{"id":28044,"date":"2017-11-16T14:06:59","date_gmt":"2017-11-16T19:06:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=28044"},"modified":"2017-11-16T14:06:59","modified_gmt":"2017-11-16T19:06:59","slug":"the-future-of-urban-farming","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=28044","title":{"rendered":"The Future of Urban Farming"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"From<\/a><\/p>\n
From left, Nataka Crayton-Walker, Greg Bodine, and Bobby Walker at a City Growers microfarm in Dorchester. | Photo by Leise Jones\/City Growers<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

The Future of Urban Farming<\/a><\/h3>\n
\n
\n

Some sights in the neighborhood were so common that I had stopped noticing them; but then one day they came into view. While driving down Harold Street on the way to my cousin\u2019s house, I noticed a vacant lot on my left and then, just a block down, I saw two large vacant lots on my right. At the end of Harold Street\u2014right before Howland Street\u2014stood a huge half-acre vacant lot. This area had been labeled the \u201cH-block.\u201d It was a tough neighborhood in Boston, Massachusetts, known for the significant number of shootings that occurred\u2014which primarily were gang related. It also was a neighborhood with beautiful housing stock, long-term residents, and strong community leadership. Later that week, intrigued at the amount of vacant space, I walked the streets and tallied approximately 1.5 acres of land sitting vacant among the homes and apartment buildings.<\/p>\n

Not long after that day, in the commissary kitchen of my company\u2014City Fresh\u2014the staff was preparing meals for one of the summer camps in session. The team members were cutting heads of lettuce that had been shipped in from across the country, and a question occurred to me: Why couldn\u2019t we be growing this lettuce closer to home?<\/p>\n

In answer to that question, I\u2014along with a small group of community residents\u2014founded City Growers. It was the spring of 2007. We set out to convert vacant lots\u2014primarily located in the Roxbury, Dorchester, and Mattapan neighborhoods\u2014into intensive micro farms: to put our community idle hands to work and supply fresh, local, organic produce to the growing and insatiable market for local and sustainably grown food.<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n

e.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From left, Nataka Crayton-Walker, Greg Bodine, and Bobby Walker at a City Growers microfarm in Dorchester. | Photo by Leise Jones\/City Growers The Future of Urban Farming Some sights in the neighborhood were so common that I had stopped noticing them; but then one day they came into view. While driving down Harold Street on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[299,319,1912,17064,10589],"class_list":["post-28044","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-survival-2","tag-farming","tag-food","tag-food-production","tag-glynn-lloyd","tag-slow-money"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28044","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=28044"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28044\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":28045,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28044\/revisions\/28045"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=28044"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=28044"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=28044"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}