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BIGH Raises €4.3m For Largest Urban Rooftop Farm In Europe
BIGH Raises €4.3m For Largest Urban Rooftop Farm In Europe
MAY 16, 2018 LOUISA BURWOOD-TAYLOR
BIGH (Building Integrated Greenhouses), a startup based in Brussels, Belgium, has opened its first aquaponic farm on a site spanning 4,000 meters squared above a food hall in the center of the city.
The startup, a developer and operator of urban farms in aquaponics, raised €4.3 million ($5.1 million) from a range of investors to fund the construction of a series of aquaponic farms in the heart of major European cities. They include a group of individuals from the banking, construction and architecture sectors via LTFD, real estate company Fidentia Green Buildings, the public investment vehicle of the Brussels region Finance. Brussels, and aquaponic farm operator and builder from Berlin ECF.
The largest urban rooftop in Europe, according to BIGH, “Ferme Abbattoir” includes 2,000 meters squared of horticultural greenhouses and connected fish farm, as well as 2,000 meters squared of outdoor vegetable gardens. The farm, which was constructed on the roof of the Foodmet market hall on a historical Abattoir site in Brussels, was partially funded by BIGH’s equity financing, and partly in a debt facility from BNP Paribas Fortis bank.
BIGH’s founder, the architect Steven Beckers, is a circular economy proponent, and so the farm captures heat from the slaughterhouses below while offering refrigeration to the Foodmet’s butchers and retailers’ cold rooms. The pump is supplemented by a gas heating device providing CO2 for photosynthesis support during the day as will the main gas heater of the Foodmet, in time.
The farm also aims for minimal reliance on mains water through filtered rainwater storage and well water top-up and its electricity consumption is partially compensated by the Abattoir’s solar panels.
“BIGH is a strong demonstration of the economically profitable circular economy, whose healthy, transparent, quality and local food production is in symbiosis with the urban environment. The city becomes a solution if the search for positive impact is made at all levels: energy, water, air quality, biodiversity, material resources, etc. while creating employment. The BIGH model is also beneficial for real estate, increasing property values,” said Beckers in a statement.
BIGH expects to produce 35 tonnes of striped bass a year and uses an aquaponics system with two closed loops. This means that while 3-5% of the fish water is removed to feed the crops, that water does not circulate back to the fish section. Instead, it is replaced with groundwater or rainwater, David Norris, project manager at BIGH told AgFudnerNews. The benefits of this system include the ability to shut down one system independently of the other which is helpful for cleaning purposes as well as security. The PH levels can be different in each system and therefore optimized instead of compromising, he added.
BIGH expects to announce the site of its next farm imminently.
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Brooklyn Grange Announces A New Location — In A Former WWII Shipyard
Inhabitat is thrilled to announce that New York City urban farming group Brooklyn Grange is launching its first location outside the city — at Kearny Point in New Jersey.
Brooklyn Grange Announces A New Location — In A Former WWII Shipyard
- May 15, 2018
by Lacy Cooke
Inhabitat is thrilled to announce that New York City urban farming group Brooklyn Grange is launching its first location outside the city — at Kearny Point in New Jersey. The location holds its own storied past: a former World War I and World War II shipbuilding yard in an industrial area that’s spiraled downhill, Kearny Point is undergoing redevelopment under recycling corporation Hugo Neu. Inhabitat caught up with Brooklyn Grange COO and co-founder Gwen Schantz and Hugo Neu CEO Wendy Neu to learn about the project’s emphasis on not only economic revitalization but also the restoration of local ecology.
At Kearny Point in New Jersey, Brooklyn Grange will help with landscaping, converting just under three acres of sod into a native meadow. In addition, the group will help transform about an acre of former parking lot space into a demonstration garden, complete with a vegetable patch and children’s play area, as well as host plant sales and educational workshops. Although none of these gardens will be on rooftops, Brooklyn Grange does plan to host green roof workshops using a Kearny Point roof.
Related: 6 urban farms feeding the world
Schantz told Inhabitat, “We know what these industrial spaces can become and how they can be reinvented. We’ve seen the evolution of the Navy Yard. When we talked to the people at Hugo Neu about their vision about Kearny Point, we really got it. It resonated with us.”
Neu is one of the people behind that vision. She told Inhabitat that Kearny Point, which is between the Hackensack and Passaic Rivers, was once a main economic driver for the area as “one of the most productive shipbuilding facilities in the world.” During World War II, 35,000 people worked on the 130-acre site. But after the war, the shipbuilding industry died in the United States. Hugo Neu acquired Kearny Point in the 1960s and dismantled ships, but that operation shut down around 1985. Until recently, Kearny Point was an industrial warehouse distribution facility.
“Hurricane Sandy was a defining moment for us because we were approximately four feet underwater. We’d never had any kind of issue with flooding. My late husband and I know climate change is coming and the environment is changing dramatically, and we had to think about what we were going to do with this site,” Neu told Inhabitat.
After her husband passed away suddenly, Neu joined forces with Steve Nislick, former Edison Properties CEO, with the goal of doing “something transformative.” The new vision for Kearny Point includes offices for startups, coworking spaces, and a waterfront opened to the public.
“The opportunity to take a heavy industrial site like this and integrate all the new technology – wind, solar, stormwater – and be able to show we can have people growing businesses without having to harm the environment but also actually improve it at the same time is, to me, a very compelling opportunity,” Neu said. Brooklyn Grange is “an indication of just what the possibilities are.”
The project’s native meadow serves as a prime example. According to Schantz, when people try to convert land into meadows or gardens, they sometimes kill what’s growing there with pesticides. Brooklyn Grange is taking a more natural approach: they’re suffocating grass and enriching the soil with the help of recycled materials, such as leftover cardboard from a nearby shipping company and wood mulch from a local tree service, both of which the urban farming group inoculated with blue oyster mushrooms. Once this process is complete, they’ll plant native flowers and grasses.
“Our approach is, let’s take this strip of land which has had a rough history along a railroad track, it has not been loved the way it could be, and give it a new lease on life and make it a place where insects and birds can feed and nest, and restore it the way it might have looked before there was a shipyard here,” said Schantz.
How will Kearny Point handle natural disasters in the future? Neu said that not only are they raising the site up two feet, they’re creating at least 25 acres of open space and putting in bioswales to boost the site’s resiliency.
“We’ll have underground parking that will serve as reservoirs for water that comes onto the site. We’ll remove as many impervious surfaces as possible, which is huge in terms of the amount that gets discharged into the Hackensack, and we’re going to do everything to improve the quality of what gets discharged,” said Neu. “I want to minimize our impact as much as possible. We have to be able to figure out how to have people prosper without destroying the environment and further degrading it.”
Brooklyn Grange’s first plant sale will be Sunday, May 20, from 10 a.m.to 4 p.m. “We’re really excited to be reaching out to our neighbors across the river,” Schantz said. “We know there’s already a culture of gardening here in the Garden State, and so we’re excited to bring some of our urban farming techniques and our general mindset of sustainable, organic gardening to the local community and hopefully get people excited about growing their own food.”
+ Brooklyn Grange + Hugo Neu + Kearny Point
Images courtesy of Valery Rizzo
under Gardening and Plants, New Jersey, News, Recycled Materials, Urban Farming
Gotham Greens Grows Into Metro Baltimore
STATE-OF-URBAN-AG: This is an artist concept of Gotham Greens rooftop greenhouse facility in the Queens, N.Y. The Baltimore system won’t be a rooftop design. Gotham Greens
Gotham Greens Grows Into Metro Baltimore
Brooklyn, N.Y., ag tech startup expands its urban greenhouse system to Maryland.
John Vogel | May 15, 2018
If your mental image of urban agriculture is of a food plot or garden between city buildings, you won’t recognize Gotham Greens, the high-tech agribusiness model now coming to metro Baltimore, Md. This rapidly growing ag tech startup, headquartered in Brooklyn, N.Y., will open its fifth state-of-the-art hydroponic greenhouse at an old steel mill site at Sparrows Point in southeast Baltimore.
The initial 100,000-square-foot greenhouse facility is expected to bring fresh branded competition to produce growers serving the Mid-Atlantic region by early 2019. The deal was announced recently by Tradepoint Atlantic, which operates the port logistical center. Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan noted that Tradepoint's location provides a competitive advantage for fresh food businesses to reach a significant Mid-Atlantic customer base.
Gotham Greens’ expansion to Baltimore makes it the third city in its network of high-tech urban greenhouses, after New York and Chicago. The facility will create more than 60 full-time jobs and bring a reliable, year-round, local supply of fresh produce to serve retail, restaurant and foodservice customers throughout the Mid-Atlantic, says Viraj Puri, the company’s CEO, and co-founder. The company, reportedly, has an additional 500,000 square feet of greenhouse under development in four U.S. states.
The system
Up to this point, Gotham Greens main production menu has been lettuce varieties, arugula, basil and vine-ripened cherry tomatoes. The climate-controlled farm will be powered by 100% renewable electricity and recycled irrigation water.
Puri says that the proprietary methods yield more than 30 times that of conventional farms, with higher levels of food safety and environmental sustainability. Gotham’s other greenhouses feature solar photovoltaic panels, LED lighting, passive ventilation and thermal curtains.
Gotham’s flagship greenhouse, built in Brooklyn in 2011, was the first commercial-scale urban greenhouse of its kind in the country. After opening new locations in New York, the company expanded to Chicago in 2015 by building the world’s largest rooftop farm. Once the Baltimore facility opens, Gotham Greens will own and operate 500,000 square-feet of advanced greenhouses across eight facilities in five states.
“We’re honored and humbled to join the rich heritage of Maryland farmers, growers and food producers,” Puri says. “Urban agriculture, at its core, is about reconnecting with the community through food, jobs, and economic development. To that end, we’ve found a great partner and are proud to be part of the American industrial turnaround story taking place at Tradepoint Atlantic.”
NBA Player Builds A Modern Alternative Farm In Oklahoma
NBA player Ekpe Udoh is keeping busy during the off-season.
NBA Player Builds Modern Alternative Farm In Oklahoma
MAY 25, 2018, BY LACEY LETT
NBA Player Builds A Modern Alternative Farm In Oklahoma
EDMOND, Okla. - NBA player Ekpe Udoh is keeping busy during the off-season.
He's back in his hometown of Edmond working on his new urban farm.
"Welcome to LGR Farms,” said Ekpe Udoh, owner of LGR Farms.
Ekpe Udoh stands inside his hydroponic garden located in south Edmond. Udoh is the first National Basketball Player to purchase and use a hydroponic vertical container farm.
A hydroponic container farm that grows vertical crops.
It's herbicide and pesticide free and uses filtered water instead of soil to grow leafy greens and herbs.
"For our crops, we will be doing butterhead lettuce, arugula, Swiss chard, spinach, collard greens, kale and romaine lettuce,” Udoh said.
Udoh started the process four years ago.
Since then, he's become an expert in modern farming.
After the seeds harvest, they grow on a vertical crop.
LGR Farms is high-tech, too, using an app to control the system.
"We can control the temperature, the water here on the table, the main towers," he said.
The main benefit?
A 40-foot shipping container can yield huge results.
"This probably has the footprint of an acre and a half, and I'm turning it over every four to six weeks and in the winter it's still growing,” Udoh said.
