Welcome to Mezzacello Urban Farm
Sustainability, Science, and EcoSystems
Mezzacello Urban Farm is a 501(C)3 non-profit passionately committed to creating a food and health oasis in the heart of a major urban city.
Sustainability
Our goal and commitment to sustainability is passionate and complete. Voted Most sustainable urban garden in 2022 by Franklin Park Conservatory’s Growing To Green program. In addition, We are committed to modeling sustainable systems throughout our gardens.
Why Sustainability?
We are at an inflection point in our world today. Rather than highlight all the things that are going wrong, I choose to take a moment and underscore and model the things we can all do NOW at a local scale.
I started a blog chain detailing all of my work in this area. You can read them all here.
Science and Summer Camps
While we build Mezzacello as a sustainable model of thoughtful infrastructure and enclosed and sustainable ecosystems, we run and innovate summer camps. Camps like BioTechnology, BioEngineering, BioRenewables, and BioChemistry. These camps are designed to expose young minds to the magic and fun of all the sciences in gardening and agriculture. Learn More Here.
On a scale of 1-5 Mezzacello Camps are an 11!
Parent of a summer camper
Ecosystems
We started this mission with just two ecosystems: Formal Gardens and a small farm. As we developed in sophistication, we began to see that each ecosystem needed to be expanded and integrated. Today in 2023, there are NINE integrated and enclosed ecosystems at Mezzacello.
These ecosystems include:
The formal garden beds and hugelkultur systems, the pollinator gardens, the parterre and herbal systems, an integrated and sustainable pond, an advanced livestock integration system, potager gardens, an advanced and integrated composting system, a power and water generation systems, and lastly, the house we live in on this farm.
Our Mission:
Grow, Maintain, Sustain, Explain, and Entertain with applied STEM
Our Vision:
Create frictionless opportunities for people to explore relationships between ecologies, farming, robotics, automation, and applied STEM in a densely populated urban environment.
Join us in our mission of building the future, and reflecting the past; To grow, maintain, sustain and explain the path forward for health and food security.
Life on Mars? Biosystems? Collared rooster? Lawns with no weeds? Not your typical day visiting a garden but Jim Bruner is never typical.
JuliaLynne Walker
Over the last six years we have converted 3 abandoned plots of land in downtown Columbus into six distinct and inter-related sustainable ecosystems. Today we continue to build, experiment, and innovate in urban farming and ag science. See an example of our philosophy here. We innovated right through COVID 2020 lockdown and proved this concept works.
Enjoy Our Blogposts and Galleries