The advantages of upside-down gardening are many: it saves space; there is no need for stakes or cages; it foils pests and fungus; there are fewer, if any, weeds; there is efficient delivery of water and nutrients thanks to gravity; and it allows for greater air circulation and sunlight exposure.

Based on its energy requirements for lighting alone, vertical farming would be incapable of substituting for a substantial share of our soil-based agricultural production. But the lighting problem is only the first among many obstacles facing high-rise agriculture. Climate control to achieve suitable growing conditions would add huge energy requirements. And light fixtures would release more energy as heat than as light, which in summer would put huge loads on air-conditioning systems. To maintain the good health of plants grown indoors, humidity and air circulation must be very precisely controlled, often at a high energy cost. And before any of those needs would come the gargantuan resource requirements for construction of the towers themselves.

Jelentősen enyhülnek a kistermelőkre vonatkozó szabályok annak a rendeletnek az értelmében, amely a napokban léphet életbe. Újdonság például, hogy a jövőben a magyar kistermelői élelmiszerek is megtalálhatók lesznek a boltok polcain és az éttermek asztalain.

Eastern Europe’s organic food industry is mushrooming as it brushes off the effects of the global recession, and more consumers in the region turn to healthier foods. Some countries now have twice as much agricultural land turned over to organic farming as those in Western Europe, and experts are predicting a bright future for the industry in the former communist bloc.

Christof Arndt, project coordinator at the Dresden-based EkoConnect non- profit group promoting organic agriculture in Eastern Europe, told IPS: “The last few years have seen a huge rise in organic farming, food production and consumption in Eastern Europe, and the market is developing really quickly - despite the recession.”

Az apró magvas zöldségféléknél a kapott eredmény elszomorító, a megvizsgált magminták fele nem felelt meg az előírásoknak - áll a közleményben. A teszten kiderült, hogy a salátánál nulla és egy százalékos, míg a petrezselyemnél 1 százalékos csírázóképességet mutató minta is akadt, a jogszabályban meghatározott 75, illetve 65 százalékos csírázóképességi érték helyett. Jobb volt a helyzet a szintén apró magvas sárgarépánál, és kifejezetten jó a nagy magvúaknál, a babnál és a borsónál, bár ezeknél is előfordult egy-két gyengébb tétel. A szakemberek és a Teszt plussz vizsgálata szerint is érdemes a hazai cégek kerti magjait előnyben részesíteni, mert még a korábbi magyar szabályozáshoz viszonyítottan lényegesen lazább uniós előírásokat figyelembe véve is megbízható és jól ellenőrzött a magyarországi vetőmag-előállítás.

“The year 2010 will be decisive in the debate about intellectual property rights concerning seeds. The EU wants to pass seed legislation that is uniform throughout Europe. In the future, will just industrial varieties be available on the seed market while regional and farmers varieties will be found only in museums and show gardens? All signs indicate that seed corporations are using the revision of the seed law to expand their power further. The EU directive on conservation varieties and non-industrial varieties complicates or forbids the propagation of old varieties due to geographic and quantitative restrictions.

In the last few years, seed initiatives in many European countries have teamed up and organized across borders under the banner of “Let’s liberate diversity!” They are defending farmers’ rights to sow seeds from their own harvest, to breed them and to pass them on. European seed initiatives from ten countries have prepared counterproposals and want to vote on them together in Graz as well as make connections in the European-wide network of resistance.

This year’s meeting is taking place in Austria in order to strengthen cooperation with Eastern European countries, yet everyone who is interested in the subject and who would like to become active is invited.”

for a detailed program download the pdf

A becslés tehát korántsem pontos. Ám nagyságrendi közelítésre alkalmas, és sejteti, hogy a mezőgazdaság Magyarországon korántsem ad korlátlan lehetőségeket a foglalkoztatás és jövedelemtermelés bővítésére. Legyen bár szép nemzeti emlékezet és hagyomány a régi Magyarország, mint Európa éléskamrája, a valóság ma már más. Ábránd, hogy Magyarország a termőföldből, mint erőforrásból el tudja tartani magát.

Jelenleg 200 ezer ember dolgozik a magyar mezőgazdaságban, tartja fenn magát és az ágazatot nagy küzdelmek árán. Helyzetüket javítani mindannyiunk érdeke. Okos politikával és az erőforrások jobb kihasználásával talán növelhetjük azok számát, akik a mezőgazdaságban találnak megélhetést. Ám úgy gondolom, hogy tömegeket irányítani erre a területre azt jelentené, hogy rengeteg embert rögzítünk bele egy alacsony jövedelmi szintű, nyomorúságos helyzetbe, ahol nemigen van kitörési lehetőség. Nem nagyon hiszem, hogy egy ágazatban, amely 200.000 embert nehezen tart el, olyan változást lehetne végrehajtani, hogy milliós tömegnek adjon biztos megélhetést.

Termőföldet bérel az újpesti önkormányzat vállalkozókedvű kerületi családok számára, hogy maguknak termelhessék meg a betevő zöldséget, gyümölcsöt. Az ingyenes, de munkaigényes programban való részvételnek egyetlen fontos feltétele van, a megtermelt javak tizedét le kell adni az önkormányzatnak, hogy szétoszthassa a kispénzű nyugdíjasok, vagy más rászorulók között.

Hungry City is a book about how cities eat. (…) when you think that every day for a city the size of London, enough food for thirty million meals must be produced, imported, sold, cooked, eaten and disposed of again, and that something similar must happen every day for every city on earth, it is remarkable that those of us living in cities get to eat at all. Food shapes cities, and through them, it moulds us – along with the countryside that feeds us. Every day we inhabit spaces food has made, unconsciously repeating actions as old as cities themselves. We might think that take-aways are a modern phenomenon, but 5,000 years ago, they lined the streets of Ur, one of the oldest cities on earth. Markets and shops, pubs and kitchens, diners and waste-dumps have always provided the backdrop to urban life.

Hungry City follows food’s journey from land to city, through market and supermarket, kitchen and table, waste-dump and back again, to show how food affects all our lives, and impacts on the planet. The final chapter asks how we might use food to re-think cities in the future – to design them and their hinterlands better, and live in them better too.

The area I think most of us aspire to eat in, is expensive, natural food. This is organic food, local food and the like.

The area I’m interested in exploring is up here in extremely cultivated food. Food made in a laboratory maybe.

One of the only known truths about laboratory-grown meat—the only real thing we know about it at the moment—is that the meat has to be very thin for the oxygen to get to it. If it weren’t thin, you’d need to grow blood vessels and that would make it a much more complicated exercise.

It’s wet and very flat.

Now in the way new technologies emerge and change markets, often it’s companies that have something quite strange and simple in common with the technology that do well. It’s a bit like the way wire manufacturers started making fibre optic cables, just because they were good at extruding miles of stuff—even though there doesn’t seem to be any other relationship between the two technologies apart from their physical similarity.

In this case I’ve started to look at photo processing labs as systems that deal with wet, flat material. They include wet paper, and highly engineered processes.

My contention is that AGFA or some photo processing company would start producing lab-grown meat machines.

This work talks about how the lab-grown meat transition will affect the public-facing processes of food and its consumption, and also how it will affect craft and expertise in the world of food.