Battle of the Book Reviews - Urban Agriculture vs The Urban Food Revolution

If you're looking for a holiday gift concerning Urban Agriculture/Food I have you covered. 2011 saw two notable books come out The Urban Food Revolution - Changing the Way We Feed Cities by Peter Ladner and Urban Agriculture - Ideas and Designs for the New Food Revolution by David Tracey.

Here's the breakdown:

-Urban Food Revolution is for those who are new to the idea of urban food and urban agriculture. If you are a frequent reader of this blog or involved in the movement already, there is little new here and to be honest, a book like this comes out every year.
The author is a politician turned journalist who adequately summarizes the various aspects of the movements.

The highlights of the book are contained in pages 88-93. It's here where entrepreneurs can get valuable information on the costs of running your own balcony farm, the cost to set up Valcent ground breaking vertical farming operation, and the cost to set up an urban agriculture farm in a metropolis like Philadelphia.
Having tried to piece together this information myself, it was quite a treat to find of all of this information in one place.
Although there are solutions sprinkled throughout the book, the final chapter is devoted solely to how to fix North America's current urban agriculture woes. However in my opinion, there just aren't enough solutions here and that's what we need more of than anything.

-As for David Tracey's book, it's for that person in your life who wants to get their hands dirty. Whereas the former book was written more for an academic, the latter book is for the farmer in all of us, whether they are new to the field or old hands. It's a terrific source of ideas, big and small, and designs too, for how we can turn our urban areas into farms. Instructions on how to increase your backyard or container yields or start a community garden are all here.

The Urban Food Revolution - Changing the Way We Feed Cities wins, hands down!

p.s. Both of the writers hail from Vancouver, where there is a lot more about their burgeoning urban ag industry.