"urban farming" news and stories

With all the talk recently of sustainability and food miles, it's hard to believe that no one's come up with this before, at least not in any meaningful way. There's a big surge behind the idea of developing ways to feed a community among city planners now.

Community food planning, as it's sometimes called, includes planning for all stages of feeding the community from start to finish. Every community has to make its own plans according its own situation, but a lot of places are looking for ways to be self sustaining when it comes to feeding the people who live there. "The nonprofit American Planning Association adopted a policy in May that encourages its members, 65 percent of whom work for state and local government agencies, to help build "stronger, sustainable and more self-reliant" local food systems."

According to the source article, many people are worried about the globalization of food, and the problems that it could cause. It's also better for the people to be able to eat locally grown, high quality food. There seems to be a lot of benefits to this. I personally hope that we find a way to make urban farming, and community food planning in general, a reality. What is your take on all of this?

These days most folks have heard about the 100 Mile Diet, a style of eating awareness that challenges folks to only eat food that is grown or produced within 100 miles of their home. Novella Carpenter, a writer and filmmaker out of California recently upped the ante and spend the month of July adhering to a 100 Yard Diet. She has a small urban farm in Oakland (who knew that you could farm so close to San Francisco) on which she raises a bunch of vegetables, in addition to pigs, rabbit and some fowl (although most of her flock was killed earlier in the summer by an unknown predator). She also keeps honey bees at a friend's farm a bit further out of the city.

She blogged the whole experience at City Farmer (here's the link to her first entry, then just read forward from there). Other than a very small taste of prosciutto, she stayed true to her diet for the entire month. Her approach certainly takes local eating to an entirely new and impressive level.