New Stories From 'Urban Agriculture Notes' — City Farmer News Are Urban Farms Actually Bad for the Environment? Edward Glaeser doesn’t see the point in urban farms. Well, it’s not completely true – the Harvard Professor does see educational value in them for school kids, but that’s it. Last month Glaeser wrote an interesting piece on the Boston Globe about urban farms (“The locavore’s dilemma“), where he made a very persuasive argument that urban farms actually represent an inferior alternative from an environmental point of view. His main point was that devoting scarce urban land to farms and not to people will reduce cities’ density level, which will then cause the rise of carbon emissions. When you read the piece it makes sense, especially when it comes from a bright well-known economist such as Glaeser, who knows a thing or two about the urban sphere. Glaeser provides many figures to back up his argument but forgets two important details: First, there are options like rooftop farms or vertical farming that don’t reduce cities’ density levels at all. And it’s not just New York.
AquaponicsUSA's Blog | Feeding America One Family At A Time with our Food Forever™ Growing Systems Aquaponics taking root in Chicago May 25, 2011|By Christopher Weber, Special to the Tribune Amid the worst economy in decades, Andrew Fernitz, 23, thinks he can raise fish and organic produce for a living. While his classmates are searching for jobs at employment fairs and scrambling for internships, the recent University of Illinois at Chicago graduate quit his job as a bartender to join three friends in launching an ambitious new startup. Together they are setting up an aquaponic farm on the South Side. Among environmentalists and urban gardeners, aquaponics has become a popular new endeavor. They call their venture 312 Aquaponics, and they will have competition. Yet another startup called Greens and Gills is looking to buy suburban property where it will cultivate 100,000 pounds of fish and 1.5 million heads of greens per year. These aquaponic farmers are betting heavily that their business will boom, but there remains more than a chance that it could fail because of the unpredictability of a new technology.
Context Institute: Whole-system pathways to a thriving sustainable planetary future Grow Wheatgrass Stats about all US cities - real estate, relocation info, crime, house prices, cost of living, races, home value estimator, recent sales, income, photos, schools, maps, weather, neighborhoods, and more What is Hydroponics? What is Hydroponics? Hydroponics gardening is a special kind of agricultural setup where plants are fed not by soil but by nutrients that are put into a body of water called a reservoir or other non-soil plant base setups. This indoor gardening strategy allows for various different kinds of innovations, including growing more plants in less space, and changing the ways that plants get the basic elements that they need to grow. Hydroponic Nutrient Processes One big way that hydroponic gardening differs from traditional soil-based gardening is that in a hydroponic garden, plants have to receive nutrients or “plant foods” in specific ways. In hydroponics, the equation is usually quite different. Control in Hydroponic Gardening A keyword for many hydroponic gardeners is control. Design in Hydroponic Gardening Unlike traditional gardening, the field of hydroponic gardening has generated many different kinds of complex tools for evaluating and altering plant environments.
Troy Dayton is on the forefront of the legal medical cannabis market Troy Dayton is an entrepreneur on the cutting edge of the legal medical cannabis industry. As co-founder and CEO of The Arcview Group, a venture capital firm focused on medical marijuana's ancillary markets (the cultivators, dispensers, and other businesses services the growing legal medical cannabis market), Troy is betting his time and money that there will be a lot of money to be made, legally, from helping to provide sick people with the medicine that is only just now being made available in growing numbers of states across the country. California is the hotbed of the movement and the home of both Troy and The Arcview Group. Before starting up The Arcview Group, Troy worked in drug policy as a campaign organizer and top fundraiser and was one of the early employees of Renewable Choice Energy, a wind power company I co-founded back in 2001 (see my profile of CEO Quayle Hodek). I first met Troy in college when I too worked as a student drug reform activist. Does the world need saving?