A note to my readers: Writing this post during the high light of summer felt almost out of place against the gloominess that has enveloped us over the last few weeks. Not wanting to succumb to the darkness, however, I persevered because it’s a story about people and a place that have worked long and hard to build a beacon of light and hope. That’s also one way of explaining why this post is so long. I just can’t be short and pithy when the subject cries out for many words. So, open it, start reading, take a break, weed your garden, get a glass of iced tea, and come back, even two or three times, if necessary, to finish it. Thank you for making the effort, and may you revel in summer’s effulgence!
Just like words, looks can be deceiving. Such was the case with my journey down an arrow straight county highway in eastern Kansas that was lined with newly fabricated malls carved from tidy rectangles of former farmland. Land that once supported precisely laid out rows of corn and soybeans now sprouted America’s meccas of materialism, whose physical profiles, brand names, and endless parking lots had become the universal language for Consumer Nation—devoid of character, regional identities, or accents.
At first glance, my destination that day seemed to echo a landscape that had been stripped of its former pastoral beauty and re-dressed in Chamber of Commerce tropes. I was looking for Innovation Drive, the site of the Kansas State University Olathe campus, whose website’s promotional prose spoke of “education that drives business,” “upskilling opportunities,” and “course material…built with the input of industry partners.” Not that there was anything new here—higher education has been prostrating itself before the STEM gods for some time now, urging young people to relinquish their doomed pursuits of the humanities in favor of joining today’s work force. But the words of the university’s ad-copy writers and the visuals of the immediate surroundings did not comport with what I found at the Olathe campus, site of K-State’s Urban Food Systems Initiative.
An urban food and agriculture initiative? Excuse me, but aren’t we in Kansas? The contradiction first hit me a couple of years ago when the Initiative’s director, Eleni Pliakoni, asked me to join the advisory committee for their GRIP Project. GRIP is an acronym for “Game Changing Research Initiative,” which like the campus’s street name, Innovation Drive, is meant to inspire faculty and students to take their own professional moon shot. But after a couple of longish Zoom calls with their faculty and staff, and reading between the lines of their promotional copy, I found my cognitive dissonance slowly dissolving.
Instead of a bastion of corporate agribusiness, I was hearing about a large research farm where appropriate-scale technology was helping urban and peri-urban farmers churn out both big yields and decent livelihoods; research, monitoring, and remediation methods that were turning lead-laden city lots into productive and safe urban growing and living spaces; and graduate students, many from conventional Kansas farms, with a desire to stay in agriculture, but only if it leads to a stronger sense of community and upholds their beliefs in social justice. Intrigued, I invited myself for a visit to the campus, which included a sampling of the Kansas City urban farming scene, many of whose players partner with the Urban Food System Initiative.
Located only 25 miles from Kansas City, Missouri, the Olathe campus was opened in 2009 and houses programs in hospitality (it includes a state-of-the-art, multi-purpose community kitchen space), animal health, agribusiness, horticulture and natural resources, and urban food systems. Though its building looks every bit the corporate citadel, the daily comings and goings of those inside its glass skin are decidedly warm, welcoming, and community friendly. With a PhD in Agriculture Sciences, Eleni has a focused and intense nature, sharpened a bit by a pronounced Greek accent. Under her leadership, she and her colleagues have created what is still an emerging, comprehensive approach to teaching and researching urban food systems. Becky Stuteville, a PhD in political science who’s developing a food policy course for 2025, called it a “radically inter-disciplinary” program that, like the more expansive understanding of food systems implies, draws from a wide array of academic and experiential learning. “This is a great, innovative environment where faculty have complete agency,” she told me. Becky also sent a jolt of electricity through my system when she told me she was a niece of one of sustainable agriculture’s academic icons, John Ikerd.
My tour of the facility literally starts at the molecular level of the food system. Eleni escorted me into her inner sanctum—the chemistry and biology laboratory where food and plants are tested and analyzed for a number of ingredients, attributes, and purposes. I enter a lab with some trepidation because I’m still haunted by images of high school chemistry class and 17-year-old boys playing with Bunsen burners and, at the other end of the spectrum, people wearing HAZMAT suits. Fortunately, I find neither as I enter a darkened room packed with highly sophisticated instruments capable of measuring every facet of the tiniest compounds, and then displaying the results across computer screens.
