The Happy Farm game on Chinese social networking sites is one of the most popular and particularly among white-collar workers. Some Happy Farm enthusiasts enjoy virtual farming so much that they have decided to try out the real thing. One Shanghai farm is planning to jump on the trend and put up 100 cabins for city farmers to use during extended holidays.

This is an extract from the draft John Grant’s new book Co-opportunity, contracted for publication with John Wiley & Sons Limited, January 2010. This extract section 3 of the book – Information and Ethical Consumerism.

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 [...]

Founded on the belief that fruit should be a commonly shared resource, art project Fallen Fruit began with the idea to map all the fruit trees growing on or over public property in Los Angeles and other American cities (see maps here). But since that time, the project — created by David Burns, Matias Viegener, and Austin Young — has expanded beyond its initial scope to include planning fruit parks in areas that lack such natural resources, and other multidisciplinary initiatives.
For example, back in 2006, the group participated in Civic Matters, a two-week residency project at Los Angeles Contemporary [...]

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 [...]

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 of like-minded organizations was impressive in its breadth and scope. More than 60 workshops touched on a wide array of subjects ranging from food policy and health to backyard gardening and political organizing. A perusal of the conference offerings from the day points to both the [...]

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 [...]

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 spiritual outlet.
The prisoners’ labor has long been utilized by San Fransisco’s Bay Area residents in the form of goods like chairs and cabinets. The prison may now export vegetables, too, as the inmates move from a small flower-and-herb garden to a vegetable garden – the [...]

 
From Mumbai to Manila, cities in emerging economies are looking to urban farming to bolster job growth, improve food security and make more productive use of organic waste. The surprising role model for off-farm farming is Havana, Cuba where 90% of fresh produce supply is grown in the city. Nationwide, urban farming has created 350,000 jobs for Cubans and has boosted the average caloric intake from 2,323 per Cuban per day in 1993 to 3,547 today. Apparently, one main cause of this shift in food sourcing is the inefficiency of state-owned farms.
China is also exhibiting how to industrialize the trend [...]