Starting in July, Udoh plans to sell to chefs, grocery stores and at the same time, give back to inner city school children.
"I'm from Edmond, Oklahoma, so we were afforded the luxury of a salad bar. Hopefully, I can introduce that into schools and give kids something else as a choice to be much healthier than what they might be eating,” he said.
A healthy lifestyle is something very important to Udoh.
Eventually, he'd like to have five of these shipping container farms in operation, adding in herbs and greens from all over the world.
"Find these powerful herbs that can be for medical or just for your food. Just make it taste better,” Udoh said. "Keep people dancing and eating salads."
It will take four to six weeks to yield the first crop, but plans to eventually produce 500 heads of lettuce a week.
Click here for more information.
Kimbal Musk, Elon Musk's Brother, On Mission To Revolutionize How Americans Eat
CBS NEWS May 12, 2018
Kimbal Musk, Elon Musk's Brother, On Mission To Revolutionize How Americans Eat
On a crisp Denver morning, middle school students were discovering how to develop a green thumb with the help of Kimbal Musk, the brother of Tesla CEO Elon Musk. In the 90s, he helped his older brother launch Zip2 and the company that would become PayPal. These days, the entrepreneur is on an entirely different mission.
"Real food is the new internet means that young entrepreneurs getting into food today, where they're bringing real food that just taste much better. That's food that you trust to nourish your body, trust to nourish the farmer and trust to nourish the planet is the opportunity of our generation," Musk told CBS News' Barry Petersen.
Kimbal Musk CBS NEWS
Musk still works with his brother's ventures Tesla and SpaceX. But his personal venture has become a life's work: replacing high-calorie foods with healthier ones. Musk always had an interest in cooking, attending culinary school after making it big in tech. But in 2001, he found purpose in tragedy.
"I graduated from cooking school just before 9/11. I woke up to the sounds of the planes hitting the building. I lived very close to the World Trade Centers and looked out the window, saw the towers fall, escaped that area was really intense and one of the hardest things I'd ever been through. But in that process I got invited to volunteer to cook for the firefighters," Musk said. "It taught me the power of community, taught me how food brings communities together, how real food can revitalize people even in the most traumatic circumstances."
Alongside his business partner, Hugo Matheson, Musk opened his first restaurant, The Kitchen, in 2004. After rave reviews, The Kitchen expanded to the Kitchen Restaurant Group, serving up high-end dining at Hedge Row and affordable farm-to-table dishes at Next Door.
Kimbal Musk's startup Square Roots turns shipping containers into vertical urban farms CBS
"Local to us primarily means knowing your farmer and trusting where your food comes from. And for us that Next Door that means a farmer gets to know us directly. So the drive here we get to know them we visit their farm," he said.
Musk wants to make sure that no matter where you live, a farmer is never too far away. He's trying to make that a reality with his Brooklyn startup Square Roots, which turns shipping containers into vertical urban farms that fit two acres of outdoor growing space into 320 square feet.
With the amount of American farmers declining steadily, Musk isn't just investing in the technology to move farming into the future, but in future farmers themselves. In 2011, Musk co-founded his non-profit Big Green, bringing edible and educational nourishment to schools that need it most.
Kimbal Musk with some of the students involved in his Big CBS NEWS
"The idea behind the learning gardens is to connect kids to real food. ... They'll take that back to their home. They may get their parents to buy more nutritious food at the grocery stores but they'll make better decisions for the rest of their lives around real food. We're not here to tell them what to do but we want them to know what real food is," Musk said.
Big Green is currently serving 460,000 students in seven states and the hope is to reach 1 million children by the year 2020.
"I would say at times as much as 90 percent of the kids have never put their hand in soil, have never pulled a carrot out of the ground, have never grabbed a cherry tomato off its vine," he said. "And when they do do that and they try it for the first time it's like a magic trick for them. ... Their senses come alive to understand what real food can taste like."
For kids like eighth-grader Paige Davis, Musk is planting the seeds of passion for real food.
"It just makes me happy to think that someone enjoyed planting that tomato and then I'm eating, like, their happiness," Davis said.
A whole new meaning to an old truism: You can be what you eat.
Are Container Farms The Future of Urban Agriculture?
Are Container Farms The Future of Urban Agriculture?
Launched in 2015, the start-up company Agricool, which grows strawberries in diverted shipping containers, today goes to the assault in Dubai. This type of urban agriculture project is a positive complement to conventional crops ....
Fabrice Pouliquen | Posted on 16/05/18
Agricool has one of its contents installed in the park of Bercy. - / Photo Agricool
In three years, the start-up Agricool, which grows strawberries in containers, has grown well. It has four containers that each produce seven tons of strawberries a year.
- Since it works, Agricool wants to deploy abroad in cities where his project makes sense. As in Dubai forced to import the strawberries that its population consumes. A first container Agricool is on the way and must arrive in the coming weeks.
- It is unlikely that these urban agriculture projects will ever be able to feed cities alone. But this complement to conventional farming is more and more welcome.
We had left Guillaume Fourdinier in December 2015, at the foot of a 30 m² maritime container just laid in the park of Bercy in Paris. This farmer's son, with his counterpart Gonzague Gru, had just turned him away to launch a first strawberry crop in the middle of Paris .
From a container to 1,500 m² of workshops
Three years later, Agricool , their start-up, grew up well. It is enough to realize to put a foot in the rear base of the company, 1,500 m² of workshops and offices at the bottom of a business area of La Courneuve (Seine-Saint-Denis). Agricool employs 55 people, including a team of agronomists, designers, and developers to further improve both the containers and the quality of strawberries produced.
"In December 2015, we were at the beginning of a bet, says Guillaume Fourdinier. We were happy with the taste of strawberries produced in this first container, but we had only a very low yield. Just enough to take out a tray a day. We still had a lot of technology to invent. "
Since then, Agricool has gleaned some certainties and spread its containers in the capital and its surroundings. "We have four in operation now, says Guillaume Fourdinier. At Parc de Bercy still, but also at Station F (13th) , Stade France and Asnières (Seine-Saint-Denis). In these boxes 12 meters long and 2.5 meters wide, strawberries grow vertically along towers placed in front of low-power LEDs (LEDs).
In these containers, the strawberries grow vertically along towers placed in front of light-emitting diodes (LEDs). - / Photo Agricool
Productivity, a settled business ...
Strawberries grown above ground and without seeing the light of day will tick some. "But strawberries with high nutritional value and very low carbon output", Guillaume Fourdinier replies. Agricool does not use any pesticides. "Just organic fertilizers and optimized LED technology that we have developed ourselves," he says.
The containers are supplied with electricity by Enercoop, a renewable electricity supplier. As for the water, it follows a closed circuit. Stored initially in a large tank, it is taken to drips placed above the towers, flows along the roots to be collected in gutters. She then arrives at a pump that takes care of bringing the water back to the tank of departure. "In other words, the water goes completely strawberry, we have very little loss, says the urban farmer. We use even less water here than in a greenhouse for example. "
As for productivity, it's a settled matter. The four containers make it possible to take out seven tons of strawberries each year. "Or 60 trays of strawberries a day," explains Guillaume Fourdinier. Until then, they had only been sold directly at the foot of the containers. But since this spring, they are also sold in two stores Monoprix, Beaugrenelle and Asnieres.
In short, it's a business that rolls. Agricool probably says it can still improve its technology. "But we will surely be working on other fruits and vegetables soon," he says.
And now strawberries produced in Dubai
Above all, Agricool wants to expand its horizons and not be limited to Paris and its suburbs. One of its containers went to sea last week. Head to Dubai in the United Arab Emirates where it should arrive within three weeks. "We thought for some time to develop abroad but we wanted to choose a city in which our mini urban farms would really make sense, says Guillaume Fourdinier. That is to say in a region where it is very difficult to produce locally, either because of the climate or because of the lack of space, and where most of the food consumed must be imported. In Dubai, strawberries come for most of the United States, France and Japan. The carbon footprint is deplorable and the prices exorbitant. "
This new container will take place in The Sustinable city , a futuristic neighborhood project in Dubai where already 2,500 inhabitants live. "They have all designed to have a carbon footprint closer to zero, says Guillaume Fourdinier bluffed by his visit. They are self-sufficient in energy, the sewage is filtered by plants, they produce fruits and vegetables locally in biodomes, bioclimatic greenhouses ... "
The perfect place for Agricool. The Parisian start-up is not putting pressure but hopes ideally to taste the first strawberries to the local population by the end of the year. And if this first experience abroad works, why not decline it in other parts of the world that import until now all the strawberries that their populations consume. For example, Guillaume Fourdinier cites Iceland and most major Asian cities, starting with Singapore.
Maybe not feeding the cities of tomorrow ...
Agricool is not the only start-up to have sniffed this vein of agricultural production in containers. In the Rennes region, Urbanfarm cultivates salads and aromatic herbs . The ECF company is also on the spot in Berlin as well as the vegetable box in Laval (Quebec) to name a few. The ADEME (Environment and Energy Management Agency)classifies these projects in the category of urban technological agriculture , one of the parts of urban agriculture, alongside vertical farms, greenhouses on roofs, aquaponics, above ground crops ...
Ideas abound but Jérôme Mousset, head of the service "forest, food and bioeconomy" at the Ademe, remains cautious. "For every project, it is important to make a global environmental assessment, objective, and analyze the strengths and weaknesses according to the local context," he says. Environmental analyzes show that the impact of transport is often lower than that of production when it is done out of season. In addition, technological urban agriculture alone will not be enough to feed cities one day. There will always be the question of volumes and this urban agriculture does not cover the entire category of food products. There are many vegetables, but few products of animal origin and cereals. As such, the preservation of agricultural land remains a priority issue. "
... But start-ups who have their place
If urban technological agriculture has no answer to everything, "it still has its place today, continues Jérôme Mousset, especially in regions of the world where climatic conditions or available space are not conducive to urban development. 'Agriculture. It can also recreate the link between consumers and producers, and because of its location, have a pedagogical vocation. "
A role on which also insists Luc Smessaert, vice-president of the FNSEA, first agricultural union, a farmer in the Oise and responsible for the #agridemain platform . "Many of the urban agriculture projects have a social dimension, either through direct sales or through the involvement of neighborhood residents or school groups," he observes.
Luc Smessaert also points to another reason for satisfaction in the development of urban farming solutions. "They bring start-ups to take an interest in agricultural issues," he says. Often, they are launched by young agronomists in teams with specialists in new technologies. These duets regularly lead to innovative solutions that benefit all agriculture. "
KEYWORDS: Planet Paris Agriculture startups innovation city dubai
Mill Creek, NJ Urban Farm Expands Greenhouses, Community Spirit
Mill Creek, NJ Urban Farm Expands Greenhouses, Community Spirit
May 24, 2018
Gateway Community Action Partnership Director of Agriculture and Food Initiatives Marcus Weaver, at left, with Bridgeton Mayor Albert B. Kelly, in front of two new greenhouses at Mill Creek Urban Farm Wednesday, May 23, 2018. The greenhouses were built with a $250,000 grant from the TD Charitable Foundation.
BRIDGETON — Two new greenhouses at the nonprofit Mill Creek Urban Farm will soon be filled with towering tomato and cucumber plants, grown hydroponically to provide year-round produce to food pantries, senior centers, restaurants and schools.
