City Farm, Chicago (Photo: Linda N./flickr.com - click photo for more.)

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It sounds idyllic. Urban farming. Artichoke feathering in the sidewalk cracks; tufts of herbs for every meal, carrots from the White House lawn.

But like many rosy dreams, we forget the thorns of hard work.

Urban farming is hotter than jalapeño right now, but it will take public support — and lobbying Congress – if it’s going to have an impact on how we eat, and how the poorest among us get fresh food.

Our guests today are farmers who have converted city lots for everything from growing fish to heirloom pumpkins. Gurus of the city farm.

This hour, On Point: Chickens at sunrise — in the city!

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Jacki Lyden, guest host

Tom Ashbrook is on vacation.

Guests:

Joining us from Milwaukee is Will Allen, founder and CEO of Growing Power, an urban farm based in northwest Milwaukee. A 2008 MacArthur Fellow, he was recently profiled in The New York Times Magazine.

And from Berkeley, Calif., we’re joined by Novella Carpenter. She started Ghost Town Farm on an abandoned lot next to her home in Oakland. She writes about it in her new book, “Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer.”  Read an excerpt here.

In this video, Will Allen gives a tour of his Milwaukee greenhouses:

Across the country, and especially in the great Midwest, the corn pickers are in the fields today, bringing in what is projected to be the biggest corn harvest in American history.

Through corn meals and corn sweeteners and corn-fed livestock and corn-brewed ethanol, Americans eat and drink — and now are beginning to drive on — an astounding amount of corn.

In a beautiful new documentary called “King Corn,” two young Americans plant one acre of corn in the corn ocean of Iowa, and learn a bundle.

This hour, On Point: You are what you eat. The corn-fed nation and “King Corn.”

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Ian Cheney, co-writer and co-producer of the new documentary King Corn.

George Naylor, president of the National Family Farm Coalition and a corn/soybean farmer in Churdan, Iowa.

Ricardo Salvador, former associate professor of agronomy at Iowa State University, currently he’s Program Director of Food Systems and Rural Development at the W.K. Kellogg Foundation.

Daryll Ray, Director of the Agricultural Policy Analysis Center at the University of Tennessee.