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Urban Farms

The Urban Gardens Where Gender And Climate Justice Grow

Up in the lung-busting altitudes of Quito, Ecuador’s capital city, 71-year-old Maria Achiña and 70-year-old Alegria Irua are busy digging up soil and plucking weeds from their modest allotment of kale, onions, broccoli and cilantro. The green-fingered pair are part of a group of local women who till the land beside the neighborhood’s health clinic, which is free to them under the city’s celebrated participatory urban agriculture project focused on gender, climate and food justice. “It gives us good food to eat and a bit of income to help pay the bills,” says Achiña, who lost both her husband and daughter in recent years. “And besides, us old ladies, we need to fill our time with something.”

Urban Farms, Community Gardens And Local Produce At Your Doorstep

It’s the first day of the beet harvest and volunteers are stooped low, hoisting the bright red tubers out of the ground, shaking off dirt and placing them neatly in rubber bins. Other volunteers are picking kohlrabi and Swiss chard or weighing the heaping tubs of fresh vegetables and preparing to bunch them. A bee drifts by in the early July heat, sampling bergamot and kale flowers as it goes. It’s a typical idyllic pastoral farm scene except for one small detail: we’re not in a rural landscape, we’re in the middle of a city in the courtyard of a Vancouver hospital. This is Farmers on 57th, an urban farm at the George Pearson Centre, an assisted living facility in Vancouver’s Marpole neighbourhood.

COVID-19 Sparks A Rebirth Of The Local Farm Movement

Family farms in California and across the country have been hit hard by the impact of the coronavirus on their markets. But in the health-conscious Bay Area, where celery was already one of the first groceries to disappear from the produce rack, demand for fresh local produce has shot up. The challenge is in redirecting food from farms to new customers. Food is fundamental. While farmers have yet to face the full economic impact of this pandemic, their collaborative efforts, along with local grassroots networks, could mark the beginning of a new economy laboring to be born.

Urban Farming Is Revolutionizing Our Cities

By David Suzuki for Eco Watch - Humans are fast becoming city dwellers. According to the United Nations, "The urban population of the world has grown rapidly from 746 million in 1950 to 3.9 billion in 2014." Sixty-six percent of us will likely live in urban environments by 2050. The number of mega-cities (more than 10 million inhabitants) is also skyrocketing, from 10 in 1990 to 28 in 2014—home to more than 453 million people—and is expected to grow to 41 by 2030.

Marijuana: The Gateway Plant To Urban Farming

Released this week in honor of 4/20 and Earth Day (two holidays important in their own right), “The Gateway Plant” provides a unique glimpse into MG’s theory of resilience-based organizing. We know that when people work together to directly meet their needs through shared work, democratic self-governance, and confronting unjust policies, they build a critical foundation for ecological restoration and self-determination. “Our farm is about community resilience and black liberation,” said Karissa Lewis, one of the Full Harvest co-founders. “Whether we’re dealing with gentrification or food deserts or racist policing, in America it always comes down to land and power. So we’re taking the land back. And that way, we can start to take our power back as a community.”
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