Built with a $250,000 grant from the TD Charitable Foundation, they were open for a tour and ribbon-cutting Wednesday. The farm is on the five-acre site of a former public housing project on Ronald Bowman Way, which used to be called Mill Street.
“I grew up here. My father and grandfather grew up on this street,” said Bridgeton Mayor Albert B. Kelly, president and CEO of the Gateway Community Action Partnership that runs the farm, now in its ninth season. “It’s a personal triumph to me to be able to utilize the street I once played on and lived on for something positive and productive for our community.”
Gateway CAP runs daycare, housing, family support and other programs for much of South Jersey and Philadelphia.
The farm started as a way to address food insecurity in the area, Kelly said. About 30 percent of the 24,505 people who live in Bridgeton live in poverty, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. That means they live on less than about $25,000 per year for a family of four.
Bridgeton's median household income was $35,417 in 2016.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture lists Bridgeton as a food desert, in spite of being located in a rural county with many farms. Being a food desert means at least 33 percent of the population has low access to a supermarket or large grocery store.
Some of what the farm grows is donated to CAP's emergency food pantry, senior centers, and soup kitchens, and some are sold to support the farm, said Marcus Weaver, Gateway CAP director of agriculture and food initiatives. The farm sells to the Bridgeton School District, local farm markets, and others.
“Our biggest customer is a broker supplying the North Jersey restaurant market,” Weaver said. “The farm is not set up as a farm stand or for retail. But a few people show up at the farm and ask, ‘What do you have today?’ We are happy to sell them whatever we have.”
The new greenhouses add 5,376 square feet of new growing space, Weaver said.
The farm previously had just three greenhouses, where it has grown lettuces and other salad greens, shiitake mushrooms, tomatoes, eggplants, broccoli, squash, green beans and melons. It also grows in about 1,300 EarthBoxes, an outdoor container gardening system that increases yield over conventional methods.
Weaver said produce grown hydroponically develop roots in a medium that includes ground-up coconut hulls. But the plants take all their nutrients from a solution in water.
Compared to traditional growing methods, hydroponic growing produces 8 to 15 times more product and takes one-tenth of the water, Weaver said. And it produces all year, rather than in a compact growing season.
The housing project was torn down about 30 years ago because the houses were sinking, Kelly said.
“(The land) laid vacant for 20 years, until we developed a relationship with the housing authority, started a container garden that’s now grown to greenhouses,” Kelly said.
Three-quarters of the new space will be used to produce tomatoes, and the rest will produce seedless cucumbers, Weaver said.
Warren DeShields, director of food services for Bridgeton Public Schools, said the district prepares 4,000 meals a day and buys produce from the farm.
Weaver said the farm is about more than just growing food.
“This work provides an opportunity for education, to be able to demonstrate how food grows,” he said, for visiting students and the general public.
The new production capacity will allow the farm to hire three new full-time workers, Kelly said.
“No previous farming experience necessary,” Kelly said. Applications are available on the website at www.gatewaycap.org.
Contact: 609-272-7219
Twitter @MichelleBPost
In my first job after college got paid to read the New York Times and summarize articles for an early online database. First reporting job was with The Daily Record in Parsippany. I have also worked in nonprofits, and have been with The Press since 1990.
Hydroponic Farm Coming To Downtown Shreveport, Louisiana
Hydroponic Farm Coming To Downtown Shreveport, Louisiana
Wednesday, May 23, 2018,
SHREVEPORT, LA (KSLA) -
406 Cotton Street is empty right now, but Michael Billings has big ideas for Cotton Street Farms.
The building is slated to become downtown Shreveport's first urban hydroponic farm, featuring lines of plants and vegetables growing vertically, water lines, and more.
"Hydroponic means growing plants without soil. We use a water system and put nutrients directly into the water," said Cotton Street Farms founder Michael Billings.
The plants don't need pesticides or herbicides.
People will be able to get the veggies delivered straight to their doorstep via an app and online market or pick it up at the building. It's truly a farm to table model.
"We're going to grow spinach, kale, lettuce, micro-greens, herbs, edible flowers," explained Billings.
Indoor, hydroponic farms are growing in popularity across the nation.
"The reason they are growing is that we can grow an enormous amount of produce in a very small area and we can feed a lot of people," Billings said.
Instead of waiting for vegetables to be picked in California, packaged, and sent to your grocery store days later, this indoor, hydroponic farm would get fresh vegetables to you in an hour.
"We cannot compete with farms nor do we want to. Hydroponics allows us to deliver in minutes or hours to urban citizens."
Billings said he lives downtown and loves the downtown community. His goal was to make cotton street farms a true piece of Shreveport. The business also plans to give back to social programs in the city.
''This is new to Shreveport, but we are very much following the example of others across the nation. I think its time for Shreveport to experience something new when it first comes out and not ten years later," he said.
There's still a lot of work to be done. Cotton Street Farms now has the building but still has to do things like buy equipment and establish the company and its marketing.
A harvest takes about 6 weeks and expects to see produce in four to six months.
Copyright KSLA 2018. All Rights Reserved.
Nine of America’s Largest Urban Farms
Nine of America’s Largest Urban Farms
April 24, 2018 | Trish Popovitch
The American urban farm comes in many guises but come it does. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, 800 million people worldwide practice urban agriculture. That accounts for between 15 to 20 percent of the world’s food supply. As urban ag continues to build momentum across all 50 states, the influence and scope of the urban farm is growing. Most of us think of less than a couple of acres when we think urban farm, yet urban farms are getting bigger. And some are getting really big. You know, given that whole city space constraint thing. Here are just nine of America’s larger city-based farming outfits (listed alphabetically).
1. Alemany Farm (San Francisco, CA – 4.5 Acres)
Although it has enjoyed several incarnations in its time, Alemany Farm of San Francisco was founded in 1995 when a youth group turned an urban lot into a community garden. Since then, the site has grown (and changed its name a few times) and become a hub for community education on growing your own food. The farm produced and distributed 20,000 pounds of food in 2016, all of which was given away for free to area residents. Even though the farm has enjoyed a 20 year life, 2017 will be the first year with paid staff.
2. D-Town Farm (Detroit, Michigan – 7 Acres)
In Detroit’s River Rouge Park lies D-Town, the Motor City’s largest urban farm. Here, using four hoop houses and row beds, the staff and volunteers grow and harvest seasonal vegetables using traditional methods. The farm began as a ¼ acre lot back in 2006 and has grown through cooperation and community effort. The farm enjoys a complex irrigation system that involves underground piping and hydrants. Funded by grant money and enjoying a 10 year lease from the city, D-Town Farm offers a farm stand, CSA and educational programming to the local community.
3. Metro Atlanta Urban Farm (Atlanta, Georgia – 5 Acres)
Metro Atlanta Urban Farm, in Atlanta, Georgia exists on donations and grant money alone as it tries to improve access to local food for local residents. Making the most of seasonal vegetables and multiple opportunities to harvest, Metro offers cool and warm weather crops. The farm is best known for its tomatoes and okra. Located on a five acre lot in College Park, food desert eradication is the focus of this urban nonprofit. The farm is located on a traditional farming plot and still has the original farmhouse from the 1880s.
4. Ohio City Farm (Cleveland, Ohio – 6 Acres)
A collaborative effort, Ohio City Farm is compromised of six acres of fertile land with five organizations sponsoring five different projects. Working cooperatively, the farm produces food for its weekly farm stand that takes place at Cleveland’s Riverview site providing fresh food access to urban residents and city workers. The farm also provides several area restaurants with produce such as beets, garlic, peppers, leafy greens and tomatoes. Part of the City Farm team is the organization Refugee Response. They help refugees farm the land, maintaining their own farming traditions while sharing their cultural produce with their new neighbors. Cultivating 150 types of vegetables annually, Ohio City Farm is growing economically and expanding its tenancies as it becomes a permanent part of the cityscape.
5. Rainier Beach Urban Farm (Seattle, Washington – 8 Acres)
A joint endeavor between the city’s parks department, Tilth Alliance and the Friends of Rainier Beach Urban Farm and Wetlands, Rainier Beach Urban Farm was founded in 2010 as Seattle’s first private farm on public land. Besides growing fruit and produce for area residents in greenhouses and ground plots, the folks at Rainier Urban Farm work to restore the wetlands habitat that just happens to run right through the center of the farm’s property. 2017 sees new programming facilities and access improvement to the farm and wetlands as the partners work together to use Seattle’s larger urban farm as a hub for sustainable education.
6. Real Food Farm (Baltimore, Maryland – 8 Acres)
Founded in 2009, Real Food Farm is a Baltimore non-profit operating on eight acres of city parkland (six contiguous with an additional two-acre site added in 2014). A program of the larger Civic Works organization, the team uses their hoop houses of fruit, vegetables and herbs to keep costs low while working towards a more sustainable local economy. They have produced 60,000 lbs of food and educated over 3000 people. Real Food Farm offers both a CSA and a mobile farmers’ market increasing access for local residents. Among their many programs, gardens and activities, the farmhouses a large gas heated greenhouse that is shared with the other members of the Farm Alliance of Baltimore City.
7. Springdale Farm (Austin, Texas – 4.83 Acres)
Glen and Paula Foore founded Springdale Farm in 2009 and grow 75 different types of fruits and vegetables using traditional methods. Comprised of 4.83 acres in East Austin, Springdale is a community hub for locavores. Like most urban farms, work is twofold: production and education. Originally, the property operated as a landscaping business and their former business employees simply transitioned to the new business. The Foores employ seven longtime employees. The farm hosts an annual tomato dinner and has won Edible Communities’ Local Hero award four times. Springdale Farm’s nonprofit arm Springdale Center is an educational program center for students to promote sustainable education and awareness.
8. Skarsgard Farms (Albuquerque, New Mexico – 40 Acres)
Skarsgard Farms was founded by Monte Skarsgard in 2003. Coming from a century old tradition of family farming, he knew how to put the river valley soil and water to best use. Skarsgard Farms offers a CSA and mobile delivery service, partnering with area businesses to increase product availability to their customers. With six greenhouses and a hydroponic operation, Skarsgard grows throughout the year producing seasonal warm and cold weather crops. The farm operates all its sales online and offers value-added hard cider from its apple crop.
9. Sunspot Urban Farm (Fort Collins, Colorado – 4.5 Acres)
Founded in 2008 by Amy Yackel and Rod Adams, Sunspot Urban is a neighbor friendly operation focused on building urban soil. They offer a farm share style CSA with a day’s work exchanged for a week of freshly harvested produce. Utilizing high tunnels, the couple extend the Colorado growing season while offering locals farm tours and workshops. The farm utilizes a ‘carbon farming’ method with the main goal being to create a carbon regenerative farm focused on growing nutrient rich vegetables. The couple appears to be succeeding, growing their CSA customers and finding time to conduct compost research for the USDA in between planting and harvesting the rows.
Local Entrepreneurs Bring Farming To The City With Urban Greens
Local Entrepreneurs Bring Farming To The City With Urban Greens
Hydroponic farm sells crops to co-op, restaurants
IOWA CITY — From the outside, the house at 1135 E. College St. in Iowa City does not appear to be a farm.
In their basement, entrepreneurs Chad Treloar and Ted Myers grow arugula, sunflowers, sweet corn, cilantro, broccoli, lettuce and several other varieties of baby green vegetables.
