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Is Expecting Food Security and RoI from Vertical Farming a Tall Order?

The vertical farming industry is being put to the test as it attempts to resolve challenges of food production with climate change while coping with investor's return-on-investment expectations and market fluctuations.

In Montenegro Urban Agriculture Projects Are Blossoming During The Pandemic

Whether due to job losses or as a way to escape the dull reality of quarantine measures, or both, many citizens of Montenegro have started cultivating gardens, parks and any other available land during the COVID pandemic. Since this spring, new urban farmers in Bar and other towns have either...

Tech-Savvy Kenyan Youth Head Back To The Farm

When Francis Njoroge graduated with an engineering degree in Nairobi, he expected to earn a six-figure salary. Instead he found himself working as an electrician on a three-month contract, for 20,000 Kenyan shillings (about $200) per month. He decided to move back to his parents’ farm in Kimandi, a village...

Feeding the Future of Agriculture with Vertical Farming

Field farming requires labour, amenable weather conditions, adequate sunshine for photosynthesis, irrigation, and often pesticides to protect crops. Vertical farming, a term coined by Dickson Despommier, is the practice of producing food in vertically-stacked layers. These “farms” make use of enclosed structures like warehouses and shipping containers to provide a...

The Direct-to-Consumer Model of Montreal’s Lufa Farms

One of Canada’s largest urban farming projects, Lufa Farms is the brainchild of Mohamed Hage and Lauren Rathmell. In 2011, Hage and Rathmell opened the world’s first commercial rooftop greenhouse, a 31,000-square-foot space atop an old Montreal warehouse. They now oversee three hydroponic greenhouses, each placed on a sturdy,...

In Berlin, Cultivating A Taste For Plants

On the Moritzplatz, in the popular district of Kreuzberg in Berlin, a colourful crowd drops its bicycles and rushes inside the Prinzessingartenfor an exchange of exchange and sale of nutritious plants. There are also several stands of environmental protection associations. The garden appears, behind the fences, as an oasis...

Urban Edge Farm Programme Offers Immersion Learning

To First Generation Farmers Executive Director Alli Cecchini and head farmer Eleanor VanHof, a 13-acre section of the prime farmland in the Bay Area’s east Contra Costa County is the site of the long-dreamed-of Urban Edge Sustainable Farming (UESF). For the first cohort of students, many of them women, people...

Futuristic Farming, In The City

Kern Agrawal was just 20 when he was introduced to the bliss and sanity of organic gardening and urban farming by his long-time girlfriend and now wife, Ranjani, over a decade ago. Kern was ushered into the art and science of agriculture in his final year of MBA at the...

FarmBot Reduces Complexities For Microfarming Growth

Seeking to influence the next generation of food production, FarmBot, the world’s first open-source, CNC small-scale farming machine, gives individuals the power to create and manage a garden using a laptop, tablet, or phone. “FarmBot is helping consumers produce and grow their own food,” said founder Rory Aronson. “It is...

Farm-in-a-box Coming To A Distribution Centre Near You

Eric and Matt founded Local Roots four years ago. Their first purchases were broken-down, 40-foot shipping containers. Local Roots upcycles the containers into modular, shippable, customizable farms, each of which can grow as much produce as five acres of farmland. The idea is to supplement, not supplant, outdoor agriculture. Every aspect...