There’s a spectrophotometer that is used to measure total antioxidants, total phenolics, anthocyanin, Vitamin C, chlorophyll, and other compounds important for human health. Then there is high-performance liquid chromatography which, Eleni explains, “We are using to measure individual phenolic, flavonoids, and carotenoids, (important compounds for human health). When we analyze hemp samples we are measuring cannabinoids.” They also use gas chromatography which is used for aroma volatiles and terpenes.
Realizing I had just had more chemistry in the last five minutes than I’ve had in the last 50 years, I ask Eleni if something like smelling a fresh tomato isn’t just a subjective experience. She reminds me, with just a hint of “tsk, tsk,” that what you are smelling are very precise compounds. “The consumer wants a nice red tomato that smells good,” she says. “In our role within urban food systems, we’re evaluating the quality of fresh produce grown under a number of very different conditions.”
Photovoltaic system in field trials with tomatoes at OHREC Farm
Over the next 48 hours, I was to see and hear about those “conditions” including urban soils that face multiple challenges. By taking an integrated approach, the Olathe program evaluates a number of opportunities to assist growers. For example, agrivoltaics technology now under development at the Olathe Horticulture Research and Extension Center (OHREC), a 300-plus-acre farm owned by K-State located only 20 minutes from Olathe, includes vertical solar panels spaced at 12-feet intervals in small, trial tomato plots. The hope is that small growers will reap the benefits of solar energy without sacrificing limited land space or the quantity and quality of their produce. Trial tomatoes from the research farm go to Eleni’s lab where grad students, who are learning to do research, analyze every feature of the tomato with the ultimate intent of sharing results with urban growers.
Carefully navigating my way through the laboratory’s sensitive and expensive instruments, I ask Eleni about a small, hand-held metal press sitting on a shelf. It seemed out of place in a room that looked a lot like a NASA mission control center. She picks up the object and grabs a rubber tomato out of a basket of toy vegetables that I just notice. To illustrate its function, she places the “tomato” on a metal tray, pushes down hard with the press’s flat bottom until the rubber bulges out around the edges in a mildly amusing manner. “This is how we start the testing process” she says with the hint of a smile. For a real tomato, the resulting pulp would then go through a dehydrator and extractor, be fed into various measuring devices, and display everything humanly knowable about itself by way of points and lines on a grid scrolling across a computer screen. I took some solace in knowing that a little bit of human touch is still necessary to start the scientific ball rolling.
Since I was a freshman in college, the thing about academia that most perplexed me was its obsession with proving what often seemed to be a keen sense of the obvious. But as I’ve hopefully matured over the years (some will differ), I now see how many of my so-called commonsense assumptions (e.g., nature is good for you) have been wrestled to the ground by scholars who, believe it or not, have often proven such vague notions to be true. And more importantly, the best among them have endeavored to place those truths in service to the public good. As if to subscribe to Edmund Burke’s prescription, “It is not only our duty to make the right known, but to make it prevalent,” the people associated with K-State Olathe disseminate their findings as rapidly as possible into the community.
A case in point is the work of Ganga Hettiarachchi, an agronomy professor of Sri Lankan background who is based at the K-State main campus in Manhattan, Kansas. As a soil scientist (she laughed when I said, “Oh, you’re a diva of dirt!”), Ganga’s research and educational scope goes to the heart of one of America’s longest-standing public health threats and environmental injustices: lead toxicity. As the country’s post-World War II urban decay led to the demolition of millions of lead-based painted buildings, lead levels in soils of the resulting vacant lots soared to dangerous levels. As part of a seven-year brownfields study, Ganga’s research found lead levels in some areas of Kansas City, Missouri as high as 400 parts per million (ppm) compared to what were normal ranges nationally of 15 to 30 ppm. Due to the high concentration of lead in these areas—50 percent of 262 lots tested had elevated levels—lead levels in children from these largely disadvantaged communities were nine times higher than the national average. This much lead in soil also posed risks for vegetable production due to a variety of factors such as what crops were planted (e.g., lead tends to accumulate in roots crops) and water hitting the soil and splashing on leafy vegetables.