The co-owners of Urban Greens sell their crops — many of them grown year-round in a hydroponic greenhouse system — to New Pioneer Food Co-op, local restaurants and at the Iowa City Farmers Market.
Various greens are grown under full spectrum LED lights in a hydroponic system at Urban Greens in Iowa City on Wednesday, May. 9, 2018. (Stephen Mally/The Gazette)
Baby greens are small, nutrient-packed produce that can be used as an alternative to lettuce on sandwiches and burgers, blended into smoothies or included in tossed salads. They are harvested about three weeks after they germinate, well before they become mature plants.
“We started in March of 2017 with a small room in the basement,” Myers recalled. ”The walls were lined and we did baby greens. Then we dug up the backyard and planted baby greens outdoors.”
Myers said the decision to grow baby greens year-round meant expanding the growing space in the basement by taking down a concrete block wall.
“We’ve had a few years’ experience with hydroponics and we designed a system — making about 1,000 mistakes along the way,” he said. “Now, we feel like we have it to where we are in full production, which is conveniently when we are able to work outdoors again.”
Myers and Treloar purchased their hydroponic growing channels and related supplies from FarmTek in Dyersville. They buy their seeds in 10-pound and 25-pound bags from Johnny’s Seeds in Maine and Mountain Valley Seed in Utah.
Hydroponic growing uses burlap as a growing medium, removing the need for soil and eliminating soil-borne diseases and pests, weeds and the use of herbicides and pesticides.
A water tank contains all the nutrients required to grow the baby greens. The channels are linked to the water tank with tubing, which carries the water to the plants and the channels drain the excess water.
LED lighting and fans are used to create and maintain the proper indoor growing environment. All the compost from the indoor production is saved and used in the outdoor plots of lettuce and other produce.
Ted Myers, co-founder, plants salanova lettuce in beds outside at Urban Greens in Iowa City on Wednesday, May. 9, 2018. (Stephen Mally/The Gazette)
Urban Greens’ base baby greens product is what Myers and Treloar call their “superfood mix.”
“We take the baby greens of broccoli, kale, bok choy, cabbage, radish and some garnet mustard. We mix that all together to create something that has a lot of nutrients, color and a lot of flavor,” Myers said.
“We are adding more exotic greens to that, like arugula, for off shoots like a bold and spicy mix. There are a few different routes that we can take.”
Myers and Treloar are trying to minimize the time before harvest with different lighting and watering techniques to adjust the growing climate,
Treloar said the challenge with hydroponics system and the limited growing space is to make the process as efficient as possible.
“By removing soil from the equation, you are developing a growing environment where you can maximize the rates of growth, keep the products cleaner, and it requires less processing as you harvest it,” he said. “These types of efficiencies are important when it is reflected in pricing. We want to compete in pricing with massive farms that produce lettuce and greens in California that are shipped here.”
Myers said Urban Greens’ existing operation is a prototype that he and Treloar want to replicate to expand production. They plan to add a detached garage at the back of their location and use it to double their hydroponic year-round indoor production.
“Once we have maximized indoor and outdoor production on this property, we are looking to purchase another property with a house in Iowa City,” Myers said. “We want to acquire other properties around the center of the city close to delivery points so we can cut down on transportation costs.”
The additional properties also will enable Urban Greens to provide room and board to employees who will manage the household and also keep up with operations, Myers said.
“That house manager could also be the rental property manager,” he said. “Each property could generate revenue from the (growing) operation as well as the renters.”
Treloar said he and Myers believe the food system of the future will involve consumers having a direct relationship with the food that they eat day to day.
“It seems like the most realistic way to do that is incorporate growing in or near your living space,” he said. “That might involve space that is wasted like a storage room or your backyard, which you spend time mowing.
“It’s not just a business model, but a sustainable idea and a lifestyle model.”
Myers and Treloar hope to purchase similar properties in larger cities, adding more production and expanding Urban Greens’ employment and client base.
Urban Farmer Jon Walsh Finds Fertile Ground In Tokyo
Jon Walsh stands in a community garden. Photo: Steve Morin
Urban Farmer Jon Walsh Finds Fertile Ground In Tokyo
May 20, 2018
By Joan Bailey TOKYO
Seven years ago, Jon Walsh watched as earthquakes shook his home country of New Zealand and his current home in Japan. Like many, his mind turned to disaster-preparedness; however, his train of thought took a different track: food security.
He planted a garden and found the 6 x 1-meter space produced more than his family could eat. Inspired, Jon decided to add urban farming workshops and garden creation to the existing menu of services offered by Business Grow, his company that specializes in writing, editing, and marketing services. Japan Today talked with Jon to learn more about urban farming and what his vision is for the future of it in Tokyo and beyond.
How would you describe your work as an urban farmer?
My objective is to make urban farming sexy – something that people don’t necessarily think they should do, but something they want to start because it is attractive and they understand the benefits of it. My underlying goal is to encourage the younger generation to get into urban farming because let’s face it, they are the future.
I focus on showing people how to grow healthy food – minus chemicals – in the city, and recycling where possible. I don’t just grow food; I provide urban farming training for individuals, families, students, companies, universities, such as Lakeland College, and organizations like Social Innovation Japan. The trainings are also supported by consulting services and an expanding range of resources that includes articles, how-to guides, lesson materials and self-learning packs. These all help people learn and pass on key food growing skills.
I strongly hope my work inspires people to start growing food in ways that can make it a viable livelihood." Photo: Steve Morin
"How does urban farming fit with the concept of sustainability?
I see urban farming as crucial in the overall picture of global sustainability. If done correctly (i.e. without chemicals), it only produces good: good food, strengthened communities, better personal and environmental health, and self-sufficiency. Plus, if there’s a natural disaster, that homegrown food could save our lives.
Urban farming seems new to many people not because these skills were "lost," but because they were never taught them in the first place. This is a big deal because food means life. Taking control of our food supply allows us to take control of our health because so much of the food currently consumed is produced in factories and laced with chemicals.
You have many different projects underway – rooftop gardens at hotels and offices, school gardens and food-focused CSR programs, which donate some of the harvest to food banks. Where do you see the greatest potential?
Hotel and office gardens. Landing the Grand Hyatt Tokyo organic garden project was a huge milestone. As a first garden installation project, it was a significant confidence booster and triggered a lot of interest.
Office gardens have a different dynamic from school or home gardens and present a unique challenge. My plan this year is to encourage and show office staff in large office buildings how to set up rooftop gardens. Over time, each company would have their own corporate garden where staff would visit during lunch breaks and after work to tend and grow food.
The space would become a fragrant, colorful garden. Staff from different offices would swap gardening tips and tools, share food and create bonds. At the end of the evening, workers would go home with vegetables they grew, solid evidence of the success of a true urban farming project.
Jon Walsh gives a seminar at Lakeland College. Photo: Daniel Calvert
Jon Walsh conducts an event at Social Innovation Japan. Photo: Social Innovation Japan
What effect do you think your work could have on farming as a livelihood in the city?
I strongly hope my work inspires people to start growing food in ways that can make it a viable livelihood. Space is, of course, a key factor as it determines yield. I am hoping that, particularly here in Japan, the falling population will free up more land in towns and cities that could be turned into community gardens. Coupled with some of the stunningly creative ideas for vertical and indoor farming out there, this would also enable these places to become more self-sustaining.
What is your vision for the future of food and Business Grow?
I would love to run this type of business in my home city of Auckland. In many suburbs, almost every house has a lawn but not every house has a garden. That means every street, as well as offices, hotels, hospitals and shops with safe rooftops and surrounding spare space would be an opportunity to grow a business like this.
I also want to see fresh, free, healthy food growing on every street that anyone walking by can pick. I want to see schools teaching comprehensive food growing programs, and companies receiving subsidies and tax deductions if they run their staff through urban farming programs. I would like people to realize that growing food is one of the most positive and impacting things we can do to improve our world, and it starts with the food we decide to put on our plates.
The bottom line is that our food should be nurturing, strengthening and healing us. Every step in the process of sharing the importance of producing and sharing real food is important, because small acts, when multiplied by millions of people, can transform the world.
- EXTERNAL LINK
- http://www.businessgrow.net/
© Japan Today
The Big Plans of Barry Benepe
Over the course of his long career, Saugerties’ Barry Benepe has had a beneficial impact on the quality of life in our cities and towns. His greatest contribution is perhaps the founding, with colleague Bob Lewis, of Greenmarket, the network of New York City farmers’ markets that began in 1976.
The Big Plans of Barry Benepe
Barry Benepe (photo by Dion Ogust)
Over the course of his long career, Saugerties’ Barry Benepe has had a beneficial impact on the quality of life in our cities and towns. His greatest contribution is perhaps the founding, with colleague Bob Lewis, of Greenmarket, the network of New York City farmers’ markets that began in 1976. The rest is history: New York City now has 70 market days – some locations, such as Union Square, have two or more markets a week – and the trend has spread to cities and towns all over America.
Benepe, who looks amazingly fit for age 89 – he still climbs the stairs to his fourth-floor walk-up apartment in Greenwich Village – earned degrees from Williams College and MIT, with a stint at Cooper Union in between. He is a licensed architect who worked at several architectural and planning firms starting in the 1950s. In the early 1960s, he was a planner in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, England, designing and overseeing the engineering of a series of pedestrian walkways and public squares; it was a radical departure from the job he was hired to do – design new highways and malls – but won the support of the municipality.
Back in America, he did design and planning work for New York City’s urban renewal agency, creating plans for the Upper West Side. By then, planning had evolved from Robert Moses’ brutal slum clearance, and the projects that Benepe worked on sought to rehabilitate existing buildings for low-income housing and preserve others, as well as tear down some tenement buildings on the basis of their poor design. He created a design that would integrate the American Museum of Natural History and other institutions into the neighborhood and streetscape, made renderings of multifunctional street amenities and benches and designed ways to improve that area’s walkability. While some of his plans sat on the shelf (one of the frustrations of the municipal planner is that he or she lacks the political clout and administrative tools to get the job done), decades later certain elements became reality.
In 1968, Benepe brought his planning expertise to Newburgh, when he was hired as the city’s first planner. He discovered that the Newburgh Urban Renewal Agency was tearing down chunks of the early-19th-century streets that had attracted him to the city in the first place. He fought for plans that would harmonize with the existing neighborhood and save rather than destroy the historic buildings. He was successful in proposing a mixed-income housing project and spearheaded the creation of the East End Historic District, which stopped the bulldozers and saved many buildings of historic significance, such as the Dutch Reformed Church, the County Courthouse and several homes along Grand and Montgomery Streets.
Benepe’s passion for historic preservation manifested in two books: Early Architecture in Ulster County, commissioned by the Junior League of Kingston, and Newburgh Revealed, a survey of outstanding Victorian architecture, including buildings that had been torn down by urban renewal, with photographs by John Bayley and Benepe and text by Arthur Channing Downs, Jr. and Benepe.
In the late 1970s, he started spending time in Woodstock and had a hand in creating its first zoning map, which incorporated contour lines, floodplains and water bodies. It was at this time that he hired Bob Lewis to work at his planning firm. The two men began talking about how to save the farmland that was vanishing around them: a conversation that ultimately led to the founding of Greenmarket in New York City.
