New slant on Alabama Growing Food Gardens

There’s Michael Dean of Michael Dean Farms growing superb, high-quality vegetables in his Leeds backyard and selling them to the best restaurants in Birmingham.

There are production non-profit urban farms tilling up vacant land in the west-side of Birmingham, downtown Tuscaloosa and Montgomery.

Jones Valley Urban Farm booth at a farmers market.
There’s a composting company called J3 Organics turning Birmingham’s organic waste into black gold for growing food.

There’s Grow Alabama, which is providing a marketing network for farmers from all over the state.

There are urban gardens growing food specifically to feed the hungry in Huntsville, Sylacauga and Mountain Brook.

And there are networking organizations, such as Greater Birmingham Community Food Partners, working to create public policies that will encourage more of all this great stuff.

Even with all this cool, new farming happening around the state, there is the opportunity to do a lot more. There’s a school garden in almost every public elementary school in California. There are less than a dozen in Alabama. The Alabama School of Fine Arts has a great model garden that’s fully integrated into the school’s science curriculum. We should be pressuring our school boards to support these developments. There are opportunities to turn the toxic “brownfields” scattered all over Birmingham into sunflower fields that supply oil for bio-diesel—something that is already happening in Pittsburgh, Pa. There could be a farmer’s market in every community every day of the week. It could even be legal to have chickens in your backyard.

With so many exciting ways to re-localize our food system, and so many benefits to our community, to our health, and to our kids, it’s time we all put our fingers back where they belong, in the dirt.

To read more about these exciting ideas, I suggest that you check out the following web sites:

For information about urban farming, visit our Jones Valley Urban Farm web site at www.jvuf.org.

To learn about local markets for local produce, visit www.localharvest.org.

To find the locations and other information for farmers markets across the state, go to the web site for the State of Alabama Farmers Market Authority at www.fma.alabama.gov.

Learn more about food systems at the web site for Greater Birmingham Community Food Partners at www.gbcfp.org.

The web site for the Alabama Sustainable Agriculture Network has a wealth of information about local sustainable agriculture. Visit www.asanonline.org.

For information about those exciting efforts to turn abandoned industrial brownfields into sunflowers fields, go to www.gtechstrategies.org. GTECH Strategies is a Pittsburgh-based non-profit dedicated to building community, reducing blight and growing the green economy.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Comments