• Environment, Agriculture, and Food

Last week, Pam, Esther and Todd attended the Annual Association of American Geographers Meeting in Seattle (12th - 16th April 2011). Pam presented some of the group's mapping work on "Envisioning Regional Foodsheds in the Midwest." The talk was part of a session "Food". Other talks in the session included looking at resilience at the farm-scale in the Pacific Northwest, saving farmland for native Hawaiians, and examining alternative food networks using tools used in network theory.

There was a full day of talks on various aspects of urban agriculture as well as sessions on water resources and regional climate change. Students thinking about graduate work associated with the environment and food system might want to check out the abstracts from the annual meeting archived online at the AAG website to get a sense of current directions.

Todd Schuble and Esher Bowen will give a half an hour presentation on mapping the regional Foodshed at the IL GISA conference on October 21, 2010. They will present results examining the capacity of local and regional agriculture lands to support urban and rural populations in the Midwest and Northeast regions of the United States.

Esther will present preliminary modeling results of the effects on nutrient runoff and hydrologic cycle from increased produce production in the Upper Mississippi Watershed at the Fall AGU session. Her poster with be part of the special session in the Biogeosciences Section, "Upper Determining the Controls of Terrestrial Net Ecosystem Exchange (NEE) and Related Processes at Regional to Global Scales." The meeting will be held in mid-December in San Fransisco.

The work Esther will be presenting is the work we have been doing in conjunction with Euguen Yan and Yonas Demissie at Argonne National Laboratory. Esther is using the SWAT model with our own model of regional foodsheds to estimate how different scenarios of converting commodity crops and accommodating food and biofuel production might affect nutrient runoff, water quality and stream flow.

Check out fashion queen interns Bryn and Rachel on the "Surprising Benefits of Gardening" featured on WGN...

http://www.cltv.com/videobeta/93c79ca0-7606-4d13-b1e5-2bd7f01385d1/Healt...

Greetings All,
I'm quite happy to share with you my enthusiasm both for the Uncommon Garden Project (UGP) at large and the fact that t I can blog about it now!
It's been a journey of communication, transit, community fusion, family coercion, University encouragement, challenges and planning gone awry, but the garden is looking lovely and active.

In the interest of inspiring more campus gardening and to share with you the wisdom Emmy and I have come to acquire, I thought it might be nice to have a blog-post that details the implementation of the project; a somewhat 'to-do' list for the next generation.

(For specific details such as contact information and monetary sensitive things please contact me directly, and I can send along a pdf version of my 'Project Write Up' that I created as a summary for the independent study I developed concerning the project).

- Emmy and Ashley, The Uncommon Garden Team