Today, Benepe and his wife, Judith Spektor, divide their time between their home in Greenwich Village, which he has had for decades, and their Saugerties farmhouse, bought in 1983. Married three times (Benepe notes that the twists and turns of his career were in some instances determined by his relationships), he has five children. His son Adrian followed in his father’s footsteps, serving as New York City’s parks commissioner for eleven years (currently he is senior vice president and director of city parkland for the Trust for Public Land). Benepe remains active in local planning efforts, serving as vice-chair of Saugerties’ Comprehensive Planning Committee and a member of its Historic Preservation Commission. He is also a founder and active organizer of the Saugerties Farmers’ Market. Almanac Weekly’s Lynn Woods recently interviewed Benepe.
You were born in 1928 and grew up in Gramercy Park. What did your parents do, and what were your childhood and student years like?
My mother was an artist who did fashion illustration, and my father had an embroidered-linen business on Madison Square. His company also imported Madeira wine from Portugal. I went to Friends’ Seminary, walking to school through a neighborhood dating from the mid-19th century: an exposure that probably explains why I have always been attracted to older parts of the city. I later went to St. Andrew’s, a boarding school in Delaware, then attended Williams College, where I initially majored in Economics and Spanish because I thought I would go into my father’s business. I took an art class in my junior year, which got me interested in European culture, and switched my major to Art History.
My dad paid for me to spend the summer in Europe; I traveled around on a bike with a roommate, staying in hostels. The influence was pretty profound: Amiens Cathedral impressed me, because even though it was so massive, the columns met the floor on a human scale. On a later trip, I saw Le Corbusier’s Ronchamp Chapel, which is extraordinary.
I entered a painting and a mixed-media piece into a student art show in my senior year, and both won First Prizes. I did stage design for the theater and worked on the class musical with Stephen Sondheim, who was a fellow student. After graduating from Williams, I went to Cooper Union. My father was really encouraging: When I was a child, he’d always take me to his office on Saturday and give me art materials. He had a resident artist who designed his printed cottons, and he had him teach me art. My mother gave me all her drawing materials and was a big influence also. I had an older brother who did go into the family business, so I was off the hook.
You were first exposed to planning principles at Cooper Union.
One of the basic courses I took at Cooper was Architectural Rendering, taught by Robert Stein, who was a member of the International Congresses for Modern Architecture, an interdisciplinary group of architects and artists who were following Le Corbusier. We would meet in the evenings at his office and discuss planning principles. I was part of a team project in which we had to design an outdoor museum. My task was to draw the site plan and coordinate the location of the buildings; even then I was doing planning, though architecture was the focus.
Stein talked about how to define communities in terms of their population. Planning intrigued me because it involved people and real life. Space can have a profound emotional impact, even if it’s not occupied. There’s a highrise by Catalan architect Ricardo Bofill in Montparnasse, in Paris, that works with classical forms in a modern way. The building rises on classical columns and the scale is massive, but at the bottom of the building, people are having a good time running around. It works in a human way. Whereas the Barbican Center, in London, is dead.
You made a significant art purchase when you were at Cooper Union.
One of my teachers told me about a show at the Sidney Janis Gallery, so I went. The artist was Willem de Kooning, and I wanted to buy a small pastel priced at $350, entitled Woman. I only had $200 in my bank account, so Sidney said I could have it for that. I learned later I was the only buyer except for the Museum of Modern Art. De Kooning’s studio was in back of my loft, which was on the top floor and had a skylight; I never met him, but would see him painting. I later sold the pastel for $5,000. Recently it was featured on the cover of a brochure for an auction at Sotheby’s and was sold for $3.2 million.
What brought you to MIT? Any interesting summer jobs during this time?
One of my teachers suggested I apply to MIT, so I left Cooper after my second year (and never consulted my father; he was furious). I went to Morristown, New Jersey one summer to work on a housing project designed by Abraham Geller, who studied under Marcel Breuer. I was impressed with his approach: His ranch-style houses had low shed or peaked roofs and were connected to the garage or a carport with a breezeway, and he varied the texture of the board exteriors, which were vertical and horizontal, and painted them in earth colors. He also sited the houses so they fitted the land well. Part of my job was shaping the land, which I’d rake, like Rodin doing a sculpture.
One of the lecturers at MIT was Buckminster Fuller, and Carl Koch was a teacher of Architecture who designed a housing project in which the houses had a glass gable end, from the peak to the ground, outside of Cambridge. I took a course in Planning and left with a degree in Architecture, graduating in 1955.
What were some aspects of your plans for the Upper West Side?
The plan that encompassed West 86th, Central Park West, West 96th and Columbus Avenue had a three-pronged approach based on conservation, especially along Central Park West, rehabbing the brownstones on the side streets and redevelopment of Columbus Avenue. We tried to convert rooming houses into single-family homes. I was doing propaganda for urban renewal – making before-and-after renderings that showed a room with a single lightbulb, which after rehab had a modern elegant bedroom with good daylight.
Some of the tenements were bought by the New York City Housing Authority and converted into apartments, which was the most successful low-income housing because it was integrated into the existing housing. I made models of high-rises with glass fronts that weren’t great. We created pedestrian walkways that were set back 100 feet from the avenue, which didn’t make sense; later we refocused the sidewalk back to the avenue, to emphasize the traditional retail component. I also had open spaces created mid-block between the sides of the buildings. It didn’t happen in this project, but the concept has been adopted in the last 30 years.
What are your ideas for affordable housing?
When I was in Newburgh in 1968, I designed a housing project for single-person houses. I called them patio houses, since each had a veranda. The problem with public housing is the design is separate from the city, and there’s no frontage on the street. The developers didn’t create any ground-floor use, where people could sit outside and have a barbecue.
What was different about your experience in England?
Newcastle-upon-Tyne was unique because enormous numbers of people walked to the center or took buses. We linked the walkways to the center, the heartblood of the city; and we valued the historic architecture, including stairs that went down to the waterfront. All that history was still there. In England they take planning seriously; here it’s seen as advisory, with developers making the determination.
How did you learn about Newburgh?
I read about Newburgh in The New York Times and was intrigued by the photos of cobblestone streets; it was a hotbed of Romantic 19th-century architecture. I was hired by the city manager as the first city planner. John Stillman, who came from a lot of money – his family had given money for Palisades Park – was the director of urban renewal. He’d been hired through the Democrats and was a friend of Hubert Humphrey.
I learned about the Hudson River School of painting and landscape architecture and how that tradition was represented in Newburgh, and I found out on the job that it was being destroyed. I went into the houses, which were pretty much owned by black people, such as the Samuel Hodge funeral home on Montgomery, designed by Calvert Vaux for W. E. Warren in 1857. It was described by professor George Tatum as “the most outstanding of Vaux’s residential designs in the United States.” These people were middle-class black families who had moved to Newburgh early on, and the owners were proud of their homes. There were still remnants of professionalism and a solid middle-class community, but people were moving out to the Town of New Windsor.
What were some of your ideas?
Part of Colden Street had been torn down when I got there, and I brought in the developers Bogdanoff and Tangredi, who worked in Westchester, to show how the waterfront could be built. The city manager was very supportive and arranged a meeting with mayor George McNeally. After McNeally refused to meet with the developers, they concluded, “We know when we’re not wanted.”
I designed Palatine Square, a public space fronting the monumental 1835 Dutch Reformed Church. My design served to integrate the historic structure with three existing buildings around a square with a view of the Hudson; parking was provided underground. Unfortunately, it was never built. [Instead, the new public library was constructed with little regard for the adjacent church, which is now in a desperate state of neglect and serves as a backdrop for parked cars.]
Rosen Associates had produced a plan in 1966 that would have leveled the entire East End, which Stillman supported. After a public hearing at which I spoke about the value of 33 historic buildings slated for demolition, Stillman said, essentially, “Drop dead.” The Federal Housing Act had just been amended to require urban renewal plans to take into account historic resources, which the Rosen plan did not do. One of the Republican members of the City Council supported my plan for the East End, because retaining the buildings meant there would be less pressure to relocate people.
Was racism a factor in making these decisions?
In 1970 I was living on Grand Street, and an interracial couple wanted to get married in a public park, where there was a natural amphitheater of evergreens. They had a permit, but at the last minute the city prevented them from having the wedding. I said, “You can have it on my lawn,” which they did. I had a sailboat, and I later heard from the head of the Planning Board, who was a member of the Yacht Club, something disturbing. A county legislator, who was head of the Yacht Club, had told the members, “Benepe wanted to become a member of the Yacht Club, but I told him I didn’t want him or his nigger friends here.”
Wow, that’s terrible. And this was in the early 1970s. Did anything positive come out of your plans?
Mario Cuomo was wrong when he championed the people in Queens who didn’t want low-income housing in Forest Hills Gardens. I proposed that the Lake Street District low-income project in Newburgh planned for the West Side of the city include middle-class housing and shopping. Mid-Hudson Patterns for Progress enlarged my project to three times the size and made it work. The state wanted to reroute a proposed arterial to the west, but I opposed that, and lobbied to keep Route 9W as an avenue and create a greenway that links to the waterfront.
After your job was eliminated by the new city manager, you didn’t go away.
With others, I started the Greater Newburgh Arts Council to carry through a plan for the East End Historic District. We produced an alternate plan entitled Newburgh Revealed, which was funded by the National Trust and New York Council of the Arts. Jack Present, who took over from Stillman, wanted to tear down the Dutch Reformed Church. That plan led to the creation of the Historic District by the State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation, one of the earliest state-designated Historic Districts.
You and Bob Lewis had a great idea: starting urban farmers’ markets as a way to keep local farms in business. How did you actually make it happen?
We had a model in Syracuse, which we read about in The New York Times. I got in touch with Susan Snook, director of the Syracuse Chamber of Commerce, who started the market, and found it was very successful. We went to foundations to fund a feasibility study and presented a proposal to the Council of the Environment of New York City, a nonprofit run by city agencies and businesses. I became their consultant and the head of the newly formed Greenmarket. My role was to raise money to pay my salary.
An employee of the Kaplan Foundation suggested using a lot near her house, on 59th Street and Second Avenue, which was used by the police to park their cars; I had to meet with a lot of people to make this happen. The market opened in 1976, and the locale was ideal because Bloomingdale’s and Alexander’s department stores were a block away. I was in charge of publicity, sending out news releases, since there was no money for ads. The TV networks covered the story as a wrap-up on the weekend news. The word was out big-time.
The next year two additional markets opened in the city, including one at Union Square. The park was dying on its feet; drug traffic had taken over, and the adjoining stores were closing. After seeing the market at 59th Street, the head of the Manhattan Planning Office asked if we could open a market at the Square as a way to help save the neighborhood. I said, “Sure, if you can get the required permits from the Traffic and Highway Departments.” We got them, and the first few years were dismal.
But people began writing about us. Bob also opened a market in Harlem, partnering with Harlem Teams for Self-Help, and got writer John McPhee to work at the market behind a stand, which led to a story published in The New Yorker entitled “Giving Good Weight.” “Giving Good Weight” was read into the Congressional Record by a congressman from California. The farmers’-market movement went national.
You’re currently active in planning efforts in Saugerties. What are the challenges?
