Read an interesting article in Grit called Farming in the City about a guy, Ken Dunn who founded the Resource Center which operates a mini "farm" in an urban Chicago lot. Amazingly, City Farm grows over 80 varieties of produce on 1 acre and employs 4 full time people -- not to mention selling to numerous area restaurants and operating an on-site produce stand!
His vision is to turn more (if not all) of Chicago's vacant lots into farms. This is very very cool to me -- for not only is it employing low-income people who might otherwise not have a job at all, but also helping to provide one of the country's hugest urban areas with some of the freshest food available. That's what I call progress!
City Farm even takes some of the local restaurants kitchen "wastes" for their compost pile.
They provide education on food production to visiting schools, too.
I'm impressed.
Sunday, November 9, 2008
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
Hey, yeah! I saw that guy on TV one time. Pretty interesting stuff. Also, on the same program, I saw people using recyclables to build these mini floating plant islands that they put in lakes and ponds to help control water purity and marine life... I can't remember what it was called, but it was a really cool idea. I'll try to remember what tv show it was... some environmental people got together and did a bus trip across America (they even had a greenhouse on top of their bus!) and saw all kinds of innovative environmental things people were doing. It was cool.
Post a Comment