The Urban Farm Tour concept builds a network of individuals who are raising their own food in limited space and opens their homes and gardens to the public. The event synthesizes ideas of local food and community with a bit of DIY inspiration and education.

In a move that aligns well with the supermarket push to place more of their in-house brands on their shelves, while at the same time keeping pace with consumer demand for locally-sourced products, UK Grocery Store chain Waitrose has announced that it will only sell milk and other dairy products that come from British cows. The products will be sold exclusively under the Essential Waitrose label, a further commitment to their network of 60 British dairy farms, a partnership now in its tenth year that ensures fair prices and best practices.
The store’s website explains their dairy standards, purportedly the highest [...]

Though it was a common practice up until the 1950’s, farm stays slowly lost favor in a world of interstates, motels and drive-throughs that transformed the family vacation to a study in modern convenience. But as issues surrounding where and how our food is raised increasingly become important considerations in our lives, city-dwellers and suburbanites alike are beginning to warm to the concept of agritourism once more.

Image Credit: Getty Images, vAns/Flickr

There’s been plenty written on the subject of converting urban space into farmland, from rooftops and abandoned lots to the empty beds of pickup trucks, but this idea always revolves around growing various varieties of vegetables and rarely strays into the realms of animal husbandry. Sure there’s the recent emergence of secret communities of city beekeepers and the age old tradition of rooftop pigeon coops, but now it appears even the humble chicken is getting its due.
A new documentary called ” Mad City Chickens” takes an informative (and often whimsical) look into the increasingly common [...]

Filmmaker Ian Cheney has transformed the bed of his old, gray Dodge Ram pickup into a fully functioning farm. To convert the back, Cheney adapted elements of green roofing technology – adding drainage, a water-absorbent bottom layer and lightweight soil – enabling him to plant a crop of heirloom vegetables and still be able to drive, giving an entirely new meaning to the idea of food miles.
In an effort to track the growing process, Cheney has installed a solar-powered timelapse camera onto the truck’s roof that captures real time footage of the progress that will later be edited into a short film. [...]

In an effort to help dairy farmers better manage their herds, Danish technology firm, SmartFarming has developed an animal tracking and monitoring system called CowDetect. The system enables farmers to maintain a more meaningful account of individual animals by analyzing movement and eating patterns in real time.

Small scale and personal farming have been slowly becoming popular again over the last few years. Whether for the health and economic benefits of growing your own food, or the moral boost that comes from knowing your vegetables are locally or sustainably grown, agriculture is increasingly on people’s minds.
Playing off this wave of interest, Mother Nature Network has compiled an interesting who’s who list of younger American farmers. Their 40 Farmers Under 40 list examines the new school of farmers who are growing produce in urban and rural areas all over the country.
Mother Nature Network: 40 Farmers Under 40

A new irrigation product by Israeli company Tal-Ya is the best kind of design—unobtrusive, perfectly functional, and wonderfully simple. Tal-Ya’s plastic trays are placed atop nascent plants or trees, collecting dew and condensation in their grooves and funneling them directly to the seedlings below. The trays also serve additional functions by virtue of their very form: blocking sunlight from the plant’s immediate radius—preventing the growth of weeds— and protecting plants from frost damage.

The environmental benefit of the trays should be substantial when implemented on a large scale: they are fabricated from recycled plastic and are themselves fully recyclable, their weed-prevention [...]

Between 1997 and 2002, the USDA drafted and implemented a National Organic Standard, an act that unified the disparate state by state regulations and unified certification under one umbrella. This move, while benefiting the consumer, by providing a universal labeling system for recognizing a product as organic, also opened the door for giant food manufacturers like Kraft, ConAgra and General Mills to enter this segment of the marketplace.
Phil Howard, an Assistant Professor at the Department of Community, Agriculture, Recreation and Resource Studies at Michigan State University, posited that this change would lead to greater consolidation in the organic food sector. [...]

The ways our food is produced, packaged and shipped stand at the center of an ongoing debate about the health of our planet and ourselves, but the key to creating a sustainable system may rely on our collective ability to accept a realistic solution as a opposed to a perfect one. And this involves a concerted effort on the part of not only producers and consumers, but policy makers as well.
If we examine the farming methods in our country, we find a polarizing set of standards – industrial monoculture machines that favor high yields and high profits and smaller outfits [...]

We’ve been aware of vertical farming for a little while now, but whereas previously it only existed in theory, we’re finally beginning to see some fledging real world examples bringing the underlying principles to life.
Understanding the environmental impact of the way our food is grown and distributed, along with the future demands for feeding the rising population of our planet, the vertical farming model offers a simple, yet radical solution that attempts to address many of these issues – instead of bringing the food to the city, we can bring the cities to the food.  This idea goes far beyond rooftop [...]