December 17, 2015 | seedstock

 

1 Winter bounty: Supporting local agriculture even when it’s cold [Great Lakes Echo]

Excerpt: The browned, frozen fields of the Midwest in winter don’t exactly call to mind visions of bounty. But Minnesota writer Beth Dooley doesn’t want that to stop people from buying locally produced organic foods in the colder months. In fact, to her, doing so is a political action.                

2 Locavores aren’t loved by everybody [High Country News]

Excerpt: In the last 20 years, the amount of locally grown foods consumed in the American diet has tripled, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and it now comprises 2 percent of the food consumed in the country. As with anything that’s popular, some have seen fit to attack this trend.

3 Ag Station gets $2 million for food safety push [Finger Lake Times]

Excerpt: Nearly 48 million cases of food-borne illness occur every year in the United States, affecting one in six Americans. Thanks to a $2 million state grant to Cornell University’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, the New York State Agricultural Experiment Station will soon be working to put a dent in numbers like that.             

4 Urban farming family turns to teaching [ABC 10]

Excerpt: For eight years, Chanowk Yisrael and his family have been growing food in their half-acre farm – right in the back yard of their Oak Park home.                                   

5 Detroit plans to plant thousands of trees to go green [Washington Times]

Excerpt: In what may be the city’s most ambitious ecological project ever, Detroit plans to plant tens of thousands of trees in two quarter-square-mile patches to show how greening strategies can improve life for everyday Detroiters.                                 

6 Urban farmer’s yard draws small-city crackdown [Courier Journal]

Excerpt: One man’s eco-lifestyle, with large industrial-sized rain barrels and vegetable and native plant gardens, may be too much for the small city of Hurstbourne, which has cracked down, issued up to $20,000 in fines and threatened a cleanup.             

7 Blooming land values are tough on Atlanta’s urban farmers [Curbed Atlanta]

Excerpt: The celebrated vegetable beds of Old Fourth Ward’s Truly Living Well garden, which occupy valuable acreage between downtown and Boulevard, will soon be replaced by something else—likely large-scale development.                                  

8 Students delving into aquaculture, aquaponics [Ashland Daily Press]

Excerpt: If you are puzzled by the word, “Aquaponics or Aquaculture,” ask a student from Ashland, Washburn or Bayfield school districts, who may have a better understanding than your average college graduate.             

9 Disabled Marine pursues new goal: aquaponics farming [Ocala]

Excerpt: Brooklyn Mickell’s career in the U.S. Marine Corps came to an abrupt halt in August 2013, when he survived a harrowing accident at Camp Pendleton, California, not long before he was to ship to Afghanistan.

10 Wave of the future: Aquaponics offers ‘common sense,’ clean food production [The Daily Times]

Excerpt: Jeff and Trish Dean, owners of Eco-Rich Farms in Greenback, use a unique aquaponic food production system featuring no chemicals, no pesticides, no herbicides and no GMOs (genetically modified organisms).

11 Another View: Schools want to be ‘farm-to-school’ model [The Sacramento Bee]

Excerpt: The Sacramento Bee’s front-page story (“Sacramento district criticized for buying Chinese canned fruit,” Nov. 16) rightly pointed out an oversight in our bidding process that we are working to correct.                                    

12 Healthy hydroponics: Skaneateles technology students eat meals from classroom-grown basil: Skaneateles Journal

Excerpt: Students in the Skaneateles Central School District are eating healthier at lunchtime nowadays thanks to the vegetables growing hydroponically in Scott Stagnitta’s technology classroom.                    

13 How sustainable is vertical farming? [Phys.org]

Excerpt: The world’s food system is beginning to strain under a global population expected to reach nine billion by 2050, by which time the planet’s arable land is projected to be half of what it was in the 1970s. And as climate change threatens long-term food security, agriculture will need to produce 70 percent more food to feed an increasingly crowded world.                           

14 In Todos Santos, students learn new lessons about sustainable agriculture [SOURCE Colorado State University] 

Excerpt: Three faculty and five students visited the Colorado State University Todos Santos Center in Baja Sur California, for a six-day trip to share ideas, experiences, and challenges surrounding sustainable agriculture.

15 ‘Living Sustainably’: Urban agriculture – policy, law, strategy, implementation [Examiner]

Excerpt: Vallejoans support a healthy food environment, we mentioned that 2016 will be a pivotal year for Vallejo. 

16 US cities: Using food to drive urban innovation [Cities Today]

Excerpt: Farmers’ markets, ‘farm to fork’ and food trucks are all the rage in many US cities but, as Jonathan Andrews reveals, two cities are taking the foodie trend to a new level by using it to drive local economic development.

17 Family foundation helps local young farmers [The Southern Illinoisan]

Excerpt: Without family support, Leon Adams likely wouldn’t be a farmer today. Without education, he wouldn’t be as good a farmer. Adams, 32, oversees more than 4,000 acres of crops in Jefferson County. He has built on a strong family farming structure to increase and improve the corn, soybean and wheat operation that has been in his family for generations.