Pay attention the next time you have the late night munchies, reaching for the box of Triscuit crackers and start chowing down without looking closely. Four million packages of Original and Reduced-Fat Triscuit crackers will include cards with basil or dill herb seeds that can be planted directly into the ground.
The new campaign by Triscuit in collaboration with the non-profit organization Urban Farming is hoping to encourage the growth of the home farming movement by setting a goal of starting 50 new urban community gardens this year.
Urban Farming is a non-profit organization. with a mission to create an abundance of food for people in need by planting farms on unused land and space while increasing diversity, educating youth, adults and seniors and providing an environmentally sustainable system to uplift communities. Their funding of community-based home farms is core to the continued growth of The Home Farming Movement in urban areas. Urban Farming encourages and welcomes everyone to get involved. Volunteering at a farm or donating food is just two ways that you can help.
The site has numerous videos on various gardening topics for beginners like the one below.

Jeremy Sisson, a research assistant at West Virginia State University, checks the aquaponic feeders at the school's greenhouses. The facility grows a wide variety of tomatoes, including heirloom types and wild tomatoes that only grow to the size of a thumbnail. Photo credit: Tom Hindman/Charleston Daily Mail

Zack Harold writes in the Charleston Daily Mail,

Winter is not a good time for fresh tomato lovers. You either chow down on hard hothouse tomatoes that taste like cardboard, or simply do without. And that last option isn’t much of an option at all.
Barbara Liedl, associate research professor at West Virginia State University, wants to change that. Since 2003, Liedl has been working with West Virginia State students to breed a great-tasting and disease- and insect-resistant tomato.
And she’s getting close. For the last seven years, Liedl and her team have bred several kinds of tomatoes with those traits, though one breed never had all of the traits. “Now, I’m going to cross them this year,” she said.
Ideally, Liedl wants to produce an eight-ounce tomato. That way, one slice will be big enough to cover the top of a burger or sandwich.
The professor said she’s also trying for a crop with little of the tough white core found in typical hothouse varieties.

Click to read the rest of the Students See Growth Potential Of Tomatoes story.

BM and Stanford University scientists announced on Weds., March 10, 2010 a chemistry breakthrough that could lead to new environmentally-sustainable plastics which promise to significantly reduce waste and pollution. Photo credit: Monica M. Davey/Feature Photo Service for IBM

In a paper published in the American Chemical Society journal, Macromolecules, scientists from IBM Research and Stanford University detail discoveries that could lead to the development of new types of biodegradable, bio-compatible plastics. The result of a multi-year research effort, the breakthrough also could lead to a new recycling process that has the potential to significantly increase the ability to recycle and reuse common PET and plant-based plastics in the future. Today’s announcement may have sustainability implications across a wide range of industries including biodegradable plastics, plastics recycling, healthcare and microelectronics.
IBM and Stanford scientists are pioneering the application of organocatalysis to green polymer chemistry, which represents a fundamental shift in the field. This discovery and new approach using organic catalysts could lead to well-defined, biodegradable molecules made from renewable resources in an environmentally responsible way.
“We’re exploring new methods of applying technology and our expertise in materials science to create a sustainable, environmentally sound future,” said Josephine Cheng, IBM Fellow and vice president, IBM Research -- Almaden. “The development of new families of organic catalysts brings more versatility to green chemistry and opens the door for novel applications, such as making biodegradable plastics, improving the recycling process and drug delivery.”

The Talking Farm's plans are to establish a 3-acre, working farm site in Skokie. Photo credit: The Talking Farm/Peter Tracy

The urban farm movement is happening in large cities like New York, San Francisco, Milwaukee and Detroit. It is also happening in small towns like Skokie, Illinois as Mike Isaacs writes on the Skokie-Review.com,

The Skokie Park District is trying to acquire about three acres of property near Howard Street and the North Shore Channel that would be turned over to a non-profit organization for the creation of a new urban farm.
Building an urban farm in the area has been a long-time goal of Evanston-based The Talking Farm, which first believed the property it sought was in Evanston because it’s east of the North Shore Channel.
But a small strip of property east of the channel is located in Skokie and owned by the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District. Once The Talking Farm representatives learned the true location of the property, it sought the village’s help.
Skokie itself could not provide much help in acquiring the property, but the Park District can. Commissioners recently voted to authorize Park District Executive Director Mark Schneiderman to try to execute a lease agreement with the MWRD so the Park District can partner with The Talking Farm on the project.

Click to read the rest of the Three Acre Urban Farm Planned For Skokie story.

Photo credit: Fast Company

Fast Company magazine lists and describes their The Ten Most Inspiring People in Sustainable Food, many of which I have mentioned in posts the past year.  I am sure everyone has their own local list of inspiring people but these are the national ones that Fast Company recognizes.

Here are some comments from traditional, conventional farmers who say sustainable farming has been “co-opted” or taken over by the organic movement. Some of their points are valid (such as the packaging one) but if they are still dumping hundreds of pounds of chemicals on their soil, I am sorry, I can’t classify you as sustainable. Sustainable means (to me) building up the health of the soil food web, not using it as a foundation to grow plants with chemicals that are necessary to keep the plants alive. Better farming through chemicals is not sustainable no matter how much one green washes it.

Cindy Snyder writes in Ag Weekly,

Ask a dozen people what sustainable means and you’re likely to get at least a half dozen different answers. It doesn’t matter whether they are consumers or food producers.
That was evident at the 2010 Larry Branen Ag Summit that featured “sustainability” as its theme.
“I look around this room and see many second, third and fourth generation farmers, but we’ve lost the word ’sustainable’, ” said Doug Jones, who farmed with his father and brother in the Twin Falls area for 35 years. He is now a director in a non-profit organization called Growers for Biotechnology, Inc., dedicated to promoting research, development and acceptance of agricultural biotechnology.
Jones’ implication was that the word “sustainable” has been co-opted by the organic movement and now refers to only “green” production practices.

