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Refugees Plant Roots with Hydroponic Community Garden
A new project in Neve Sha ’ anan , a neighbourhood of Tel Aviv , is attempting to connect people to their food traditions using a hydroponic community garden . The neighborhood is low-income and has attracted thousands of refugees and migrants from East Africa . The idea of the new project , Rooftop Gardens , is to connect all the parts of this community to one common denominator : real food from home . Leading the project is urban farming consultant Lavi Kushelevich , who is heading more than a handful of projects to rejuvenate Tel Aviv and to turn it into a food-producing engine . “ We have now given the residents tools to grow their own food ,” says Kushelevich , “ and taught them about hydroponics , while we bring them seedlings with tastes of flavors from all over the world where these people once called home .”
greenprophet . com
Berkeley Lab Awarded Grant for New Ag Tech
The U . S . Department of Energy ’ s Advanced Research Projects Agency- Energy ( ARPA-E ) has awarded $ 4.6 million to the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory for two innovative projects that will allow farmers to nondestructively peek into the soil . One project aims to use electrical current to take an image of the root system , which will accelerate the breeding of crops with roots that are tailored to specific conditions such as drought . The other project will develop a new imaging technique based on neutron scattering to measure the distribution of carbon and other elements in the soil . “ Both technologies could be transformational for agriculture — for quantifying belowground plant traits and where carbon and other elements are distributed — and will enable the next generation of predictive models for agriculture and climate ,” says Eoin Brodie , deputy director of Berkeley Lab ’ s Climate & Ecosystem Sciences Division . “ They ’ re windows into the soil , something that we urgently need .”
universityofcalifornia . edu
Learning to Farm on Mars
Shipping food to Mars could cost nearly $ 1 billion per person per year — so if people want to live there , growing food on the planet is a necessary step . It ’ s a challenge that NASA and the European Space Agency are working on . However , a nonsanctioned group of urban farmers , food entrepreneurs , and bio-hackers who call themselves the Mars Farm Odyssey thinks it can also help in the quest to figure out how space farming should work . “ The collective hive of humanity has more ideas to offer than a research team bu ried in a bunker somewhere ,” says member Karin Kloosterman . “ And this know-how can be applied on Earth , too , so young researchers can employ the hive to start experimentation even without the gravity or resource limitations one would experience in space .” In a recent meeting in Tel Aviv , the group focused on developing a citizen science kit that will crowdsource how particular plants grow , making it possible to build controlled “ food computers ” that recreate the climate and nutrients that a crop needs .
fastcoexist . com
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