Fueled by cherry tomatoes and lemonade, three-dozen bikers (this blogger included) hit the pavement last Saturday afternoon for a seven-mile tour of seven great community gardens in East Baltimore. We started the ride at the 22-year old Duncan Street Miracle Garden, a one-acre fruit and vegetable haven. Along the ride I was searching for secretes [...]

I wanted to post an impact study that I performed this year of the Urban Agriculture Institutes that I used to run in Richmond, Calif.  This paper represents the first step in a program evaluation of Urban Tilth’s Urban Agriculture Institutes.  While this study had an intervention/control cross sectional design, with no baseline data it [...]

Grist.org recently invited bloggers through it’s Grist Talk: Food Fight series to respond to an August 20th op-ed piece, “Math Lessons for Locavores,” by Stephen Budiansky in the New York Times.  What follows is my response:
“I agree with Mr. Budiansky that freight is by some measures cheap, and that the interstate system and trains [...]

Congressional testimony by two high-ranking government officials in April revealed some misconceptions about the mounting evidence over the use of antibiotics in industrial farm animal production and links to antibiotic resistance in humans.
To clarify the case, Keeve Nachman, PhD, MHS, and director of CLF’s Farming for the Future Program, and Robert Lawrence, MD, director of [...]

While researching meat consumption and production in China last month, I visited two farms that have installed large-scale biogas digesters. These intriguing, bulbous contraptions capture animal waste, prevent pollution, make use of a renewable source of energy (methane), and transform the icky stuff into a rich fertilizer for crops. Biogas digestion  has not been widely [...]

Cultivating an Ecological Conscience: Essays from a Farmer Philosopher
by Frederick L. Kirschenmann
A collection of Kirschenmann’s greatest writings on farming, philosophy, and sustainability
Theologian, academic, and third-generation organic farmer Frederick L. Kirschenmann is a celebrated agricultural thinker. In the last thirty years he has tirelessly promoted the principles of sustainability and has become a legend in his [...]

In a recent Mother Jones article, writer Kiera Butler asks the experts if eating responsibly raised meat can actually be good for the planet.  One of the responses comes from Joel Salatin, star of Food, Inc., Fresh and a personal hero of mine.  Joel makes some strong points that uphold the merits of an ethically- [...]

The CBS Evening News with Katie Couric aired yet another report last night detailing the risks associated with feeding antibiotics to farm animals. The report is a follow-up to a series aired in February and reported on here in the LivableFutureBlog.  In last night’s report, Couric covers Wedneday’s Congressional hearing held to determine whether or [...]

Carolyn Pomodoro eagerly greeted us with “Do you need any tomato plants?  Which plot is yours?  I’ll drop them off whenever you want!”
This past winter, Carolyn started over 600 heirloom variety tomato plants under grow lights in her Hampden home, a neighborhood in North Baltimore.  She intended to sell or give them to neighbors and [...]

Leadership at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) made it abundantly clear last week that the low-dose usage of antibiotics in food animals, simply to promote growth or improve feed efficiency, needlessly contributes to the emergence of antibiotic resistant bacteria and poses a serious threat to public health. Despite the fact that the FDA [...]