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California’s Long Beach Will Tax Empty Land to Encourage Urban Farming

A California law to give tax breaks to landowners who convert vacant lots to small urban farms has gone largely unused in the four years since it was passed. But now Long Beach is adding a stick to the carrot of incentives. Landowners who don’t convert their vacant parcels to...

Hong Kong Finds Bliss in Rooftop Gardens

Rooftops in densely populated Hong Kong are fast turning ­greener and more fertile as urban farmers seek to grow crops from their homes and offices and create a more liveable community. Some 60 rooftop farms and 1,400 farmers have emerged locally over the past decade, and a handful of farms...

Australia’s Karenni Refugees Cultivate Community Through Wollongong Farming Initiative

Developing small farms on unused land in urban areas could help alleviate chronic unemployment for refugees resettled in Australia. At Mangerton in Wollongong, Karenni refugees are transforming a steep hillside next to the Saint Therese Primary School, into a traditional terraced garden. According to University of Wollongong geographer Ananth Gopal, community...

Rich Millennials Are Ditching Golf Communities For ‘Agrihoods’

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...

Urban Farming Is Booming, But What Does It Really Yield?

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...