Healthy soil and sustainable growing

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Feeding the Cities Series Intro
http://www.grist.org/article/series/food-feeding-the-city/

As Tom Philpott explains in his introductory essay to this series, cities for 
centuries have played an integral part in producing food for their residents. 
Only recently did cars and trains replace horses—and garden-friendly horse 
poop—a switch that made possible the long-distance supply chain of 
big-farms-to-big-supermarkets that’s the foundation of the modern American 
urban food system.

Thanks to a confluence of pressures—rising fuel prices, a nostalgic desire to 
reconnect with our food sources, a new awareness of the environmental and 
moral costs of industrial agriculture—that model is losing ground. Not since 
the Victory Garden movement of World War II has America seen such an 
explosion of urban food-growing. Cities are once again green with lettuce and 
alive with the cackling of chickens.

Over the next few weeks and beyond, the Feeding the City series will explore 
the many alternative food systems taking root in major cities around the 
country, with profiles of New Orleans, Baltimore, Detroit, Oakland, 
Philadelphia, and Seattle. You’ll meet agtivists such as Annie Novak, who’s 
farming a rooftop in Brooklyn (above), and an entrepreneur who’s got a wildly 
ambitious plan for abandoned big-box retail stores in blighted urban 
neighborhoods. We’ll show you painless ways to compost, even if you live in a 
studio apartment, and some of the ingenious places that urbanites have found 
to grow food.

Feeding our cities requires more than urban farming, however. Stephanie Paige 
Ogburn will look at the thorny issue of “food justice,” or making sure 
low-income neighborhoods have access to healthy fresh food. Emily Gertz 
checks out the nouvelle food trucks that are serving up Slow Food-esque fast 
food to middle-class, but budget-conscious hipsters.

And that’s not all. Public Produce author Darrin Nordahl takes you on a tour 
of towns that are growing food, not flowers, around public buildings; Kerry 
Trueman spotlights cities that are leading the way in agriculture-friendly 
policies; and Daniel Nairn explores the limits of “agricultural urbanism,” a 
city-planning model that evangelists believe is key to the livable cities of 
the future.

Even with the best agricultural policies in place, no U.S. city is capable of 
supplying more than a fraction of the food it needs. “Not even the most 
committed Brooklyn market gardener dreams of supplying the metropolis with 
flour from wheat grown on French-intensive plots,” Philpott writes in the 
introduction. “Growing grain in the city makes no sense, and no one wants to 
see cows grazing on Central Park’s Great Lawn. Any realistic vision of ‘green 
cities’ sees them as consumption hubs within larger regional foodsheds.”

As the many pieces in this Feeding the Cities series will illustrate, that 
still leaves a lot of room in which to grow—and plenty of projects to be 
inspired by.