Students in the culinary program at Jasper Place High School in Edmonton, Canada (yes, Canada apparently has culinary programs in high school) probably think farm-to-table restaurants are a pretty cute idea. Oh, you have a farm on your roof? You must be so proud. We have a farm ON OUR ACTUAL TABLE.

The students are raising 100 tilapia, which they'll cook for college credit in the spring.

Editor’s note: This is your weekly installment of images from Douglas Gayeton and Laura Howard-Gayeton’s Lexicon of Sustainability. We’ll be running one image every Friday this winter, so stay tuned. If you have your own sustainability terms, you can add them yourself to the Lexicon of Sustainability.

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On our way across North Carolina, we stopped to chat with some Native American farmers trying to change the food and work situation in their communities. Plagued with high poverty rates and little access to good food, these folks were inspiring in their efforts to farm in a sustainable way:

Rebecca Wiggins-Reinhard.

Those who live in the desert borderlands of southern New Mexico face plenty of serious struggles. Water is limited, living wages are scarce, and many live in unincorporated communities called colonias, which often lack basic infrastructure like roads and gas lines. Things are so tough there, in fact, that one might understandably presume that the only food issue on residents’ minds is whether or not they’ll have enough. Not so, argues Rebecca Wiggins-Reinhard, director of the Farm Fresh program for La Semilla Food Center in Las Cruces, the largest city south of Albuquerque. In 2010, Wiggins and two colleagues founded Semilla (“Seed” in Spanish), with plans to start a youth food policy council, a youth farm, and multiple produce stands. After their inaugural year, which included the council's launch and the gift of 15 acres to start the farm, Wiggins’ work won her an Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (IATP) fellowship -- and a visit from cookbook author, New York Times columnist, and food maven Mark Bittman. I spoke with Wiggins by phone to hear about her surprising path to food work, her plan to grow 500 foods in a desert, and what it’s like to promote local food in the country’s fifth-poorest state.

As any Portlandia fan knows, ethical meat-eaters don't just want their food to be humanely raised and humanely slaughtered. They also want it to have had a happy life. And it turns out that what makes pigs have a happy life is video games. Seriously -- pigs like to snuffle at flashing lights, which is basically Galaga. Accordingly, ethical farming researchers at Wageningen University are working with designers from the Utrecht School of the Arts to develop a human/pig interactive gaming app. The game, called Pig Chase, is designed to relieve some of the tedium of being a pig on a farm …

In a rare bipartisan move -- the policy was initiated under George W. Bush and finalized under Obama -- the federal government has enacted catch size limits in order to prevent overfishing of coastal seas, reports the Washington Post. "It's something that’s arguably first in the world," said Eric Schwaab, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's assistant administrator for fisheries. "It's a huge accomplishment for the country." Five years ago, Bush signed a reauthorization of the Magnuson-Stevens Act, which dates to the mid-1970s and governs all fishing in U.S. waters. A bipartisan coalition of lawmakers joined environmental groups, some fishing …

Tree sparrows have seen large declines in western Europe, in part due to changes in farming practices.Photo: Nutmeg66Call it the bird tax -- or rather, the amount of food that farmers need to set aside in order to get birds to stick around and stop dying. Farmers don't historically have an awesome relationship with birds [PDF], but in recent years, they've actually been paid to scatter grain around their land after the harvest, since a lack of seed resources in winter is thought to be one of the reasons for birds' dramatic decline. Some of the seeds farmers spread around …

No less an authority than Willie Nelson is writing in the Huffington Post, calling on people to Occupy the Food System. Big Agriculture is just as one-percenty as the banks, says Nelson, with most of the resources concentrated in the hands of a few large corporations -- and the government isn't doing anything to help. Our banks were deemed too big to fail, yet our food system's corporations are even bigger. Their power puts our entire food system at stake. Last year the U.S. Departments of Agriculture (USDA) and Justice (DOJ) acknowledged this, hosting a series of workshops that examined corporate …

Photo: Cathrine Windyk Inga Haugen may look a little like Heidi, but she's a modern-day farm girl through and through. In 1993, her family moved to the small town of Canton, Minn. (population less than 400), to Springside Farm, 230 acres of rolling hills and grazing land that was then a hobby farm. Her mother, Bonnie, wanted to run a working farm; she figured it would be a way to earn a living while she raised three children: Inga, now 30, Olaf, now 27, and Thor, now 24. Springside was in one of the worst places to farm in the …

Photo: Donn HewesAsk any 5-year-old: Few tools symbolize the farm like a trundling tractor. In fact, you'd have to reach further back in time to find an equally enduring symbol: the horse. And while there's little doubt that tractors have revolutionized farm labor and made farms much more efficient than they were in past centuries, a growing number of farmers are taking the back-to-the-land ethos as far as it will go and choosing horses and mules over John Deere. "Maybe it's a [glimpse] into the future," says Adam Davidoff, co-owner of New Family Farm in Sebastopol, Calif. Davidoff is 25 …