Tag: farming

A nurse, Wangari counts on income from farming to raise money to buy more land - for more farming. With prices for basic foodstuffs at their highest levels in decades, many urbanites feel well rewarded by farming. Across Africa, political leaders, long dismissive of rural concerns, have woken up to the...

Gafarbhai Qureshi has collected over 5200 types of plants in his nursery and gives free information and training to farmers and students about these plants, herbs and trees. His father, a small farmer from Ramdechi of Junagarh district of Gujarat, had four acres of land, a well and 50 plants. He...

Pot gardening is the growing of plants in pots or containers rather on the ground. It is generally applied for houseplants and is also useful in areas where the soil or climatic conditions are not suitable for a particular crop. Any pot or container can be used, anything that can...

A new type of housing community known as "Agrihoods" are popping up around the US. Agrihoods are built around working farms and are replacing the once-popular golf communities favored by Baby Boomers. Hundreds of so-called "Agrihoods" - short for agricultural neighborhoods - around the US are now aimed at farm-to-table-loving millennials. According...

When Blany D’souza told people that he was trying to grow jackfruits in a pot, they laughed at him. A Mangalore-based urban gardener with a rapidly increasing social media following, Blany had a green thumb since he was a precocious young boy. However, he finally found the time to set up his own garden only after he returned from the Gulf (where he served as an income auditor at a five-star hotel for six years) in 1998. Thanks to Blany’s careful nurturing, a multitude of fruits and vegetables were soon growing on the 1,200 sq ft terrace of his home in Mangalore. Today, Blany grows nearly 100 varieties of fruits and vegetables on his terrace, with his latest experiments revolving around growing jackfruits and lychees in a pot. In 2015, Blany became a household name among the garden-loving citizens of Mangalore after he helped a couple of his friends set up their terrace gardens.

Well prepared garden soil is great for growing things in the ground but when it comes to growing things in containers the soil is different. Soils for containers need to be well aerated and well drained while still being able to retain enough moisture for plant growth.  So when choosing...

Horace Mann Elementary School has a rooftop garden. After leafy vegetables are planted and cared for, students harvest the crops, chop them up and serve them to more than 400 of their peers for lunch. Jagodnik’s third-floor classroom, which is filled with seedlings and outfitted with a small kitchen, opens...

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,...

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...