Kyoshabire squeezes cash out of hibiscus

Culinary and agricultural education can sometimes take a backseat to the more academic side of high school. But Blue Hill is teaching high school students the importance of healthy cooking and home grown produce through a cooking class that was recently instituted in Manhattan high schools.

Inclusive Farm is adapted for people with a wide range of physical needs, like for people who are blind, to give farming students the full range of skills expected on a farm. Inclusive Farm aims to break down barriers for disabled people in the farming industry and is currently ushering its first intake of 14 students toward completing their courses.

Three biointensive mini-farms in the US are teaching small-scale farmers from throughout the world how to grow more food through sustainable practices that focus on using less water and land. After bringing these farmers onto the US farms to learn the methods through a hands-on approach, the farmers then return to their home countries to implement and encourage the biointensive practices.

Production agriculture has put many small town, local farmers out of business, changing the landscape of the communities they've been pushed out of. One town in Missouri is fighting against this by joining together to preserve the importance of local control by nurturing a tradition of canning tomatoes.

As climate change continues to advance, its impact on farmlands has become more pronounced and increasingly devastating. Farmers and researchers in both South Africa and Nepal are working towards solutions to problems specifically related to climate change. Centered on developing technology, these farmers have found success with NASA satellite imagery as well as local clinics.

Green gram farming has lead to some promising results for communities in Eastern Kenya. Allowing for more crop diversity, this breakthrough has proved to be both a cash crop and a food crop, which provides economic stability and food security to the farmers in this region.

The Women’s Collective is a nonprofit that works with more than 10,000 subsistence farmers in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu to promote food security using millets, a crop resilient to drought and climate change. For Pavitra, one of those farmers, she began cultivating the ancient grains in 2015 and now has more than enough food to feed her family year-round. However, there’s a lack of public investment in millet production and machinery. And there’s no unified effort to create demand for millets: Some state governments lead the charge and in other states, it’s led by grassroots organizations.

Blanchet House is a nonprofit that provides food and housing for people in need. Men who are recovering from substance abuse can live at the farm and have an opportunity to work on the land and learn skills that promote self-sufficiency and confidence. Men generally stay up to 8 months with free room and board, attend daily AA and NA meetings, and are assigned jobs like tending to the animals and ground maintenance. Unlike other sobriety programs that emphasize deep self-reflection, Blanchet House focuses on the physical component of getting your hands dirty and learning responsibility.

Could clean meat be the solution for cutting greenhouse gas emissions, feeding an ever-growing human population and saving water? A growing number of food innovators think so, as do investors such as Bill Gates and Richard Branson. Although too expensive to hit the market immediately, production is in the works to create clean meat from animal cells that may be better for human health and the health of the environment.

In Kenya, like other countries in the world, deforestation is the major driver of tree cover loss. To solve this, a local startup called Seedball Kenya has developed the seedball technology whereby seeds of indigenous tree and grass species are coated with charcoal waste mixed with nutritious binders then thrown like balls into the planting grounds.