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Making urban grown produce affordable "This is a real challenge," says Kate Hofman, CEO and co-founder of London-based aquaponics enterprise GrowUp Urban Farms, which produces fish, salads and herbs in unused city spaces to sell wholesale. "Food is a commodity, and we have to make the business work. Of course,...
Looking to take advantage of the increased demand for locally-grown and a better quality product, ornamental plant growers in Michigan are adding a variety of greenhouse vegetable crops. Michigan State University Extension greenhouse and floriculture outreach specialist W. Garrett Owen said he works with ornamental growers who produce bedding plants,...
Mr Cheng, 30, a co-founder of a creative consultancy, says: "Most of the time, we don't know where our fresh produce is imported from and if it is free from pesticides or chemical fertilisers. I became interested in having more control of what I put on my plate by...
Urban farming alive and well at site of former Robert Taylor Homes. It's one of many lessons Rosenthal has learned in the two years she's been growing produce at Legends Farm, a training site for urban farmers through the Chicago Botanic Garden's Windy City Harvest program. Today, where chain-link fences once...
Bowery is the latest of a handful of urban farm startups attempting to reinvent how people, specifically city dwellers, get their food. Even AeroFarms, a New Jersey farm startup that waters its plants with patented aeroponic misting apparatus and is the most established U.S. company of its kind, describes its...
With more reports sounding alarms about looming food scarcity issues, there is a boom in agriculture tech, breeding companies offering everything from unorthodox growing setups to soil sensors, hydroponics and all manner of crop data analytics. Alongside the boom in urban ag startups is the growing number of grassroots nonprofit...

Dirty Hands, Happy Students

On the first day of school last week, students in Steven Schultz’s high-school agriculture class in Lacombe, Alta., toured their greenhouse and edible gardens, harvesting gooseberries, cherries and grapes for a canning project. After school, the beekeeping club conducted a postsummer hive inspection, harvesting 60 kilograms of honey from...
Midway through spring, the nearly bare planting beds of Carolyn Leadley’s Rising Pheasant Farms, in the Poletown neighborhood of Detroit, barely foreshadow the cornucopian abundance to come. It will be many months before Leadley is selling produce from this one-fifth-acre (one-tenth-hectare) plot. But the affable young farmer has hardly...
Omprakash Mor, a farmer, who couldn’t stand the injustice against other farmers in the agriculture sector decided to do something about it and started his own social enterprise in 1995. The possibility of getting fairly paid for the worth of their yields was extremely low, getting paid in time was...