The city farming movement conjures images of growers covered in soil, planting and picking in community or rooftop garden plots. But perhaps the most promising technique for urban agriculture involves pumps and pipes in squeaky clean labs. It's called aquaponics, and it may revolutionize the way we eat. In a piece for The Atlantic Cities, UrbanFarmers CEO Roman Gaus describes how it......read more
With more and more people interested in local, sustainable food, there are more and more people looking for meaningful work in the field. Enter Good Food Jobs, a “gastro-job search tool, designed to link people looking for meaningful food work with the businesses that need their energy, enthusiasm, and intellect.” Launched in 2010 by “friends, partners and ice cream......read more
NRDC President Frances Beinecke for Huffington Post: Today NRDC announced the winners of the 2013 Growing Green Awards. These awards celebrate the farmers, business owners, and bold thinkers who are transforming America's food system. Each one of them has pioneered ways to provide food that nourishes our families and restores our environment at the same time. This is the fifth year NRDC has......read more
Mark Tercek for Huffington Post: This week, I was asked an interesting question as part of the Q&A session following a talk I gave at the Fortune Brainstorm Green conference in California. To paraphrase journalist Marc Gunther, who moderated the evening: "You are a vegan. You also lead the world's largest conservation organization. Why doesn't The Nature Conservancy make changing people's......read more
If you serve it, they will come. That's the conclusion drawn from a recent survey asking restaurant-goers if they would be willing to pay a premium for their meal if they knew the restaurant sourced sustainable food and recycled its food waste. The poll of 1,000 people by the Sustainable Restaurant Association (SRA) found more than half would be prepared to pay more for their meal if they knew......read more
The Vermont Sail Freight Project is up and running, delivering fresh farm-to-table goods over 300 miles down the Champlain-Hudson waterway to Manhattan, the Hudson Valley, and points between. In April the project reached its $15,000 Kickstarter goal and founding farmer Erik Andrus set to work building a 39-foot sail barge named Ceres (after the Roman goddess of agriculture). Farm advocacy group......read more
Elizabeth Kucinich for the Huffington Post: The purpose of the Farm Bill is to balance the immediate needs of feeding the country with the long term goal of ensuring a sustained food supply. In order to unite the interests of both urban and rural communities, the Farm Bill combines food assistance for our fellow country men, women and children in need, along with longer term agricultural......read more
From Eve Andrews at Grist: Let’s be real: The American food system today has some pretty daunting issues. We’re saddled with a farming system that, on the whole, releases a massive amount of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere (675 million metric tons annually at the most recent tally, to be exact), sucks nutrients from the soil, and leaches chemicals into the water table. And in......read more
We could get used to working here. Designed by FLOAT architecture, 'Watershed' is a 100 square foot writer's studio that reveals the complex ecology around it. Little tunnels under the structure bring reptiles and amphibians into view through the floor-level window. A water collection basin, doubling as the front step, attracts birds and deer. All of the structure's parts are......read more
As part of its footprint reduction project, Puma commissioned Yves Behar of fuseproject to create a new packaging system for Puma shoes. The result is a revolution in showbox design. Using 65% less paper than a traditional shoebox, the "Clever Little Bag" is a cardboard stock frame wrapped in reusable shoe bag. The packaging has no laminated printing, no tissue paper, requies less space......read more