“When you consider the benefits of gardening and the limited capacity of many under-resourced cities to monitor lead and implement abatement procedures,” Ganga explained, “we had to find other solutions.” Phytoremediation—using plants to take up soil-based toxins, then harvesting and destroying the plants—works on some contaminants like arsenic but not lead. Her resolution was determining that phosphorous, one of the three basic elements for soil fertility (nitrogen and potassium being the other two), and heavy applications of compost, also good for soil health, were effective in making them safe for vegetable production by reducing the bioavailability of lead.
Ganga sees herself as a scientist in service to the community. “It’s my responsibility to educate,” she told me. To that end, she has developed written material on the subject of soil safety and gardening in potentially contaminated environments for university extension bulletins that are used frequently by the Master Gardeners program. She’s particularly proud of the fact that she was able to get those materials translated into Spanish for the many Spanish-speaking gardeners in the Greater Metro Kansas City area.
In a similar vein, her students benefit greatly from her commitment to education, which drove me to ask about a quote in her university bio which read, “I advise my students to find a niche they enjoy, rather than just seek out the best job prospects.” I wondered if such a remark didn’t fly in the face of the higher education trend that allows earning potential to determine a student’s learning path. A recent New York Times (5/26/24) report examined the growing propensity of college graduates to “sell out” in favor of high paying jobs. “In an age of astronomical housing costs, high tuition, and inequality,” the Times wrote, “students and their parents…see college as a means to a lucrative job, more than a place to explore.” Ganga stuck quietly to her guns. “I went with my gut feeling to be a soil scientist. We should find what excites us.”
As I was speaking to Candice Shoemaker, a retired K-State professor in horticulture therapy, it dawned on me that gut feelings and individual passions can play a bigger role in the evolution of higher education than universities may care to admit. Amanda Lindahl, one of the program’s earliest graduates (2016) and now an educator for K-State Extension, credits Candice as a catalyst for the urban food system program. “The reason the program is in Olathe,” she tells me, “Is due to some very passionate people like Dr. Shoemaker.”
For Candice, the passion was stirred early in her life while working at a foster home for 15 children in Seattle—she lived in a tree house on the home’s grounds—where she first learned to use horticulture to reach children with serious disabilities. She fondly speaks of a 9-year-old with cerebral palsy named Danny who helped her understand how plants’ healing powers extended far beyond nutrition and aesthetics. Her observations were later confirmed when she studied the seminal research of Roger Ulrich who explained why exposure to nature reduces psychological and physiological stress. Later, during a professional stint at a psychiatric hospital in Georgia, Candice would see for herself how patients who worked at the facility’s farm healed faster than those who didn’t.
After earning a PhD at Michigan State University in plant physiology, she worked for a while at the Chicago Botanical Garden. In 2000, Candice landed one of the two faculty positions in the horticulture therapy program at Kansas State, the first such program in the nation. Though her journey up until this point might be called a slowly evolving but essential part of the Urban Food Systems’ creation story, it wasn’t until Candice connected with Katherine Kelly that sparks started to fly.
Katherine Kelly and the uncooperative goat
As the head of Kansas City’s premiere urban farming non-profit, Cultivate KC, Katherine was on a tear to not just make urban farming known, “but to make it prevalent.” Though not from a Kansan farm family by birth, she grew up working on Mr. Nuttle’s farm, a Wichita neighbor with a 1200-acre spread that grew and raised everything. “I was always at my best when I was riding horses, driving cattle, or taking hogs to market,” she tells me. But powered by an innate sense of social justice, she later grew agitated upon eyeing Kansas City’s thousands of vacant lots and became determined to put them into production. Her larger goal, as she put it, was to “normalize urban agriculture.” Being pragmatic, however, Katherine knew she needed deep support to attain her goals, and not just from the garden variety partners available in the non-profit world.
“If you can get in with the university and help them do what they do, but only better, they can be great partners,” she states in a manner that sounds as cleared eye today as it must have been 15 years ago when she forged ties with Candice. Together, they began the long, slow slog of bringing Kansas State, with its deep roots in conventional commodity agriculture, into the ill-defined, still hippie-influenced world of urban agriculture. Candice took on the necessary chores of writing the curriculum, developing educational goals, and addressing an infinite number of details required to secure university sanction. Katherine would add her energy, advocacy, and strong background in diversified forms of food production to the mix. They drew in a couple of other Midwest agricultural legends, Dan Nagengast, former director of the Kansas Rural Center, and Mary Hendrickson, an agricultural economist at the University of Missouri for advice and further legitimacy.
