Fox Urban Farming 2nd Ed

Sustainable City Living in Your Backyard, in Your Community, and in the World
1. Auflage 2018
ISBN: 978-1-62008-302-4
Verlag: CompanionHouse Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 416 Seiten

Comprehensive Guide to the Urban Farm Movement It doesn't take a farm to have the heart of a farmer. Thanks to the burgeoning sustainable-living movement, you don't have to own acreage to fulfill your dream of raising your own food. Urban Farming 2nd Edition walks every city and suburban dweller down the path of self-sustainability. It offers practical advice and inspiration for gardening and farming from a high-rise apartment, participating in a community garden, vertical farming, and converting terraces and other small city spaces into fruitful, vegetableful real estate. This comprehensive guide to urban food growing will answer every up-and-coming urban farmer's questions about how, what, where and why-a new green book for the dedicated citizen seeking to reduce his carbon footprint and grocery bill. Winner of the Benjamin Franklin Award in Home & Garden from the Independent Book Publishers Association (IBPA). Inside Urban Farming 2nd Edition Portraits of successful urban farmers DIY projects for container gardening Instructions for creating a garden calendar Recommendations for the most foolproof multi-zone plants Plans for companion gardening Time-saving advice about planting, seed starting, and harvesting City-hall survival tips for navigating your town's ordinances Zone map and extensive resource guide

Thomas Fox is a graduate of Fordham University and Fordham University School of Law. An early experience working at Hargrave Vineyard (now Castello di Borghese), Long Island's pioneer winery, awakened in him an appreciation of the shared health of plants, animals, humans, and ecosystems. A former research editor at Reader's Digest, Fox has been published in The Washington Post, Wine Enthusiast, The Christian Science Monitor, and elsewhere. Fox lives with his family in New Jersey, where he is a passionate gardener and sometime urban farmer.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Fox, Thomas

