Healthy soil and sustainable growing

[<pbunch@cox.net>]

Here in Medellin we still see horse carts on occasion. They used to be very 
common say 10 years ago but they still serve a purpose.


---- Tradingpost <tradingpost@lobo.net> wrote: 
> 
> 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.
> 
> 
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