urban agriculture

The Biden administration is taking a two-step approach to supplying enough money for the Women, Infants, and Children food program to meet larger-than-expected enrollment, said the White House on Wednesday.

High-tech, indoor, urban agriculture is growing in places like New York, but so is controversy around them, according to FERN's latest story, produced in partnership with Edible Brooklyn magazine. The story, by Rene Ebersole, points to one indoor company that produces high-end specialty greens for restaurants called Farm.One. "In a town of eight million, Farm.One is part of a rising movement to cultivate produce where large numbers of people live by using high-tech systems and smart greenhouses placed at grocery stores, in basements and even inside cargo vessels."

In recent years, vacant land in cities across the country has been colonized by community gardens, giving the often-poor residents access to fresh produce. Now, though, developers of affordable housing are targeting those same empty lots, putting them at odds with the gardeners in communities that need both housing and fresh food, reports FERN's latest story, published with NPR's The Salt. No paywall

On a 47-0 vote, New York’s city council passed legislation to create a digital hub meant specifically for urban agriculture, said Metro Media.

Danielle Marvit, who could fairly be called the tomato maven of Pittsburgh, didn’t hesitate when asked to list her favorites among the dozens of tomato varieties sold as seedlings by Garden Dreams, an urban farm set between vacant Victorian-era houses in Wilkinsburg, Pa.

City officials in Long Beach, California, are laying the framework for an Urban Agriculture Enterprise Zone program “that would encourage more urban farms to crop up in vacant lots across the city,” says the Press-Telegram.

Gov. Jerry Brown has signed an amendment to the California Seed Law, exempting “non-commercial seed sharing activities from industrial labeling, testing, and permitting requirements,” says Shareable.

From small gardens to roof-top farms greenhouses, urban agriculture "is taking off and taking on new forms," says the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future, which released a 35-page assessment of the movement.

The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors voted unanimously to reduce property taxes by up to $15,000 for owners who convert vacant lots in unincorporated parts of the county to agricultural use.

Lead contamination, often acute, is common in New York City’s urban garden soil, according to a new study from the City University of New York. Published in the journal Soil Science earlier this month, the study evaluated 1,652 soil samples, volunteered from 904 home and community gardens, for contamination by a number of trace metals. It says the city’s soil contains higher average concentrations of lead than a number of other metropolitan areas, including Hong Kong, Beijing, London, Bangkok, Berlin and Baltimore.

In North America, women more commonly are the farmer's wife than the farmer, notes Modern Farmer. In Canada, 27 percent of farm operators are women. In the United States, 14 percent of farms are headed by women.

The board of supervisors in Los Angeles County took the first step toward implementing a state law that allows local governments to designate urban agriculture incentive zones, with lower taxes for owners of small plots who promise to grow food on them for five years, reports the Los Angeles Times.

In Brentwood, a "para-urban" community in Contra Costa County on the eastern outskirts of San Francisco, an amalgam of groups combines to keep 20,000 acres of farmland in production and out of subdivisions, office parks and strip malls, says Kristina Johnson at Civil Eats.