Leseproben

INTRODUCTION
In January 2009, I answered an ad posted with the Editorial Freelancers Association seeking a writer for a book on city living/urban farming. I jumped at the chance. At the time, I’d spent most of my adulthood living in cities, and I’d written about and for environmental organizations based in them. Some of my most vivid memories of my childhood were the cucumbers and asparagus my father grew in the narrow stretch between our suburban homes. The person who had posted the ad wrote back to ask what I’d write about. I pitched an outline and was eventually chosen to write the book. Still . . . urban farming. Back then, “urban farming” was like “salad couch.” Sure, you could smoosh the two words together, but what the hell would you be talking about? Of course, just because the idea of urban farming might have struck Americans as odd in the early twenty-first century, that’s not to say that the practice of urban farming was new. It was woven throughout the history of North America, most famously in the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan, now known as Mexico City. It was practiced throughout world history, in fact, and wasn’t just a thing of the past. Greensgrow Farm has thrived in Philadelphia since 1997, the Dervaes family has maintained an urban homestead in Pasadena since 1985, and City Farmer has been doing it in Vancouver since 1978. And those are just three well-known examples among countless others. Indeed, I discovered that urban agriculture had been seriously considered by some in the development community since 1996, when Jac Smit and Joe Nasr published Urban Agriculture: Food, Jobs and Sustainable Cities for the United Nations Development Program (UNDP). But somehow the terms “urban farming” and “urban agriculture” hadn’t quite made it to American public consciousness—at least based on the blank stares I received whenever I would tell people I was writing a book on urban farming. Talk about local color! Beautiful local produce adorns farmers’ markets across the nation and around the world. The concept seemed at best exotic, if not entirely oxymoronic. There didn’t seem to be much in the way of nonacademic books squarely addressing the topic. Growing food was just one aspect of Kelly Coyne’s and Erik Knutzen’s Urban Homesteading, which covered a wider set of lifestyle issues, while other existing books applicable to city farmers focused more narrowly on some combination of technical or philosophical issues, like Mel Bartholomew’s Square Foot Gardening or H.C. Flores’s Food Not Lawns. In other words, I hoped to make a minor contribution to a very obscure field about which almost nothing seemed written outside of international development organizations and other specialists. A few months later, while I was still researching this book, Novella Carpenter’s Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer came out (“Fresh, fearless, and jagged around the edges,” as Dwight Garner described it in the New York Times). The month before my manuscript was due, Kelly Coyne and Erik Knutzen published a revised and expanded edition of The Urban Homestead (I profile Kelly and Erik in Chapter 5). Dickson Despommier’s The Vertical Farm arrived in between my manuscript submission and its publication, which was itself quickly followed by Annette Cottrell and Joshua McNichols’s Urban Farm Handbook, Jennifer Cockrall-King’s Food and the City: Urban Agriculture and the New Food Revolution, Sarah C. Rich’s Urban Farms, and an ongoing stream of additional books by farmers, journalists, foodies, and others. There’s probably been one published since you started reading this. Still, the urban farming bookshelf was and remains roomy and diverse enough to embrace a book that reflected my interests in both the larger social issues that led to this historical moment for urban farming, especially in North America, and how one could engage in it. In other words, a book that explores two questions about urban farming: “why now?” (Part I, Chapters 1–3) and “how?” (Part II, Chapters 4–9). I’d like to say that my book helped us usher in a revolution, but the fact is that I was lucky enough to crest a wave. And what a wave it has been. As Michael Levenston of City Farmer in Vancouver, Canada, notes, urban agriculture has gone from back page news to front page news. It’s no longer salad couch. Levenston points to an urban farm being a central plot device in the web comedy series The North Pole. Several podcasts center around urban agriculture and farmers. Consumer giant Unilever even launched an entire “Growing Roots” vegan snack line that plows half of its profits into urban farming. A street market in Bali may look different from the farmers’ market down the street, but they’re both built on the same principles. Changes have happened so quickly that it’s been a challenge deciding what to update in this edition, and how. In the end, the lion’s share of updates fall within Part I, the “why now?” section of the book. Chapter 1 (Feeding Our Cities) largely holds up as is, though we continue to experience events related to national security. For example, Hurricanes Harvey and Irma underscored for many American how climate change has exacerbated the risk of such storms and made resilient food systems more important. As of this writing, Cape Town, South Africa, is poised to become the first major city in modern times to run out of water; I doubt it will be the last. I did not reiterate how urban agriculture, as part of a more sustainable food system, advances national security because, unfortunately, we will continue to be struck by new examples of this again and again. Likewise, the fundamentals of many of the examples discussed in Chapter 2 (Marching to Sustainability on Our Stomachs) are relatively evergreen. Did You Know? In one of the most telling sign of urban agriculture’s arrival, it featured for the first time in the USDA’s 92nd Agricultural Outlook Forum in February 2016. I made the most changes in Chapter 3 (Toward an Urban Farming Future). While many of the biggest challenges for urban farmers remain the same—land costs, transactional costs, and issues with zoning and other municipal policies—tremendous headway has been made. Thanks to pioneering urban farmers and farsighted policymakers, for example, there has been a wave of newly pro-urban agriculture policies and reforms, including in Minneapolis and San Diego (2012); Boston and St. Paul (2013); Atlanta, Aurora (Colorado), San Francisco, and Spokane (2014); Pittsburgh, Sacramento, and Savannah (2015); Flagstaff and Indianapolis (2016); and Fargo, Laredo (Texas), and Los Angeles (2017). Urban agriculture has gained wider expert acceptance. Take certificate and degree programs in urban agriculture, for instance, which are currently offered by the University of Illinois, University of San Francisco, Kansas State University, City Colleges of Chicago, San Diego City College, Prince George’s Community College, Ryerson University, Virginia State University, Purdue University, the University of Colorado, the University of the District of Columbia, and the University of Florida—and probably even more schools by the time this book is published. And that’s not including the scads of institutions offering certificates and degrees in food systems, sustainable agriculture, and related topics. Urban farming has become, if not ubiquitous, then at least respectable. It is a legitimate topic of academic inquiry. For example, a 2016 study by Carolyn Dimitri, Lydia Oberholtzer, and Andy Pressman examines the social missions of urban farmers in the United States based on a survey of hundreds of them. Another study, spearheaded by researchers at Arizona State University and Google, Inc., and published in 2018, uses huge datasets to estimate the actual and potential value of urban agriculture worldwide. While I was not able to benefit from this research when writing this book, I have referenced it in this updated edition. Several large commercial ventures have flourished. AeroFarms operates several aeroponic farms, including the world’s largest indoor vertical farm, in New Jersey. Brooklyn-born Gotham Greens has steadily been expanding its trademark rooftop greenhouses, with three in New York (at 15,000, 20,000, and 60,000 square feet) and the latest in Chicago (75,000 square feet, making it the world’s largest rooftop farm as of this writing). Philadelphia’s Metropolis Farms has been perfecting technology for hydroponic vertical farms that can grow anything from cannabis to strawberries while, 250 miles to the west, Pittsburgh provides a home to Hilltop Urban Farm, currently billed as the nation’s largest urban farm. Part II—the “how to?” section—remains largely the same in this updated edition. Choosing which plants to grow and how best to do so borrow on traditions going back millennia. The biggest changes to Part II concern technological improvements in terms of containers (Chapter 4: Starting Your Farm) and lighting (Chapter 8: Plant Management). The urban farms and farmers I profiled throughout the...