2021’s proved another busy year for the Farm Urban team; we’ve worked on a range of projects with partners as diverse as the Welsh Government, RIBA and community groups across Birkenhead. Here’s a taster – pun intended – of some of the things we’ve been working on. Crop Cycle The Welsh Government’s Crop Cycle project brought together community organisations across Wales and expert organisations working with Controlled Environment Agriculture (CEA).  Farm Urban worked alongside other experts including LettUs Grow, Digital Farming and GrowStack over spring and summer 2021. It allowed like-m ..read more

One of PhD students, Francis, has written a blogpost describing his journey to date into the world of Urban Farming ..read more

2018 saw the first run of our secondary school Future Food Challenge, which was a great success – and a whole lot of fun! The programme, funded by Shaping Futures, ran in collaboration with The University of Liverpool’s Institute of Integrative Biology. It aims to inspire young people to think about science and enterprise differently, challenging Year 9 students to find solutions to tackle the issue of global food security by focusing on ways to grow more food in our cities using aquaponics. The programme started in January with Farm Urban touring local schools to deliver their TEDx talk, Fixi ..read more

In May, we attended OpenMaker’s policy event at the European Parliament, where makers met with policymakers to discuss the future of industry within Europe. The event took place during European Makers Week, a 28 country wide celebration of the “Maker Movement”- a quickly growing group of people, like us at FarmUrban, who create unique products and technologies. Growth of the maker movement is desirable for both for the economy and for society as a whole. Makers have formed many successful start up businesses, and bring 26 billion euro to the world economy each year. This novel approach to busi ..read more

Here at Farm Urban, we always try and think about the why of what we’re doing, and to make sure that whatever we do is in accord with our values and the things that we care about. And doing things in the right way is particularly important when it comes to how we treat each other and work together as a team. We’ve been really inspired by some of the ideas in the book Reinventing Organisations by Frederic Laloux, which our friends at Squash Nutrition told us about. Reinventing Organisations looks at how the structure of organisations has evolved over time, and how people’s relationship to emplo ..read more

We’re generally not huge fans of TV at Farm Urban (largely because we don’t have the time to watch it), but one of the few programs that we go out of our way to see is BBC’s Countryfile. We were therefore thrilled when one of their producers, Nick, contacted us to ask us if we would be interested in featuring in their special episode about Cities. We can’t remember our initial response, but we just hope it didn’t involve any comments about bears and woods or the religious affiliations of the Pontiff. It was just after we’d arranged for Nick to come and see us that the only 100% reliable law in ..read more

The Farm Urban team were thrilled to be a part of this year’s Big Bang North West on 4 July. Taking place at the Exhibition Centre in Liverpool, pupils from schools across the North West came out in their droves for a day of discovery. They had the opportunity to meet face-to-face with inspiring engineers and scientists from industry and academia and take part in a whole host of hands-on activities and experiments. We love Big Bang’s approach to engaging young people in Science, Engineering, Technology and Maths (STEM). The event offers a huge range of exhibition stands (including ours!) with ..read more

Working at Farm Urban has been really intense so far, but in a good way don’t worry. With this sunny spring, and summer on the way, the team has been truly busy. We’ve been preparing for the arrival of the new interns, and also to get ready for many events that I have to keep secret at the moment but which promise to be very encouraging for the future of Farm Urban and communities. To give you an overview, we have been running several workshops with primary school pupils at St Luke School in Formby, along with the regular enrichment sessions at the Liverpool Life Sciences UTC. We also had to ..read more

The Farm Urban team will be rapidly expanding over the summer, with a number of interns arriving ready to roll up their sleeves and get stuck in (quite literally) to all things aquaponic. As they follow their own interests and learn about different aspects of what we do at Farm Urban they’ll be posting on the blog and taking us along on their journeys, enabling us to see what we do from different, fresh perspectives. First up is Eugenie, who arrived just over a week ago, from Lille, in France, where she is currently studying Territorial and Urban Development. She’ll be exploring what’s happeni ..read more

We have been busy developing FUEd: Farm Urban In Education. We’ve taken everything we’ve learnt on our eco-entrepreneurial journey so far to create a powerful new way to educate. By presenting students with real-world problems and challenging them to find innovative and creative solutions, we believe we can nurture and inspire them to become the next generation of scientists, entrepreneurs and leaders. Following a series of successful workshops and education programs in schools across Merseyside, we will be launching our immersive 1-week summer schools starting in July. Human potential is inf ..read more