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Solar-Powered School In Denmark Planned For Kids Grow Their Own Food

A secondary school in Denmark hopes to be more engaging with students with a solar-powered building that teaches them how to grow and cook food in the rooftop garden. Boasting a size of 105,690 square feet, this new school allows for up to 784 students with additional rooms for the...

Goats, Pigs And Veggies Crop Up In Urban Tokyo

A lift takes you to the Otemachi Bokujyo ("Otemachi Farm") on the 13th floor of a gleaming skyscraper. You step out into natural light streaming in from floor-to-ceiling windows. Tiny plywood picket fences in the 1,000 sq m space separate the animals from visitors. Across Japan, city dwellers have been...

Mangaluru Man Shows Terrace Gardens Can Be A Boon

After working in West Asia for six years, Blany D’Souza returned home to Mangaluru 20 years ago. A passion for growing fruits and vegetables led him to set up a garden on an area of 1,200 sq ft on the terrace of his home in Mangaluru. Now he has...

Black Farmers Reviving Their African Roots

Xavier Brown formed a partnership with Boe Luther and Wallace Kirby, two gardeners from Ward 7 who started Hustlaz 2 Harvesters to offer people released from incarceration ways out of poverty into urban agriculture careers and other social enterprises. Brown, a certified master composter for the city, helped Luther...

A Rapper Grows Plants, Peace and Self-Esteem In Colombia

Luis Fernando Alvarez looks more like a rapper than a farmer. "El AKA" as he is known in Medellin, Colombia's second-largest city, has brought his two passions together with the initiative Agro Arte - agricultural art. San Javier is a slum of mountainous Medellin, and one of the city's poorest...

Sowing Seeds For Social Good

Founder of Ikhaya Garden, Xolisa Bangani, speaks about his passion for nature, and how starting a garden in Khayelitsha has helped change his community. Bangani started growing plants and flowers at home and says he was motivated by a friend to start growing vegetables. Bangani approached Isikhokelo Primary School,...

This 11-Year-Old Girl Farms In Her Courtyard

A Class 6 student from Ambalavayal, Kerala, India, has turned her courtyard into a vegetable garden. 11-year-old Shikha Lubna, daughter of Abdul Basheer and Nasriya, has been active in farming since she was in Class 1. Shikha’s garden consists of almost all major varieties of vegetables and nearly 30 types of...

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,...

Indian Startup Aims to Bring Vertical Farming To Your Doorstep

A Mumbai-based start-up,  U-Farm Technologies, is using hydroponic techniques to customise modular farms for an individual apartment complex or for a supermarket. A group of four, comprising three graduate students from Birla Institute of Technology and Sciences (BITS) Pilani and a horticulturist, came with an idea of building an automated,...