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BUILD TOUR - On the Road
When I first met Rupa Marya I admired her fun nature and fierce activism it would be 8 months later before we would start to fall in love and then she invited me to accompany her band Rupa and the April Fishes for the BUILD Tour, a world tour of their third Studio Album. The tour was 16 weeks and included 52 shows in over 9 countries. I was a farmer to go on the road and I decided to conduct a seed sharing event at every show. I gathered some educational materials and blank packets, a few books and brought some seeds with me. It was actually hundreds of thousands of seeds all organized and labeled in a suitcase that I would then set up at all the shows along with the merch that the band was selling.
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Rooftop Farms and Adapted Seeds for Urban Agriculture We have been involved in building a series of rooftop farms in the East Bay. And now we are launching a crowdfunding campaign with Barnraiser and are asking you to join us in our efforts to build an urban seed farm and facility that will produce climate-adapted seeds and train a new crew of urban farmers.
Our food system has become more and more industrialized and commercialized.and our planet has undergone major climate changes. Today we need more local organic food and less fossil fuels in it. We are building just that we need a little extra help to get it growing! Top Leaf Farms is growing food where people live and our urban adapted seed project will help supply seeds to a new generation of urban farmers. We plan to create a robust catalogue of seeds adapted to the urban environment in order to generate delicious and wholesome food. Our project is designed to create a model of hyper-local food security through the growing, selecting, processing and local distribution of organic heirloom foods and open-pollinated seeds as well as the training of a new kind of farmer--one trained specifically in producing the volume and quality of organic food required in the city. Time to begin. In early September I approached Jonathan Youtt at the PLACE for sustainable living in Oakland, Ca. to ask if he had a space for us to test our system out. Our Berkeley project was being delayed and I wanted to keep TJ busy and use the extra time to learn more about the design we were to install on the 16 roofs. Alot has been tweaked on paper and it was time to begin testing it out. We also switched blenders and wanted to start growing in the new medium we had developed.
The space that we were given was the roof of two shipping containers that were 20' long. The space ended up being 276 square feet, after we built the deck and parapet to contain the soil. There was alot of ideas that had been floating around in my head over the last 6 months on how to make a more productive lightweight and affordable system, getting the opportunity to do a test run at PLACE has been invaluable. |
AuthorBenjamin Fahrer is the owner and operator of Top Leaf Farms and has over 18 years of organic farming experience, building, design work and teaching in natural resource management. Archives
February 2017
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DESIGN - BUILD - GROW - LEARN
