Rice farming usually conjures mental images of vast, sprawling rice paddies. That’s not always the case, as Tokyo Green Space recently discovered.

The Boerum Hill area of Brooklyn may be getting a touch of urban farming to counter newly installed sidewalk extensions.

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.

Growing up, the future of food as imagined by Saturday morning cartoons looked something like: put pill on plate, add drop of water and watch as Thanksgiving dinner magically appears. Though we might not be quite there yet, it’s hard not wonder what eating and cooking will resemble further down the road, particularly given the booming population that is increasingly moving to urban areas coupled with limitations on resources and space. Will there still be meals comprised of distinguishable ingredients or just some blended cocktail of nutrients and flavors topped off with a dollop artful foam?
Philip’s vision has been profiled [...]

For a new store development grocery retailer Tesco plans to rent 30 ‘allotments’ for part time gardeners to locals in Lancashire in the UK. In tandem with an interest in grow-your-own-food PSFK has noticed around the world, there has been a recent boom in interest in allotments in the UK (see our interview with an allotment ‘owner’ here). The store will also sell starter kits to the renters, the Daily Telegraph reports.

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

Taking eco-innovation out of the hands of large corporations and slow moving “official” groups, artists Britta Riley and Rebecca Bray are putting their R&D-I-Y (Research and Develop it Yourself) ethos into practice with their latest project – Window Farms.
The duo is working with a small group of collaborators to create an easy to make and maintain solution to grow produce in cramped city spaces. Their suspended hydroponic window garden uses common materials such as PVC pipe and old plastic bottles to grow 25 different plants including tomatoes, lettuce, beans, cucumber, okra, basil, arugula and peppers.
Riley and Bray hope that their [...]

Treehugger has a fantastic round up of all kinds of different urban farming concepts, both vertical and horizontal. They come from the Carrot City exhibition at Toronto’s Design Exchange, which showcased both existing and concept designs for food growing structures.
Check it out here.

 
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 [...]

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 [...]