Touch the Soil News #1983 (Photo – Edible Fungi – George Chernilevsky, Public Domain) Euro News brings a story of an enterprising venture in Portugal that grows mushrooms directly out of coffee waste plus some additions. While this is a niche form of urban agriculture, it may have some application, from a business model perspective,…
Touch the Soil News #1982 (Photo – California Farmland – Carol Highsmith, Public Domian) Farmland Grab news portal brings a story about Chinese ownership of U.S. farmland. Come to find out, China owns very little U.S. farmland. The largest foreign owner of farmland in the U.S. turns out to be Canada at 12.8 million acres…
Touch the Soil News #1981 (Photo – Loading Grain for Export at Seattle – ( Daniel Ramirez CCA 2.0 Generic Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic) Successful Farming news portal brings the story that U.S. food imports for 2024 are forecast at $199.5 billion while U.S. food exports are forecast to be $172 billion. The reason for…
Touch the Soil News #1979 (Photo – Spring Mix Lettuce – ( CCA SA 4.0 International by Daniel Penfield Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International) Amazon announces investment in Hippo Harvest which uses robotics and greenhouses to grow lettuce. Located in Half Moon Bay in California, Hippo Harvest now supplies Amazon Fresh online customers in the…
Touch the Soil News #1978 (Photo – Community Cannery 1943 in Jeffersontown, Kentucky – Courtesy of the U.S. Farm Security Administration – Public Domain Community Canneries are still operating in many parts of the nation. The origin of the county or community cannery came about during World War I, along with the vintage “Victory Garden”…
Touch the Soil News #1977 (Photo – Farm Produce – Sarah Stierch (CC BY 4.0)) As one becomes familiar with the hundreds of business models that small and mid-size farms employ, there is a treasure-trove of ideas floating around. Almost by accident we found a listing of Farms in the United States as provided…
Touch the Soil News #1976 (Photo – Wheat Harvest – USDA – Public Domain) The USDA just released its Cropland Value Report. The USDA estimates that the volume of land in farms continues to inch downwards, coming in at 893 million acres. Of that amount actual cropland in the neighborhood of 300 million acres and…
Touch the Soil News #1975 (Photo – Zinnias – CCA SA 4.0 International, Geo Lightspeed7) City Farmer News brings the story of Rachel Nafis, who farms 8 yards in the L.A. area. Never underestimate the influence of flowers in life. Trying to do the conventional urban farming with vegetables and farm animals was hard. Rachel’s…
Touch the Soil News #1974 (Photo – Good Feeding – CCA SA 4.0 International – Ceciliaakan) The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) just released its report on the state of hunger in the world. Interesting is that all major cities in the U.S. are concerned about the same thing, perhaps to a lesser degree than…
Touch the Soil News #1973 (Photo – Tokyo, Worlds Largest City – 42 million people – CCA SA 3.0 Unported – Morio) An in depth article, Bloomberg News poses the question: Can a City Feed Itself? Exploring the efforts of a number of cities, this article brings to surface a new paradigm – the politics…
