How 16 Initiatives Are Changing Urban Agriculture Through Tech And Innovation

Interviews opened with two open-ended questions about why participants became involved in urban agriculture and whether their values have changed over the course of their involvement. These open-ended questions were asked at the start of the interview and before the values-ranking activity so that the list of values gleaned from the literature would not influence the values that participants expressed during these first two questions. Agriculture programs that target young people could increase the health and longevity of a community.

While policies tend to promote green spaces and UA in the city carried out for ecological-environmental, aesthetic-recreational, and social-educational purposes , the same cannot be said for UA oriented toward food production. Several community projects in Victoria, British Columbia were born to promote urban agricultural practices such as the Sharing Backyards program. This program exists to help people living in urban areas get connected with others who have extra space in their yards for the purpose of urban farming. Organizations also exist to educate people living in the urban parts of Vancouver on farming and growing food in an urban setting by running public demonstration gardens. Animal and livestock options in urban agriculture include chickens, fish, goats, and honey bees. Currently, the USDA does not collect data on the number of urban farms in the U.S.

They use their grounds as wedding venues, host workout classes, and create value-added products like jam, jelly, hot sauce, or seedlings for other gardeners. Many long-standing farms are nonprofits, with educational goals or other community-driven objectives. Marcus Williams, the Baltimore City Master Gardener Coordinator with the University of Maryland, laid out the struggle it takes for some residents in urban areas to get fresh food. Automation has tackled the most labour-intensive parts of production including seeding, raising seedlings and transportation of the cultivation panels. ‘We think that this will help to make agriculture more attractive for the young generations, and contribute to making agriculture a more sustainable industry,’ the Spread spokesperson adds.

‘bad Food Or Lack Of Food’ For Minorities

And like any green space, urban farms and gardens offer essential ecosystem services like moderating temperatures and reducing storm water runoff. Urban agriculture is especially important in New York City as many low-income residents suffer from high rates of obesity and diabetes and limited sources of fresh produce. The City and local nonprofit groups have been providing land, training and financial encouragement, but the impetus in urban farming has really come from the farmers, who often volunteer when their regular workday is done. One NYC urban agriculture initiative targeted at low-income residents is the Farms at NYCHA project.

Urban agriculture—which can host education programs conducted by non-profits, schools, and other organizations—is a form of farming or gardening that occurs in cities, sometimes accompanied by food processing and distribution. Some scholars suggest that urban agriculture also includes or is often connected to farmers’ markets, food coops, community-supported agriculture, garden-to-café initiatives, and other programs that focus on fair and sustainable food systems (Jarosz, 2008; Burt et al., 2017). Urban agriculture can contribute to food security, economic development, public health, individual well-being, and community revitalization (Brown et al., 2003).

Transforming Vacant Buildings To Urban Farms

Early urban farms were explicitly pitched as a way of alleviating food shortages. After the Panic of 1893, the mayor of Detroit urged starving residents to grow potatoes on vacant lots. The “victory gardens” of WWI and WWII were critical for supplying needed fruits and vegetables during wartime. During World War II, millions of Americans planted “victory gardens” in their backyards, eventually supplying a hungry nation with 40 percent of its homegrown fruits and vegetables. Once the war was over, those urban farms withered away, supplanted by increasingly efficient large-scale rural agriculture. Alexandra is a produce safety and compliance expert who champions safe and sustainable food systems.

Economic development goals and policies can lead to new financing tools for urban agriculture development; tax incentives can encourage the location of urban agriculture in underserved neighborhoods on vacant property. Housing goals and policies can encourage urban agriculture near affordable housing through the provision of community gardens, rooftop gardens, and community kitchens in multifamily and low-income neighborhoods. Community health goals and policies can support access to fresh fruits and vegetables through community gardening, sales of produce from urban farms, and education and outreach to residents about the benefits of healthy, fresh foods.

Over this past year, the pandemic, climate disruptions and ongoing harm caused by racial violence have challenged our urban communities and food systems in unprecedented ways…. Riparian Forest Garden – is the corridor along an urban stream where a diverse selection of crops can be grown. Good examples of products grown in these areas include fruit or nut trees, small fruit bushes, herbs, and perennial vegetables . Though a backyard garden or a community garden plot will not provide enough food for a whole family throughout the year, it’s both empowering and enlightening for people to grow their own food. Goldstein is an assistant professor of applied environmental health, and she codirects the Extension and Outreach team of a project called Coordinating Nontraditional Sustainable Water Use in Variable Climates best site fnfcg.org.

One outcropping of the project is water quality testing that Goldstein’s team is conducting using a set of raised beds built by Hood College, set up beside a homeless shelter in Frederick, Md. Pipes collect rainwater off the roof of the shelter’s offices and funnel it through a filter and then to a holding tank. Once the holding tank is full, the excess runs to a wicking system at the base of the large raised beds. The wicking system feeds into a layered set of materials, with gravel at the base, then sand, and then soil and plant roots. The beds are lined to prevent too much water loss, and the soil layer only wicks water upward as the surface dries. Regardless of scale, the challenges that face urban gardeners haven’t put them off the practice.