Inside Urban Green

BBC News - Rising Food Prices Increase Squeeze on Poor - Oxfam

The Oxfam report is more than disturbing. In my view, we in the U.S. do not pay enough attention to what is happening around the globe. It is likely that we will react only when our own food prices reach a point of severe personal pain.

I am not a doomer, homesteader type or alarmist but believe that it is a prudent and intelligent action to learn about personal urban food production using modern methods that do not involve land ownership or access to public land for in-ground growing.

via www.bbc.co.uk

Rising food prices are tightening the squeeze on populations already struggling to buy adequate food, demanding radical reform of the global food system, Oxfam has warned.

Sub-Irrigation Systems Produce Fresh Food In Jamaica

Peace Corps representative Curt Lindley left Idaho in the United States to make Manchester his home just over a year ago. As part of his Peace Corps duties, Lindley is assisting with a nutritional outreach programme. -Norman Grindley/Chief Photographer

This is about an open minded young man who is working with Jamaicans to grow fresh food in homemade EarthBox type sub-irrigated planter systems (SIPs). 

They are experimenting with indigenous materials to substitute for more expensive planter mixes. This kind of applied research is going on all over the world except in the U.S. We can thank our retrogressive horticultural and botanical educational institutions for that.

We desperately need new blood in the field of urban agriculture. We need people of all ages who have not been drinking USDA Kool-Aid, people who can see beyond dirt.

via www.jamaica-gleaner.com

Curt Lindley was present inside the award-winning Manchester agricultural village at the annual Denbigh Agri-Industrial Show, ready to provide details on how to make backyard farming easier for families without gardening space.

"Mandeville feels like home. I can only imagine what the reception is going to be like when I return to Idaho," he said.

Introducing AlphaCrop: Entry Level Vertical Farming

Valcent announced AlphaCrop, a food production system scaled in size for much wider use than their VertiCrop system.

Without knowing the cost, it is hard to tell at this time how many families will be able to afford one but it appears to be in range of the consumer market. It is clear, however, that it offers small business potential.

One thing is apparent. Valcent is a very serious player in the field of urban food production. It even offers a houseplant-sized product (Europe only at present) called “The Tomorrow Garden”

It does not appear at this time that the U.S. has a horse in this race. What we do have, however, is horse and buggy thinking. We are simply stuck in the dirt, in a backwater of Victory Garden nostalgia.

SINA Blog From China: Skyscraper Farms in the Future?

This is from the SINA Corporation blog in China. The subject is timely and it  demonstrates Google's current ability to translate most of the popular languages of the world. This is a huge advance in that it will facilitate doing much more research in other countries that are important in this field.

Most of the American public and media do not understand how far behind we are in the field of what I call urban greenscaping (growing edible and decorative plants in the city). Our science and technology education in this field is woefully behind the rest of the industrialized world. Translations will help immeasurably to demonstrate the situation and hopefully help change it.

Do Plants Sense Temperature Change?

Arabidopsis thaliana. (Credit: iStockphoto)

via www.sciencedaily.com

ScienceDaily (Jan. 10, 2010) — Plants are incredibly temperature sensitive and can perceive changes of as little as one degree Celsius. Now, a report in the January 8th issue of the journal Cell, a Cell Press publication, shows how they not only 'feel' the temperature rise, but also coordinate an appropriate response -- activating hundreds of genes and deactivating others; it turns out it's all about the way that their DNA is packaged.

As the number of people and affluence around the world continues to grow, "it is projected that world agriculture will have to increase yields by 70 to 100 percent in the next 100 years," Wigge said. "Under climate change it will be challenging simply to maintain present yields, let alone increase them." Crops such as wheat are particularly vulnerable to very hot and dry summers, he added, as evidenced by the fact that wheat reserves recently fell to their lowest level in 30 years.