Archive for the ‘Soil Management’ Category

FoodCycles is offering a 9 month, full time Greenhouse Operations and Sales Coordinator position.


Are you interested in fresh, local and organic, chemical free food? Do you want to build a movement for real food and real change in Toronto? Are you ready to build a stronger community and environment through food and farming — in small and large ways? Then get a FoodCycles membership, do volunteering or get a CSA harvest share.


FoodCycles (http://foodcycles.org) is hosting one of the first largest screenings of the award winning DIRT! the Movie in Toronto at Bloor Cinema (506 Bloor St W; map) on Thu, Jan 28, 2010 (6:30-8:30 PM). Dirt! the movie tells the amazing story of the earth we stand on everyday and how we depend on it for life. In addition, FoodCycles is fundraising for its education work. Tickets will be available online and at the door on a sliding scale of $10-20. There will be a reception at 6:30 PM and the movie will start at 7 PM and end at 8:30 PM. You can buy sprouts, vegetable earrings or memberships during the reception.


The UK’s Soil Association just put out a report 5 days before Copenhagen that farming’s biggest thing is in fighting climate change — putting carbon back into the soil and earth. Organic, chemical free farms have dirt that has 20-28% more carbon (the lego brick of all life) than your burned out non-organic, chemical fried farm. If the whole world turned to organic farming, you could cut greenhouse gas emissions (not to mention air pollution or acid rain) by 11%.


Dr. Wayne Roberts spoke on food policy and a new vision for cities at Toledo Library in the US. As always his witty humour is always a hit. The photos he uses in the presentation are also quite insightful. Dr. Roberts also proposes hopeful solutions and answers to fixing cities and the food system. If you want the quick written summary you can read it below.


Join FoodCycles, Toronto’s first city farm (http://foodcycles.org), for their official launch party at Parc Downsview Park on Friday, October 2, 2009. The even


Are you interested in:  City farming, gardening and growing food?  Learning the practical side of environmental and food issues?  Getting lots of exercise and fresh air?  Composting and creating good soil?  Learning skills to get you a paying job?  Are you ready to make a difference!


There is one way we could save ourselves and that is through the massive burial of charcoal. It would mean farmers turning all their agricultural waste – which contains carbon that the plants have spent the summer sequestering – into non-biodegradable charcoal, and burying it in the soil. Then you can start shifting really hefty quantities of carbon out of the system and pull the CO2 down quite fast.


Wrecking good soil is like wrecking the foundations of your house. It’s costly and it’s dangerous (not to mention the possibility of having the roof collapse on your head). The destruction of healthy, nutritious soil costs US agriculture $20 billion a year [1]. Topsoil (the stuff you get when you jab your hand into the first 6 inches of dirt) is vanishing faster than you can say, “Duh” in a third of the world’s food growing land.[1]


Sunny gives a video summary of the first 2 panels (low income food access and locally sustainable food supply) at the Ontario’s Test Kitchen Conference.



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