I’ve spoken to the woman who runs the HUD office in Saugerties, and she said the waiting list for low-income housing runs into the hundreds. There’s a great need and a lot of resistance. Although there is a provision in the zoning law that stipulates ten percent of new housing in conservation subdivisions should be affordable, no developers have adopted this. The provision allows for cluster planning, which creates an average zoning density for a given parcel, saving open space and allowing for ribbons of open space connecting development; but no such developments have yet been built. There’s also a proposal by the town to allow illuminated moving-image signs. I’ve done drawings showing both how bad they would look and how much better the normal permitted signs appear.
Any suggestions on how to change this mindset?
We should go back to the 19th-century roots of the Hudson River School of painting, architecture and landscape architecture. Those artists in the 1850s had a vision of nature and architecture working together that’s very relevant today. One positive effort is the creation of the Saugerties Farmers’ Market, which connects people to the land and saves working farms.
The Saugerties Farmers’ Market opens its 17th season on Saturday, May 26, from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. at the Cahill Elementary School parking lot at 115 Main Street in Saugerties. For more information, visit www.saugertiesfarmersmarket.com.
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A Revolution In Farming
Caroline Katsiroubas/Freight Farms
May 21, 2018
On a recent walk one afternoon in Manhattan, I stumbled upon a shipping container. Parked on a small patch of concrete next to a subway exit in Soho, the steel box took up about the same amount of space as several parked cars. It was noticeable for its novelty but otherwise unobtrusive. I peered inside and saw electric pink lights and column after column of leafy greens.
The shipping container, it turns out, contained a hydroponic farming system capable of producing between two to four tons of produce each year. I turned the corner to the other side of the container and was promptly handed a bag of dinosaur kale, plucked just the day before from inside that very shipping container.
Have you seen the #urbanfarm growing in #NYC? It’s on the corner of Lafayette and Houston St. until May 10th! #wsjfuturefest #verticalfarm
This particular container was created by a company called Freight Farms. According to its website, the box, called a Leafy Green Machine, "is capable of growing lettuces, herbs, and hearty greens at commercial scale in any climate or location." Produce can be grown year-round, using less than five gallons of water a day.
The farms are hydroponic systems, which means the plants are grown in liquid nutrients rather than in soil. The low water usage of the containers is partially due to the fact that leftover water gets recirculated. The neon pink lighting I noticed were the LED lamps that provide the plants with the right amount of light and can even affect how the plant looks and tastes. The light tends to appear pink or purple because chlorophyll, the pigment in plants that soaks up energy from light, absorbs red and blue light.
While the concept of shipping container farms was novel to me, they aren't new — and Freight Farms is far from the only company selling these farms-in-a-box to hopeful growers. Local Roots, Modular Farms, and Growtainer are just a few of the other major players in the space. Though these farms seem a natural fit for urban environments that are short on space, they aren't just cropping up in New York City. One farmer purchased a shipping container farm for her plot of land in Montana — a place with significantly more space than downtown Manhattan — because she says it allows her to grow fresh food year-round despite Montana's cold winters. Shipping containers are also getting parked in the Arctic, allowing people to grow fresh produce in the frigid climate and avoid the high costs and long waits associated with shipments from far-away farms. Furthermore, the food they are getting is more nutrient dense, as food can lose up to 45 percent of its nutritional value during transport.
Recently, NASA awarded a grant to Freight Farms and Clemson University to look into the possibility of growing food in space. Freight Farms says the innovations "could also be applied to other industries in need of a stable food supply, such as disaster relief, military bases, mining, and offshore industries." The Washington Post's Maura Judkis pointed out that "the flexibility and scalability of the farms has huge implications for food desserts" as well.
While these farms boast compactness, transportability, ready availability, and sustainability, there are challenges associated with them. Though shipping container farms seemingly make it easy for novice farmers to become green thumbs, these farms aren't an inexpensive investment — and it isn't always paying off, Vox reported recently:
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 is littered with the corpses of vertical-farming startups that thought they could beat the odds (though several are still alive and kicking). [Vox]
Another issue is that not all fruits and veggies can be easily grown in a shipping container system. "Hydroponics and controlled-environment agriculture lends itself to certain types of produce, like highly perishable leafy greens, salads, herbs, and vining crops like tomatoes, cucumbers, and peppers," Viraj Puri, CEO of Brooklyn-based urban farming company Gotham Greens, told The Wall Street Journal. "But a lot of other ag staples can't be grown in a commercially profitable way, like grains, root vegetables, and tropical fruit." Puri predicts that these shipping container farms would be more of a complement to traditional farms rather than a replacement.
But even still, with a projected 2.4 billion more mouths to feed by 2050, an alternative source of fresh produce is certainly a mouthwatering prospect.
of The Week magazine.
Is it Really Safe To Eat Food Grown In Urban Gardens?
I wanted to start a vegetable garden in my backyard. But my yard is in Brooklyn, a land of street garbage, truck exhaust, and stray cats. So I decided to figure it out: Was it really safe to grow food there?
Is It Really Safe To Eat Food Grown In Urban Gardens?
© Gunmanphoto/Shutterstock
I wanted to start a vegetable garden in my backyard. But my yard is in Brooklyn, a land of street garbage, truck exhaust, and stray cats. So I decided to figure it out: Was it really safe to grow food there? I had no idea that the rabbit hole I burrowed in urban gardens would lead to dead cows in Georgia, a global contamination meeting in Sweden, and the strange price we pay to make sure kids don’t catch on fire.
I started by calling Murray McBride, a professor at Cornell University who researches contamination, to find out if city gardens are really safe. According to McBride, I should be worried about one main thing:
“We found lead to be the biggest problem,” he told me. “There can be high concentrations of lead even in the garden beds.”
Making things with this toxic metal is a bit passé, but lead doesn’t go away. The lead painted in houses and used in gasoline and industry is still floating around in dust and landing in backgrounds. But there’s a twist: plants don’t generally take this lead up through their roots.
“It’s not in the lettuce. It’s in the dirt that may stick to the lettuce,” another scientist named Sally Brown would tell me later. So I should use compost and wash my plants before eating them, McBride explained. I had my answer. Or so I thought.
“So I should just buy compost at the gardening store?” I asked.
“Well … a lot of soil in those stores isn’t well regulated,” McBride told me. “Don't trust topsoil. And make sure you’re not buying sewer sludge.”
“… What?”
© Devan King/The Nature Conservancy
McBride told me that sanitation plants take sewage sludge, clean it up a bit, and sell it as fertilizer. One popular brand of fertilizer, for instance, is sewer sludge from Milwaukee that’s sold around the country. These “biosolids,” as they’re called, can have pharmaceuticals, lead, toxic metals, and fire retardants in them. Safe amounts … maybe.
Hundreds of people who live near places where farmers dump biosolids have complained that the biosolids made them sick. Andy McElmurray, a dairy farmer in Georgia, fertilized his fields with biosolids. He grew hay in the fields and fed it to his cattle. Hundreds of cows got sick and died. McElmurray said the biosolids must have been tainted with industrial waste from nearby factories, poisoning the cows. He argued his case in court … and won.
“The administrative record contains evidence that senior EPA officials took extraordinary steps to quash scientific dissent, and any questioning of the EPA's biosolids program,” the court ruled.
I officially wanted to know more. Are these biosolids really that dangerous?
“You should talk to Robert Hale about it,” McBride told me. “He’s one of the world experts on a lot of these chemicals.”
So I called Hale, an environmental chemistry professor at the College of William & Mary who researches pollution.
USDA/Public Domain
Hale told me that he’s analyzed biosolids and found all kinds of contaminants.
“They found flame retardants in this stuff in 2000,” he said. “And they’re still in there.” These chemicals are used to make stuff not catch on fire, and a lot of people are worried about their health and environmental effects. The EPA says they may cause learning disorders, thyroid disorders, and cancer.
And this stuff isn’t just in gardens. Most biosolids are spread over farmland. In fact, about half the sewage sludge in the country is applied to farmland (though generally farmland used to grown stuff like soybeans for fuel and animal chow rather than human food). Hale has even found flame retardants in Antarctica.
“Is that … a problem?” I asked. “Are biosolids safe?”
“That’s kind of the six million dollar question,” he answered. Nobody’s done enough research to know for sure how these chemicals affect people, or how many chemicals is too many. It wasn't really the answer I was hoping for.
“Should I be worried?” I asked. “Should the government step in?”
“The government is part of this,” Hale answered.
© From water to trees to bees, there are a lot of natural elements that go into making our food that aren't listed on nutrition labels. PHOTO: Chris Helzer/TNC
The governnment actually makes a lot of these biosolids; they sell them and give them to farmers. “We’ve got this viewpoint in this country that things are safe until proven dangerous,” he added.
Hale says that other countries are more concerned. He once gave a talk in Sweden where experts from around the world met to discuss contamination. They were banning a particular flame retardant.
“They were congratulating themselves on how they solved the problem on a global basis,” Hale said. “I stood up and said, “Uh guys? All you have to do is look at the production statistics. We use 95 percent of it in North America, and we’re still using it.” A few jaws in the audience dropped.
I wasn’t concerned about urban gardens anymore. Instead, I was feeling the weight of yet another massive global problem settling onto my shoulders. Did I really have to live in a contaminated world now?
Still, something itched. This all seemed so extreme and, I don’t know, oddly cinematic. Was the situation really so dire? Was there something oddly familiar about this storyline? And would it make for a good Mr. Robot meets Farmville style show?
I wanted to talk to another expert before I made up my mind. So I called up Sally Brown, a University of Washington professor who, you guessed it, also researches this stuff.
We chatted about urban gardens as I wondered how I’d bring up biosolids. Fortunately, she started telling me about a great urban gardening program in Washington and mentioned that it used biosolids.
“Yeah,” I said, trying not to sound too excited. “I heard biosolids are dangerous.”
“They’re not,” she said flatly. “People always think they are, but they’re not.”
I wasn’t convinced.
“I talked to Robert Hale,” I said.
“He’s made a lot of his fame and fortune by telling people they’re going to die if they eat biosolids,” she said. “You can make a name for yourself screaming the sky is falling.”
© K Martinko
Brown didn’t exactly disagree with Hale’s research. She told me that, yes, there are flame retardants and other chemicals in sewage sludge, but the levels are kept low (Hale isn't so sure about that), they aren’t going into the plants, and nobody really knows if they can make people sick. Besides, the chemicals in sewage come mostly … from our houses.
“They’re in our TVs, they’re in our furniture, they’re in our laptops,” she said. “They used to be in kids’ pajamas. The concentration of this stuff in dust in your home is much higher than in biosolids.”
Brown pointed out that if your kid chews on his flame retardant pajamas, he’s getting exposed to “several million times” more of the stuff than is in biosolids. Hale actually told me something similar: a couple decades ago, a study found that flame retardants in Swedish women’s breast milk have been increasing exponentially over a ten year period. Then someone tested American women.
“The levels were ten times higher,” Hale said. The flame retardants probably came from indoor dust. Hale agrees that there are generally more of these contaminates inside than in biosolids; he's just worried about them everywhere.
I was not feeling particularly reassured.
“Wait, so should I be worried about all these chemicals in my house?” I asked Brown.
“It’s really, really hard to say,” she answered. “Just because chemicals are there doesn’t mean they can hurt you.” Besides, even if these chemicals are questionable, they might be worth the risk.
“It’s much better to have a kid exposed to flame retardants than for the kid to catch on fire,” Brown said.