Click to read the rest of the What Does Sustainable Agriculture Look Like? story.

BASF's genetically modified Amflora potato, which has just been approved by the European Commission, contains genes that are resistant to antibiotics. Photo credit: The Independent/AP

The European Union has traditionally rejected approval of GMO vegetables but in a surprising reversal, the EU has approved a GMO potato, which critics fear the plant could spread antibiotic-resistant diseases to humans, as Martin Hickman and Genevieve Roberts write in The Independent,

The introduction of a genetically modified potato in Europe risks the development of human diseases that fail to respond to antibiotics, it was claimed.
German chemical giant BASF won approval from the European Commission for commercial growing of a starchy potato with a gene that could resist antibiotics – useful in the fight against illnesses such as tuberculosis.
Farms in Germany, Sweden, the Netherlands and the Czech Republic may plant the potato for industrial use, with part of the tuber fed to cattle, according to BASF, which fought a 13-year battle to win approval for Amflora. But other EU member states, including Italy and Austria and anti-GM campaigners angrily attacked the move, claiming it could result in a health disaster.

Click to read the rest of European Union Approves GMO Potato story.

The heirloom haogen melon has a sweet aroma of honeysuckle blossoms and a minty hint of musk. Photo credit: Seed Savers Exchange

Richard Cornish writes about the forgotten flavors of heirloom edible garden plants on theage.com.au,

THERE’S a melon on the kitchen bench. Pale yellow with green stripes, its scent fills the room with a deep, sweet aroma of honeysuckle blossoms and a minty hint of musk. The flesh drips with juice, shimmers in the morning light and is soft and delicate. The melon is called Haogen, but don’t expect to see one in your supermarket any time soon. Its skin is too thin to make it through the supply chain without being crushed to a pulp.
Haogen is considered a heritage or heirloom fruit. (The terms heirloom, heritage and traditional are transposable.) Developed on a kibbutz in Israel from an ancient Indian melon, it was once so desired that it was jealously guarded and seldom shared with outsiders. The fact that it has survived into the 21stcentury is nothing short of a miracle. Nearly 90 per cent of the varieties of fruits and vegetables that were grown at the end of the 19thcentury have been neglected, forgotten and lost forever. The greatest period of the decimation was after World War II, when refrigeration and mass transport entered our food chain.
Our desire for cheap fruit and vegetables all year round saw food trucked around the nation from farm or market garden to warehouse to supermarket. Contemporary fruit and vegetable breeders concentrated on developing varieties that would develop and ripen consistently, have maximum yield and withstand hours hurtling down Highway One in the back of a semitrailer.
But small pockets of old-fashioned abundance remain in our midst. Seed collectors, plant hoarders, individuals and companies are dedicated to protecting the diversity of flavor.
What we gained in volume and affordability, we lost in flavor. Apples that taste like pineapples, tomatoes that are as sweet and juicy as a mango, purple carrots, red sweet corn, melons that can fill a whole room with their intoxicating aroma. Where once we enjoyed a cornucopia as complex and entrancing as a symphony orchestra, we are now offered a fruit and veg selection as diverse as an old Casio keyboard.

Click to read the rest of the Forgotten Flavors Of Heirlooms story.

A local woman tends zucchini at a Saudi owned farm in Ethiopa. Photo credit: The Guardian

I have commented before on posts related to this; the world grows enough food, it is the agri-biz industrial food distribution system, and the abject poverty around the world that is the cause of world hunger. Now the wealthy countries are buying up farm land and water rights in Africa and other parts of the world to produce food for the other wealthy members of their country while locals starve to death in the countries that host the farms, as John Vidal writes in The Guardian,

We turned off the main road to Awassa, talked our way past security guards and drove a mile across empty land before we found what will soon be Ethiopia’s largest greenhouse. Nestling below an escarpment of the Rift Valley, the development is far from finished, but the plastic and steel structure already stretches over 20 hectares – the size of 20 football pitches.
The farm manager shows us millions of tomatoes, peppers and other vegetables being grown in 500m rows in computer controlled conditions. Spanish engineers are building the steel structure, Dutch technology minimises water use from two bore-holes and 1,000 women pick and pack 50 tonnes of food a day. Within 24 hours, it has been driven 200 miles to Addis Ababa and flown 1,000 miles to the shops and restaurants of Dubai, Jeddah and elsewhere in the Middle East.
Ethiopia is one of the hungriest countries in the world with more than 13 million people needing food aid, but paradoxically the government is offering at least 3m hectares of its most fertile land to rich countries and some of the world’s most wealthy individuals to export food for their own populations.
The 1,000 hectares of land which contain the Awassa greenhouses are leased for 99 years to a Saudi billionaire businessman, Ethiopian-born Sheikh Mohammed al-Amoudi, one of the 50 richest men in the world. His Saudi Star company plans to spend up to $2bn acquiring and developing 500,000 hectares of land in Ethiopia in the next few years. So far, it has bought four farms and is already growing wheat, rice, vegetables and flowers for the Saudi market. It expects eventually to employ more than 10,000 people.

Click to read the rest of The Wealthy Are Buying Up Farms And Water Rights In Africa While The Locals Go Hungry story.

The recently completed greenhouse at the College of Southern Idaho is the most modern educational facility in the state of Idaho. It grows plants using hydroponics and aeroponics, soil less systems that grow the plants faster than in soil.