Biofuel Oasis in Berkeley is an all-women worker-owned cooperative and urban resource for folks who want to lighten their ecological footprints and maybe raise a chicken or two.

Novella Carpenter is both author and farmer, freelance journalist and entrepreneur. Her 2009 memoir, Farm City: Education of an Urban Farmer, chronicles how she turned a 1000-sq.-foot lot near her West Oakland apartment into a full-fledged urban farm. What began as a vegetable garden grew to include chickens and honey bees, then turkeys, rabbits, dwarf goats and pigs.

Carpenter will speak tonight at 7 p.m. at UC Berkeley along with Nathan McClintock, a doctoral candidate in geography and member of the Oakland Food Policy Council, about how agriculture can fit into urban environments now and in the future. Her talk is part of a series created by Agrariana, a UC Berkeley food policy group with a range of inspiring programs.