So there you have it: We’re putting sewage with flame retardants, toxic metals, and other surprise stuff in it over our gardens and farmland. But that’s largely because sewage comes from the buildings we live and work in, which have even more of these chemicals in them. And the jury’s still out on whether these chemicals in these amounts are dangerous contaminates or harmless specks of dust. Or somewhere in between. But hey, at least we don’t paint our walls with lead anymore.
On the bright side, the scientists all seemed to agree on one thing: As long as I use compost and wash my vegetables, I can totally start an urban garden.
This Detroit Non-Profit Created A Shipping Container Farm To Feed Their Community
SOURCE CHARLOTTE BODAK
This Detroit Non-Profit Created A Shipping Container Farm To Feed Their Community
May 11, 2018
A charitable grant from the Ford Motor Co. has made possible a "mobile farm" partnership between the automaker and a Detroit charity that promises to educate children on healthy eating, provide food for the hungry, and teach people to be more self-sufficient by growing their own food.
Two essential (if unlikely) pieces required to make this project happen? A 40-foot-long shipping container and an F-150 pickup truck.
The collaboration answers a call to build a “Better World.”
The Bill Ford Better World Challenge distributes up to $500,000 a year to innovative programs that serve communities, from health and safety initiatives to education. Half of the money awarded each year comes from the Ford Motor Company Fund (the charitable arm of Ford), and half comes from Bill Ford personally.
"Our work can be divided into three broad areas," said Todd Nissen, director of communications for Ford Motor Company Fund, in an interview with Green Matters. "Basic needs, economic advancement, and quality of life. We believe it’s important to address all three categories in order for people to move up the social mobility ladder. We group hunger and food insecurity as basic needs. If people are food insecure, they are not able to do well at school or reach their full economic potential."
SOURCE: CHARLOTTE BODAK
A full 50 percent of the 2017 challenge funding went to the Ford Mobile Farm project, an ambitious undertaking that will grow several tons of food every year in a 40-foot shipping container equipped with hydroponics to grow food; and a Ford pick-up truck with plants growing in its bed that will make rounds at local schools to teach students about healthy eating and cultivating a garden.
The mobile farm was conceived of by two Ford employees, Chris Craft and David Root, both of whom are participants in Ford's Thirty Under 30 program. That leadership course educates young Ford employees about philanthropic organizations and design.
Nissen emphasized Detroit as being a perfect city for the mobile farm, saying, "We believe it’s important to add to the enrichment and quality of life where we do business. Detroit is our hometown and southeast Michigan is where a large number of our employees live.
But there’s a bigger issue at work. Although the downtown area has enjoyed a lot of economic success, the neighborhoods face significant challenges. About 40 percent of Detroiters are at or below the poverty line. In southeastern Michigan, nearly 900,000 adults and children are food insecure. In short, there’s a huge need for not just access to food, but education and access to healthy food."
SOURCE; CHARLOTTE BODAK
Cass Community Social Services is rooted in sustainability issues.
Ford’s partner in this project, Cass Community Social Services (CCSS), is a Detroit-based, non-profit entity that has focused its efforts on combating poverty since 2002. The organization's initiatives center around access to food, health, housing, and jobs.
"We prepare and serve 700,000 meals annually, and house 300 homeless men, women and children nightly," said the Rev. Faith Fowler, executive director of CCSS, in an interview with Green Matters. "We operate two free medical clinics, and a day program for 135 adults with developmental disabilities; [as well as provide] recycling jobs [through the organization’s 'Green Industries' program] for 80 adults with significant barriers to employment."
Last year, she said, the Green Industries Program began assembling and installing solar power. "We even took a team to Puerto Rico last November and powered up 50 homes."
The Rev. Fowler also described Cass Community’s tiny home initiative as a "tiny homes campus" of more than two dozen 250- to 400-square-foot houses for homeless individuals, low-income senior citizens, and young adults who have "aged out" of foster care. "They rent for seven years and participate in a program that prepares them for homeownership," she explained. "If they meet the program requirements, they are given the homes." The tiny homes on campus is another of several collaborations between CCSS and Ford.
The Ford Mobile Farm's shipping container's food will supplement CCSS' community gardens, serving up food for the hungry year-round in the organization’s community kitchen. Produce will also be sold to local restaurants, creating an income stream to keep the freight farm afloat.
'Ford Mobile Farm' is an exercise in green innovation.
The shipping container, built by Freight Farm, is dubbed the "Leafy Green Machine." The system arrives from Freight Farm fully assembled, with 256 irrigated vertical towers and thousands of growing sites, custom workbench, automatic nutrient and pH dosing, and insulated padlocked entry. Plants are irrigated by captured rainwater, with LED lighting powered in part by solar to stimulate plant growth.
"We’re excited to expand what we are doing with solar energy," the Rev. Fowler said. "The use of solar with the shipping container fits in nicely with what we are doing with renewable energy and employment."
CCSS is expected to harvest weekly from the shipping container once it is up and running, amounting to several tons of produce grown every year. "We will also be able to monitor and control the lighting, and can water remotely thanks to specially designed software," the Rev. Fowler said. The system is expected to produce the same volume of food as a 1.8-acre farm, with solar power and 90 percent less water than a traditional farm.
The biggest plus next to the system's compact design is its predictability. "We will be able to grow no matter what the weather is like outside," the Rev. Fowler said.
As for the pick-up truck, CCSS will likely hire someone to take the Ford F-150 to area schools, where he or she will be working alongside members of Ford Motor Co.'s Thirty Under 30 team, as well as other volunteers from Ford. The program will reach about 2,250 Detroit-area students in its first year.
The freight farm is expected to be fully operational by August.
The shipping container farm is being installed at Cass Community’s World Building site in downtown Detroit, a move the Rev. Fowler said will allow the organization to "utilize volunteers as part of the gardening."
That shipping container is slated for arrival in July and will be followed by a few cycles of harvesting produce before opening the site up to the public. "This is the first time we will have grown anything vertically or hydroponically," the Rev. Fowler said, "and we expect there will be a steep learning curve."
It's hard to overemphasize the impact of year-round, on-site food being produced at CCSS — and the reach of the new educational component with the traveling Ford truck. "The greatest feature for us is the ability to have fresh, free, organic food all year long," the Rev. Fowler said. "Up until now, this was limited to June through September utilizing our gardens. In terms of the school outreach component, we believe that teaching children about healthy alternatives to snacks and meals full of salt and sugar is extremely important. Our food choices are as critical as our exercise habits in terms of health."
Nissen said Ford doesn’t have any specific plans to repeat the freight farm and mobile farm project elsewhere just yet, but "we always look for opportunities to replicate successful programs elsewhere."
CCSS recently made a trial run with the truck to a Detroit-area pre-school to see how the project might be received. According to the Rev. Fowler, that excursion ended with one of the students gobbling up seven crackers piled high with cream cheese and fresh-cut basil. "I have no idea if she ate her dinner that night," the Rev. Fowler said.
People, Power Costs Keep Indoor Farming Down To Earth
In this Jan. 18, 2018 photo, production manager Emy Kelty, left, and senior grower Molly Kreykes scan and monitor plants growing on towers in the grow room at the Plenty, Inc. office in South San Francisco, Calif. More than 30 high-tech companies from the U.S. to Singapore hoping to turn indoor farming into a major future food source, if only they can clear a stubborn hurdle: high costs. Jeff Chiu AP Photo
People, Power Costs Keep Indoor Farming Down To Earth
BY RYAN NAKASHIMAAP, Technology Writer May 10, 2018
South San Francisco, California
There's a budding industry that's trying to solve the problem of the limp lettuce and tasteless tomatoes in America's supermarkets.
It's full of technologists who grow crops in buildings instead of outdoors, short-cutting the need to prematurely harvest produce for a bumpy ride often thousands of miles to consumers in colder climes.
More than 30 high-tech companies from the U.S. to Singapore hoping to turn indoor farming into a major future food source, if only they can clear a stubborn hurdle: high costs.
These companies stack plants inside climate-controlled rooms, parse out nutrients and water and bathe them with a specialized light. It's all so consumers can enjoy tasty vegetables year-round using a fraction of the water and land that traditional farming requires. Farmers can even brag the produce is locally grown.
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But real estate around cities is pricey. Electricity and labor don't come cheap. And unlike specialty crops like newly legal marijuana, veggies rarely command premium prices. (It's tough to compete with plants grown in dirt with free sunlight, after all.)
Even the best-funded indoor farming company on the planet — Plenty, which has raised nearly $230 million so far — has embraced a longtime farmers' crutch: government handouts. It hasn't found any takers yet.
"We believe society should consider investing in this new form of agriculture in the way it invested in agriculture in the 1940s," said Plenty CEO Matt Barnard in a recent interview.
Barnard says public aid — in the form of cheaper power — is one way to turn a good but elusive idea into a sustainable venture.
Last year, the U.S. paid farmers $9.3 billion in direct support, and subsidized weather-related crop insurance to the tune of $5.1 billion. In a nutshell, Barnard argues that some of that money could be diverted to crops that grow in rain or shine.
Plenty grows kale, mixed greens, basil and natural sweetener stevia in a grey, low-rise warehouse complex in the industrial suburb of South San Francisco.
Visitors arriving via the back door must don full-body overalls and rubber boots dipped in disinfecting shoe baths before entering the air-tight workspace.
Seedlings are grown on flatbeds and bathed in purple light that gives them the look of a 3D movie watched without glasses. Maturing plants are stuffed into columns where they grow sideways, fed by drip irrigation, and irradiated by columns of light-emitting diodes.
The plants will be clipped and packaged before heading to stores later this year.
But there are some noticeable gaps in the menu. There are no carrots or tomatoes, because long roots that grow down and vines that require human pruning don't do well on walls.
For indoor farms, making money has largely meant shipping in bulk to grocery stores, a conundrum if costs aren't in line.
Investment in indoor farming soared to $271 million last year, up from just $36 million in 2016, according to market research firm Cleantech Group.
"The question is, how are they going to scale?" asks Pawel Hardej, CEO of Civic Farms, a vertical farming consultancy in Austin, Texas.
There have been plenty of indoor farming failures already.
FarmedHere shuttered its operations in Louisville, Kentucky, and Bedford Park, Illinois, in January last year due to cost overruns.
Georgia-based PodPonics, which filed for bankruptcy in 2016, cited labor costs as its biggest drag.
Google's X, the search giant's secretive "moonshot factory," killed its indoor farming efforts because it couldn't grow food staples like grains and rice.
Even fans of the technology aren't sure it can beat another sheltered alternative: greenhouses.
"Vertical farming to a lot of (investors) is an 'if' and a 'maybe' versus a 'when,'" says Cleantech adviser Yoachim Haynes. "The question that needs to be answered is, 'Can they do it with cheaper electricity and cheaper labor?' This is not a question that many have been able to answer."
Barnard says Plenty can prosper if it spends 3 to 5 cents per kilowatt hour on power — well below the 10.4 cents that is the average price nationwide, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
While Plenty announced plans to build a 100,000 square-foot facility in the Seattle suburb of Kent in November, it said it isn't in talks about power breaks with any U.S. city now.
Most public support has so far been in rebates for energy-efficient lighting, not running costs.
Seattle City Light provided $10,000 worth of energy-efficient lighting to an indoor growing facility that helped feed the city's homeless. But it already offers the lowest power rate of the top 25 cities in America. "That's the deal that's on the table," says spokesman Scott Thomsen.
