By Brian Barth If you’ve taken the plunge and are brooding baby chicks, the only thing that stands between you and a supply of fresh eggs is a permanent place for your hens to call home. By six weeks of age they need something more than a cardboard box to live in. Building a basic […]
Vertical farms have been touted as a way to feed a rapidly urbanizing world population (I’ve waxed poetic about them myself.) Critics of the trending technology, however, contend that these energy-intensive hubs are too costly and perhaps impractical to maintain. Sure, the naysayers have a point, but what if vertical farms did more than just […]
Looks like Philadelphia’s first indoor vertical farm will also be the world’s first to go completely solar. Metropolis Farms, which operates out of a warehouse in South Philly, has switched on its massive 100,000 sq. foot rooftop array, according to a company blog post. The system’s 2,003 solar panels generates more than half a megawatt […]
A former 107-acre public housing site in South Pittsburgh’s St. Clair neighborhood is being transformed into a massive urban farm. According to Next Pittsburgh, once construction of the Hilltop Urban Farm is complete, the site will be home to the largest urban farm in the U.S. The project will consist of 23 acres of farmland […]
By Tracie McMillan How do you feed a hotter, drier, more inequitable world? A new generation of American farmers are coming up with answers that rarely resemble the cornstalks and cattle pens of mainstream agriculture. Today’s American farmers are less white. They’re also increasingly experimental. Even as our biggest farms get bigger, small producers are […]
By Melissa Denchak Most people don’t move to New York City and become farmers. Sheryll Durrant certainly wasn’t planning to when she left Jamaica for Manhattan in 1989. She got her undergraduate degree in business from the City University of New York’s Baruch College and spent the next 20 years in marketing. Then, when the […]
A New Jersey farm is growing leafy greens such as baby kale, arugula, butterhead lettuce and basil all year round without pesticides, soil or even sunshine. Bowery, a high-tech vertical farm in the town of Kearny, claims to grow “the world’s first post-organic produce.” The company officially launched Feb. 23 after two years of planning […]
Hunger and food insecurity affect more than 1 in 7 Americans. Those facing hunger are three times more likely to have diet-related health problems like diabetes or hypertension. Yet, far too often the solutions to help these individuals typically offered, funded and advocated for by our society address the issues of hunger and health as […]
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 […]
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