  while also decreasing spoilage. It enables local farming at commercial scale year-round, regardless of the season. It tracks and monitors its leafy greens from seed to package so that the source of food, if some becomes tainted, can be quickly identified. Taken together, AeroFarms claims to achieve 390 times greater productivity than a conventional field farm while using 5 percent as much water.

“We are as much a capabilities company as we are farmers, utilizing science and technology to achieve our vision of totally controlled agriculture,” said David Rosenberg AeroFarms co-founder and CEO. The company’s vision, he said, is to understand the “symbiotic relationships” among biology, environment and technology, to leverage science and engineering in ways that drive more sustainable, higher-yield food production.

IoT comes into play via AeroFarms’ Connected Food Safety System, which tracks the “growth story” of its products, analyzing more than 130,000 data points per harvest. The growth cycle begins when seeds are germinated on a growing medium that looks like cheesecloth, receiving a measured amount of moisture and nutrients misted directly onto their roots that dangle in a chamber below the growing cloth, along with a spectrum of LED lighting calculated to match the plants’ needs throughout a 12- to 16-day growing cycle.

Rosenberg said Aerofarms decided to partner with Dell because it “offers a comprehensive infrastructure portfolio that spans our IT needs, from edge gateways and rugged tablets to machine learning systems and network gear.”

At the edge, sensors and cameras in the aeroponic growing system gather data on everything from moisture and nutrients to light and oxygen and then send operating and growing environment data to Dell IoT Edge Gateways for processing. Information is then relayed over their farm network to Dell Latitude Rugged Tablets and a local server cluster, making it available to Aerofarms workers for monitoring and analysis. AeroFarms’ precision growing algorithms allow just-in-time growing for its selling partners. Once the plants reach maturity, they are harvested and packaged onsite and then distributed to local grocery stores.

Aerofarms is developing a machine learning capability that identifies patterns based on analysis of images and a combination of environmental, machine and historical growing data.

The company said it may expand its use of Microsoft Azure to conduct more analytics in the cloud while leveraging geo-redundant data backup, collect disparate data from its multiple vertical farms and multiple data sources, including information interpreted in historical context, leveraging data previously collected and analyzed over time to improve taste, texture, color, nutrition and yield.

View fullsize

Aerofarms' 

David Rosenberg

Aerofarms said it also is working on real-time quality control through multi-spectral imaging from its grow trays. Cameras with integrated structured light scanners send data to Dell Edge Gateways, which create 3D topological images of each grow tray. When an anomaly is detected, the gateway sends an alert to operators using Dell Latitude Rugged Tablets on the farm floor.

“For me, the journey started with an appreciation of some of the macro-challenges of the world, starting with water,” said Rosenberg. “Seventy percent of our fresh water goes to agriculture. Seventy percent of our fresh water contamination comes from agriculture.”

Land is another problem.

“By U.N. estimates, we need to produce 50 percent more food by 2050, and we’ve lost 30 percent of our arable farm land in the last 40 years,” he said. “Looking at all those macro-issues, we need a new way to feed our planet.”

United Nations: Vancouver’s ‘City Farmer’ One of Seven Small-Scale Urban Agriculture Initiatives Featured at UN Secretariat Building in New York!

United Nations: Vancouver’s ‘City Farmer’ One of Seven Small-Scale Urban Agriculture Initiatives Featured at UN Secretariat Building in New York!

Linked by ilovewushu

View fullsize

See City Farmer’s submission exhibited at the United Nations. Click image to see larger file.

Out of the many submissions received from across the Americas, seven have been selected to be featured in a print exhibit showcased at the UN Secretariat

Nov 1, 2017

Our “Feed Your City – a showcase of small-scale urban agriculture initiatives in the Americas” exhibit is up in the UN Secretariat lobby. Please stop by and learn more about some of the many wonderful community gardens across North, Central and South America committed to sustainability, community and connection between people and planet!

We are very excited and happy to announce that the selection for the first annual Feed Your City showcase has officially been completed! Out of the many submissions received from across the Americas, seven have been selected to be featured in a print exhibit showcased at the UN Secretariat starting today, 30 October!

These submissions, along with another six qualifying submissions, will be published on the UN Food Gardens website and shared through social media in recognition of their outstanding efforts to further sustainable urban agriculture and community involvement! A special thank you to UN-HABITAT, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and World Food Programme for participating in the review and selection panel.

Print exhibit:

North America

462 Halsey Community Farm – Brooklyn, New York, USA –www.462halsey.com

Kelly Street Garden Bronx – The Bronx, New York, USA

City Farmer’s ‘Demonstration Garden’ – Vancouver, Canada –www.cityfarmer.info and http://www.cityfarmer.eco

South America

Plantando e Aprendendo – Piracicaba, São Paulo, Brazil – (Casa do Bom Menino)

Horta Das Corujas – Vila Beatriz, São Paulo, Brazil –https://www.facebook.com/groups/hortadascorujas/

Horta Comunitária de Calçada Cristo Rei – Curitiba, Paraná, Brazil

Central America

Huerto Urbano La Arboleda – San José, Costa Rica

See United Nations ‘Feed Your City’

Their Facebook page.

View fullsize