Chicago provided some $344,000 in construction grants since 2008 to The Plant , a former pork processing plant that is home to multiple indoor farms.
While that helped with structural improvements, it didn't help with operations, says John Edel, the president of Bubbly Dynamics LLC, which owns The Plant.
Supplying grocery stores in large volumes is "harder than it sounds," he says. And other ways of obtaining cheap power — like The Plant's plan to install a bio-gas guzzling turbine — have faced obstacles that make it uneconomical.
"There isn't a whole lot in the way of incentives for farms here," Edel says. "There needs to be."
Manila - Neophyte Solon Seeks To Institutionalize Integrated Urban Agriculture, Vertical Farming
Manila - Neophyte Solon Seeks To Institutionalize Integrated Urban Agriculture, Vertical Farming
Published May 8, 2018
By Charissa Luci-Atienza
A neophyte lawmaker has cited the need to institutionalize integrated urban agriculture and vertical farming in the country to ensure food security, and address hunger and poverty.
Rice farming / Facebook / Manila Bulletin File Photo
1-Ang Edukasyon partylist Rep. Salvador Belaro Jr. made the proposal following the latest Social Weather Station (SWS) self-rated poverty survey results showing that the number of Filipinos who consider themselves poor fell to a record low of 42 percent in the first quarter of 2018.
“Urban dwellers can grow substitutes to rice using less land and less space than rice farms. Corn and root crops can be cultivated in urban farms. Gardens of public schools can grow these crops and meet the carbohydrate needs of their urban poor students,” he said.
He said integrated urban agriculture and vertical farming do not require lots of land compared to rice farming.
“Integrated urban agriculture is the practice of cultivating, processing and distributing of agricultural products from animal husbandry, aquaculture, agroforestry and horticulture in or around a metropolitan village, town and city. In vertical farming food from plants cultivated using indoor agriculture methods of growing produce in vertically stacked layers using geoponics, hydroponics, and aeroponics,” he explained.
Belaro filed HB 7526 proposing the institutionalization of integrated urban agriculture and vertical farming in the country to ensure food security, to promote livelihood and to regenerate ecosystem functions in metropolitan areas.
Under House Bill 7526 or the proposed Integrated Urban Agriculture and Vertical Farming Act, schools and local governments shall be the key implementors of urban agriculture and vertical farming.
“LGUs can put open spaces and idle lands to good use with vertical farming and urban agriculture, while campus gardens can do more than just have ornamentals and herbs,” Belaro said.
The assistant majority leader said the LGUs can also encourage or give incentives to homeowners associations, neighborhood associations, and community and/or people’s organizations to participate in urban farming activities within their areas.
“Idle and/or abandoned government lots and buildings owned by either national and local governments or available land resources in state universities and colleges can be conducive for growing crops, raising livestock and producing food using said methods, provided that these are compliant and subject to safety standards such that of DOST and other pertinent agencies,” he said.
Belaro proposed that for universities, colleges and training centers, both public and private, integrated urban agriculture and vertical farming can be required as an advanced elective course for students pursuing Agriculture, Practical Arts, Home Economics, and other agriculture-related courses.
Good Life Growing Wants To Bring Back North City, One Micro-Farm At A Time
FEATURED
Raising North St. Louis
Good Life Growing Wants To Bring Back North City, One Micro-Farm At A Time
By Tiffany Shawn
James Forbes, Micah Pfotenhauer, James Hillis and Jack Redden work in one of the hoop houses of Good Life Growing at the corner of Sarah and Evans avenues in the city's historic Ville neighborhood.
Photo by Wiley Price / St. Louis American
According to the USDA, food deserts are parts of the country void of fresh fruit, vegetables, and other healthful whole foods, usually found in impoverished areas. This is largely due to a lack of grocery stores, farmers’ markets, and healthy food providers.
The local business Good Life Growing is combatting urban decay and food insecurity by way of urban farming. Located northwest of Saint Louis University in the city of St. Louis, it is working to bring healthy food to local food deserts. Sitting on almost two acres, Good Life Growing is focused on methods of organic farming, like aquaponics, hydroponics, and aeroponics.
"We convert vacant, neglected urban spaces into thriving, productive micro-farms,” said co-founder and CEO James Forbes.
Aquaponics is the combination of aquaculture (raising fish) and hydroponics (the soil-less growing of plants) that grows fish and plants together in one integrated system. Aeroponics is the process of growing plants in an air or mist environment rather than soil.
“I got my start in sustainable agriculture accidentally after graduating from Mizzou’s College of Agriculture and Natural Resources in ‘08, but I never planned to use the degree," Forbes said.
He was inspired to learn more haphazardly while watching an episode of "Doomsday Prepper" about surviving the apocalypse by using a solar panel and junk to make an aquaponics system. After his college days, Forbes and friends would practice building systems in one another’s backyards, and it was mind blowing.
“You can catch rainwater and raise fish and plants in any setting – rural or urban, indoors and outdoors, hot or cold," Forbes said.
City dwellers often have to live by way of convenience, lacking access or education to obtain healthy food.
"People load up on unhealthy food, which is why I think North St. Louis has such a higher rate of diabetes, liver failure, heart disease, obesity, asthma, etc.,” Forbes said. “It’s a compounding problem. Convenient food is not actually cheap. It adds up over the long run, and adds insane medical bills and prescriptions."
Poor health can lead people to self-medicate, which may lead to addiction, then fueling crime and narcotics trafficking.
“Because people living in food deserts lack access to food and dignifying work, it leads, from my observations, to the many social issues plaguing society today," Forbes said.
Good Life Growing aims to inspire, train, educate and incubate aspiring social enterprises to take up empty, blighted land that developers and investors ignore and turn them into thriving food-production organizations.
"I hope that people copy our urban farming model and spread it in every economically and resource-depressed part of the planet,” Forbes said. “Food injustice, to me, is one of the greatest tragedies that exist in the developed world, and I believe St. Louis is a microcosm.”
Forbes realizes it takes a village to improve the village.
His mentor, Ellis Bell, a 5th generation sharecropper from Mississippi, supported Forbes’ vision while he worked for him.
“He hired me on to his insurance brokerage and had me focused on agricultural insurance. I attended St. Louis Agriculture Club meetings with him,” Forbes said.
“From those meetings I got hooked up with the developers working on Farmworks, met a ton of great people and ultimately got access to our property in The Ville. I thought blending his concept of connecting youth to agriculture in an urban setting would be a good way to repurpose property and provide a skilled trade component. Lastly, he had me pursue expanding his non-profit organization that aimed at getting rural African-American youth exposed to agricultural studies so they can get access to the growing agriculture business sector.
He also relies on his aunt Ruth Smith, former president and CEO of Human Development Corporation of Metropolitan St. Louis, for daily guidance, community engagement and empowerment, and Alderman Sam Moore helped navigate city politics. His partners Matt Stoyanov, Bobby Forbes, and James Hillis, constantly help him to improve operations, and Roy Roberson, Jack McGee, and Janette Kohl are North St. Louis residents who keep him informed.
"On one acre of land, a family can generate over $40,000 a year. One acre equals three vacant lots in the city,” Forbes said. “They just have to learn how to grow, wash, package, and sell. With urban agriculture, we can introduce a new system of self-sustainability, healthier food options, occupied land, rising property values, better housing and schools, legal enterprise – and more businesses will move in."
Forbes noted that urban farmers with small plots face obstacles getting into the for-profit sector of the agriculture industry.
"It’s been historically geared to wealthy, predominantly white, rural people. I tell kids in The Ville all the time that there is a $5.2 trillion pie in food retail/production, and 99 percent of that is coming from the top 10 percent of the wealthiest food producers. The bottom 90 percent don't even touch the industry because we all assume farmers are poor and work too hard,” he said.
“I hope to see 1,000 families get into micro-farming, unify under a local collaborative of brands, retake and then reinvest in their communities. I'd then hope that, with good health and money, North St. Louis and other blighted urban cores can begin the long journey of unraveling systemic oppression."
US (WY): Vertical Harvest Celebrates Second Anniversary
US (WY): Vertical Harvest Celebrates Second Anniversary
Publication date: 5/16/2018
Author: Jan Jacob Mekes
Content Sourced From www.hortidaily.com
On the verge of completing Hearts of Glass, the feature-length documentary following the first 15 months of Vertical Harvest’s operation, JenTen Productions wishes Jackson Hole’s vertical farm with a social mission, “Happy 2nd Anniversary.” The production company put together a short video for the celebration:
Vertical Harvest
Copy of Growtainers Expands With Central Market, Looks to New Crops
For just about a year now, Central Market in Dallas has tested out offering produce that was grown on-site in a Growtainer. Evidently, that partnership has gone so well that Central Market is making the relationship more permanent and expanding it with the addition of another Growtainer.
Growtainers Expands With Central Market, Looks to New Crops
By Chris Albrecht | The Spoon
February 17, 2018
For just about a year now, Central Market in Dallas has tested out offering produce that was grown on-site in a Growtainer. Evidently, that partnership has gone so well that Central Market is making the relationship more permanent and expanding it with the addition of another Growtainer.
Growtainers are modified shipping containers that provide a food-safe indoor growing environment. Each one contains a vertical rack system for holding crops, crop-specific LED lighting fixtures, and a proprietary irrigation system. Growtainers come in 40, 45 and 53-foot sizes and are customized for each customer, costing anywhere from $75,000 – $125,000 a piece. The amount a Growtainer can produce depends on the crop.
The Growtainer at Central Market offers leafy greens and herbs grown on-site in a 53-foot container. While he couldn’t provide specific numbers, Growtainer Founder and President Glenn Behrman told me by phone that “demand outpaces supply” for the market’s store-grown produce. “We’ve proven the concept,” he said.
Central Market expanding its relationship with Growtainer helps push the idea of produce grown on-site more into the mainstream. Other players in this sector include Inafarm, which has been installing indoor vertical farming systems at food wholesalers in Berlin. And here at home, indoor farming startup Plenty raised $200 million last year from investors including Jeff Bezos (who happens to run Amazon, which owns Whole Foods).
As on-site farming technology improves and gets cheaper and easier to use, it’s not hard to imagine more stores opting to grow their own fresh produce in-house instead of having it transported across the country.
Behrman says that there are Growtainers all over the world for a variety of agricultural and pharmaceutical customers. He built two Growtainers for the Community Foodbank of Eastern Oklahoma so they could grow their own produce, and he’s talked with both the military and the United Nations about installing Growatiners for them in more remote (and volatile) areas.
One group Behrman hasn’t chatted with is venture capitalists. He laughed when I asked him about funding. “We have no investors, and we’re profitable,” said Behrman. But in the next breath, he said he realizes that his current go-it-alone approach won’t scale. “I think once this Central Market project expands and becomes more mainstream, I will have to look for some funding.”
Until that time, Behrman wants to have Growtainers produce more high value crops. “Lettuce and leafy greens are not that challenging,” he said. Behrman, who’s been in horticulture since 1971, believes Growtainers could be excellent for growing exotic mushrooms that have short shelf lives, or fungi that historically could only grow in particular seasons.
Perhaps after another year or so you’ll see truffles and porcinis grown on-site and offered at Central Market (and elsewhere).