In the shadow of the brick buildings and barbed wire gates of the old Vogt industrial complex, Greg Graft is farming. His greenhouse sits on a once empty lot behind a company that used to make machine parts in the early 1900s. It’s on the edge of West Louisville, just south of downtown, and the perfect place, Graft says, to grow greens for local restaurants.
“It’s pretty much shipped right out the door every single day, so we have a very little time of it actually spending any time in a cooler or storage facility. So it’s much pretty much from the channel straight to the chefs,” Graft says.
Graft talks about this successful agricultural venture between rows of hydroponic herbs and lettuce. Tubes of water feed into the slender trays holding more than 13 thousand greens. And Graft says he can grow his products more quickly, and closer together, than he could if he were farming in soil—a good scenario for an urban operation. While he may be one of the city’s few, Graft says economic conditions as well as a growing interest in local food may inspire more urban farmers.
“Just in the last two or three months, I’ve had this really kind of a gut feeling that there’s going to be a lot more people getting into urban agriculture or trying to get in to the inner city. The farmers’ markets have really started to expand, you’ll really, even in the Louisville area, start to notice there’s just so many more that have popped up,” says Graft.
His gut feeling may be reality. The Windy city just launched the “Chicago Fresh Initiative,” which, in part, aims to start growing food on vacant city properties. The Kansas City Center for Urban Agriculture offers city farmers a spot in a communal greenhouse. Seattle’s P-Patch community gardens now supply nearly 10 tons of food a year to city food banks.
While community gardens and farmer’s markets have long histories, new attention is being paid to urban farming as a viable way to feed families. Michael Levenston started the educational organization City Farmer in Vancouver, British Columbia nearly 30 years ago.
“The recognition of it as a subject worthy of people’s interest is the huge change. It’s being studied by students at university, being looked at by mayors as something to think about. This is dramatic change,” Levenston says.
Louisville has not yet seen that dramatic change. There’s a city effort underway to bring more food from nearby farmers to the city, including plans for a year-round downtown farmers’ market. But there’s no official effort to increase food production within the city. Still, County Cooperative Extension Service agent Denise Peterson says she’s getting more calls than ever from individuals wanting to join a community garden or needing gardening advice.
“We’ve definitely seen an increase in the number of participants. A lot of first time gardeners, or people that perhaps haven’t done it for quite a while who now with the higher food prices and fuel prices have decided to put in a garden,” says Peterson.
Peterson says the waiting list for community gardens is three years long, but the city isn’t tapping all of the resources it could to meet that demand.
“We have a lot of unused property. We have a lot of unused potential of humans that would really like to grow a few things and supply their community,” Peterson says.
The city owns a long list of vacant or unused lots. But it’s up to developers—and the city—how those lots are used. Nonprofits that want to put in a community garden can lease lots for only a dollar. The city probably won’t see the kind of large scale production rural farms put out. But it is seeing a growing number of community gardens, commercial growers, and even individual balcony and back yard gardens that are producing enough to feed many mouths. But urban gardeners beware: the soil in older parts of town could be contaminated with lead. Best to have it tested, or farm in raised beds.
The American Lung Association is praising this week’s U.S. House passage of a bill that would tighten regulations on tobacco.
It calls for new restrictions on advertising and federal penalties for selling tobacco to minors. The bill also puts further regulation of tobacco products into the hands of the Food and Drug Administration.
Spokesperson Menisa Marshall with the lung association’s Kentucky chapter says current tobacco regulations are out of date.
“If tobacco products were discovered today and tried to be brought on the market, anyone would naturally assume that they would have to go through the same kind of rigorous testing and approval process that any other products that are marketed and that we consume and put into our bodies, that someone would be looking at that,” says Marshall.
The bill will likely have a tough time clearing the Senate, and President Bush has promised to veto the measure.
An expert on consumer trends in the car industry thinks the latest changes at Ford may bring the company back into solvency in North America. Ford Motor Company announced last week its plans to re-tool some of its plants, including the Louisville Assembly Plant, to be able to produce multiple models of a similar size.
It’s not the first time for has tried make a car popular in one part of the world equally popular everywhere else. Similar efforts were made and failed with the Contour and Focus. Car and Driver Technical Editor Mike Austin thinks they’ve learned from those mistakes and will be successful this time.
“They have a lot of commonality, but they’re not exactly the same, and I think that’s what we’ll see with Ford,” says Austin. “They’ll use as much as the global stuff as they can, but they won’t do it with such fervor to ignore the market.”
Those smaller, more-efficient models from Europe are slated for U.S. production by 2010. Meanwhile, the Kentucky Truck Plant will absorb the company’s large SUV production in addition to Super-Duty trucks.
The University of Louisville’s Birth Defects Center has received a renewal of funding from the National Institutes of Health. The center was awarded just under $9-million five years ago for research. Today the center announced that amount has been renewed by NIH for another five years.
Director Dr. Robert Greene says although researchers have made some breakthroughs, there is still much work to be done.
“Despite ongoing research, 70-percent of the causes of birth defects are entirely unknown.,” says Greene. “Moreover, birth defects are the single leading cause of infant mortality.”
The center also received an additional grant of $1.5-million. That money will be used for a specific research project on gene mutations in babies.
Thursday, July 31, 2008
College Student Retention
Staying on board for four years of college has always been difficult for many students, and universities and colleges have tried many strategies and policies to retain students. What programs have proved the most effective for student retention? What are some of the challenge faced in keeping undergraduate students on track? Are part-time or full-time students more likely to drop-out of college, and what are the larger factors that influence students who fail to complete college? Join us Thursday as State of Affairs gets schooled in student retention.
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The city has issued several alerts about poor air quality so far this summer. The alerts suggest you drive less, mow your lawn after sunset, and wait to fuel up until evening, too. They caution those in “sensitive” groups to avoid strenuous activity outside. When you hear about an air quality alert, do you change your plans for the day in any way?
The Kentucky Public Service Commission has begun the process of vetting rate increase proposals from Louisville Gas and Electric and Kentucky Utilities. The official paperwork for the proposals was filed yesterday.
PSC spokesperson Andrew Melnykovych says they’ll have an informal meeting with the involved parties in the coming weeks to set a procedural schedule. Those meetings may determine if they’ll hold public hearings on the proposals.
“There will be an opportunity for public comment under any circumstance, and written comments are always welcome,” says Melnykovych, “but I think the decision that has yet to be made is whether the commission will actually go out into the field and conduct hearings and if so where and how many of those there will be needs to be determined as well.”
The rate proposal would hike the average LG&E electric customer’s bill by about five-dollars a month. The increase would be around eight-dollars a month for natural gas customers.
LG&E representatives have said they need the money to replace outdated natural gas lines in downtown Louisville and pay for a new plant in Trimble County.
