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 [...]
June 24, 2009
May 5, 2009
Event: Brooklyn Food Conference
The first annual Brooklyn Food Conference took place over the weekend, bringing a diverse audience, estimated at between 2,500 and 3,000 people, together around the idea of creating a just, sustainable and delicious food system for all. The grassroots effort that resulted from a partnership between a group of passionate volunteers and a small number [...]
April 10, 2009
Charting the Rise and Consolidation of Organic
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 [...]
March 11, 2009
Are Our Ideas About Sustainable Food Out of Date?
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 [...]
March 5, 2009
California’s First Vegetable Garden Behind Bars
The Insight Garden Program has been teaching inmates at the San Quentin Prison in San Francisco, CA gardening skills since 2002. With about 40 of the 1,000 male prisoners enrolled, the program hopes to give inmates a vocational skill that they can later use to get a job in addition to providing them with a [...]
January 30, 2009
The Rise of Urban Farming Worldwide
There’s something poignant about this photo of a former bank vault in Tokyo that’s been converted into a semi-automated urban farm. In Japan, urban agriculture is not only making good use of spaces where money used to be, it’s also compensating for the traditional farmers that its shrinking population is shedding.
From Mumbai to Manila, cities [...]
January 6, 2009
Sharing Land: A Growing Revolution
Although community gardens might be nothing new, two UK based websites, Landshare and LandFit (temporarily on hiatus), are hoping to expand the concept in a radical way by putting would-be gardeners who lack the space in contact with those that would like to see their underutilized property put to good use. Time and again we’ve [...]






