Urban Agriculture was a podcast all about food production within the built environment. It’s no longer in production, but the completed episodes are available on the home page.
Among the covered topics were:
- The current state of agriculture around the world and critical issues facing outdoor farming
- The effects of outdoor farming on ecosystem functions and services
- Indoor farming (e.g., greenhouses, vertical farms)
- Food safety, sovereignty, and security
- Food deserts, and resulting dietary/health concerns
- Ecological footprint
- Freshwater availability, and much more.
In-depth interviews with many of the world’s leading experts in urban agriculture were a regular feature on this podcast.
We began Urban Agriculture because host Dickson Despommier has had a long-standing interest in farming within the built environment. He wrote a book about it called The Vertical Farm.
About the Host
Dickson D. Despommier, Ph.D.
Dickson was born in New Orleans in 1940 and grew up in the San Francisco Bay area until he was age 11. His family moved to New Jersey, where he remained until he was out of college. He obtained his BS in Biology at Fairleigh Dickinson University in 1962, MS in Medical Parasitology at Columbia University in 1964, and Ph.D. from the University of Notre Dame in 1967. Dickson spent 3 years at Rockefeller University in New York as a guest investigator before his first academic appointment at The Medical College of Ohio in 1971 as an Assistant Professor of Microbiology. He moved to Columbia University in 1972 and remained there until my retirement in 2009 as a Professor of Microbiology and Public Health. He won Teacher of the Year six times and National Teacher of the Year in 2003. He held an RO1 NIH Research Grant from 1972-1997. All of his research centered around the biology of Trichinella spiralis.