The time is ripe to support urban agriculture

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Study: Policy brief: sustainable agriculture impacts in urban settings make the case for federal investments (DOI: 10.5304/jafscd.2024.141.002)

As Congress reconvenes, a coalition of advocates have published a policy brief calling on representatives to provide more support for urban agriculture through a new iteration of the Farm Bill, which has been in a state of limbo since expiring in September 2023.

Built on the expertise and experiences of urban agriculturalists, along with research from the University of Michigan, the brief urges Congress to fully fund the Department of Agriculture's Office of Urban Agriculture and Innovative Production for the first time in the office's six-year history.

First established by the Farm Bill's passage in 2018, the office wasn't funded until 2020 and, even then, the funding was at only 20% of its authorized level. By providing more support, the nation could reap even more of urban agriculture's undeniable social and economic benefits, the brief's authors said.

"It is possible to unlock extraordinary synergies between the environmental, economic and social benefits of urban agriculture, and this becomes even more likely if policy is supportive of it," said Jason "Jake" Hawes, an author of the urban agriculture policy brief, which was also published by the Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems and Community Development.

He's now an assistant professor at the University of Wyoming, but he earned his doctorate at U-M studying the impacts of urban agriculture on people, places and the planet. Members of the nonprofit Michigan Food and Farming Systems and the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, an advocacy group, also authored the brief.

In addition to expanding funding for the Office of Urban Agriculture and Innovative Production, the brief also seeks to make that funding more reliable and to foster urban agriculture technical support and data collection.

"Despite the incredible demand the office has seen for its programs, it has not been funded to the extent it was initially written for and this funding is conditional on repeated approval," Hawes said. "So every year there are questions about the sustainability of its programs, despite their really remarkable success."

More support, more sustainability

Results from Hawes' earlier research have emphasized the barriers and challenges urban producers face in maintaining sustainable and viable operations.

The average collective and individual gardens included in the study were more carbon-intensive than conventional agriculture, often as a result of barriers beyond the control of urban agriculturalists, such as land insecurity and preexisting soil pollution.

Yet, despite these barriers, the average urban farm had a greenhouse gas intensity per vegetable competitive with conventional farms. So the research team, which also included Benjamin Goldstein and Joshua Newell of the U-M School for Environment and Sustainability, dug into the reasons for that. What they found is that solutions are readily available with the right support.

"In this brief, we explore the ways that policy and planning have a role to play in supporting the climate-friendly practices already developed by urban food growers," Hawes said.

For example, on-farm infrastructure-including sheds, raised beds and composting bins-requires costly, upfront investments of time, money and even carbon. But many urban farms and gardens are displaced within a decade of starting due to local policies or development pressures outside of urban producers' control.

Thus, funding an office and programs that help extend the lifetime of these sites would go a long way in offsetting the startup costs and strengthening the environmental impact of urban agriculture, Hawes said. Long-running urban farms and gardens have already shown that, he added.

"Urban agriculturalists have developed a variety of really interesting ways to reduce financial costs and their carbon footprint, including reusing materials, promoting soil carbon retention and reducing fuel use," Hawes said. "When programs are supported for a long period of time, they are often competitive with conventional agriculture in terms of carbon emissions, and outcompete conventional agriculture in terms of some other social and ecological benefits."

It's also important that all these factors and more are considered when evaluating the impact of urban agriculture, said Goldstein, a co-author of the original study and an assistant professor at the U-M School for Environmental and Sustainability.

"For example, our study showed that urban agriculture uses far less synthetic fertilizer," he said. "We need to use holistic approaches to assess these problems and cannot focus solely on one aspect of a system when appraising sustainability."

Furthermore, bolstering the technical assistance available in existing USDA service centers could also promote greater access to conservation practices and lower other barriers to urban agriculture.

"If we learn from the best practices that are out there today, learn from the kind of research we've done and if we have an appropriate level of funding and technical support, we can support urban agriculturists who create systems that are good for communities, good for cities and good for the climate," Hawes said.

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