At 62, Katherine is a wiry, bespectacled woman constantly in motion. My first encounter with her occurred atop a mulch pile at the Olathe Research Farm where she was attempting to corral an ornery goat refusing to join the herd in a nearby trailer. Like chemistry, goat herding is not one of my strong suits, but I was conscripted on the spot to block one escape route that the agitated culprit was trying to reach. Seeing that I was of minimal use, I was quickly relieved of my duties and would catch up later with Katherine at a picnic table under the shade of large ash trees. Having left Cultivate KC four years ago, she now runs her farm that uses goats for two purposes: to perform what she calls targeted grazing services which harnesses goats’ propensity to eat anything to clear areas of browse not accessible by cutting machines; and as meat (she didn’t say if uncooperative goats ended up in this category) for Kansas City’s large Afghanistan community.
Currently taking an extended break from nonprofit work, she reflects candidly on her experiences and the role of urban agriculture in today’s food system. She confesses to being very entrepreneurial and hard driving with the organizations she’s spearheaded and the networks she’s built. Not only has this led to the rise of the Urban Food System Initiative within a major university, it has made the metro Kansas City region a hotbed of urban agriculture. Yet that kind of start-up energy can also feed an impatience with bureaucracies, technocrats, and even the staff from many urban farming organizations who, in her estimation, don’t have the same fire in the belly that she has. Honestly assessing her own personality traits and leadership style, she readily admits that, “Sometimes I could be a real asshole!”
In spite of her deep introspection, Katherine remains a dogged proponent of urban agriculture. When I raised some of the attacks brought by the concept’s opponents, such as the futility of ever growing enough food to feed a hungry world from small, densely built places, she vigorously counterattacked. “Cities are where most people live; that’s where they encounter food choices,” she says, noting that the more you can “integrate good food into people’s lives, the more you can change the basic framework [of the food system].” This is another way of saying that wholesale economic and social change is actually the goal, and that urban agriculture is only one piece of a much larger strategy.
But the other major element she raises is that urban agriculture is also a way of not just humanizing the food system, but of reestablishing community ties that have been severed by rural and urban divides. One example she offers is the Kansas Farm Bureau which like state farm bureaus around the country, is known for some conservative and entrenched positions on the American food system. “We have younger members of the Kansas Farm Bureau selling in the cities,” she says with almost as much incredulity in her voice as I feel when hearing it. According to Katherine, farmers are establishing new relationships with city folks that are breaking down their former stereotypes. “When today’s young farmers see they are growing food for a young mom with a diabetic daughter, they see things at a more human level.”
KC Farm School’s Mission Statement Greets All Visitors
Maybe the best defense of urban agriculture is, well, urban agriculture. A tour of two nonprofit farms in Kansas City, Kansas, directly across the Missouri River from the other Kansas City—about the distance a professional outfielder can nearly throw a medium kohlrabi—demonstrates the multiple benefits that unconventional farming brings to a community. At the KC Farm School (Eleni Pliakoni is one of their board members), 3 acres of land and 6,000 sq. ft. of high-tunnel greenhouses located in a modest residential neighborhood are a springboard for about 10,000 pounds of produce each year, as well as bountiful crops of new farmers. Over 500 volunteers, tens of thousands of starter seedlings for backyard gardens, an on-site farmers’ market that serves the neighborhood and accepts SNAP and Senior Double Up Buck coupons, and a recent purchase of an adjacent 11-acre parcel across the street, make this urban farm a small gem whose luster enriches the lives of residents and the value of properties for blocks around.
But the value of the farm’s human capital exceeds even that of its food, land, and greenhouse outputs. Young children come to the farm for special nature and gardening programs (kids sometimes cry because they don’t want to leave when their parents pick them up). And high school age apprenticeships provide paid work and learning experiences that have morphed into jobs and even careers on area farms. In this regard, Olathe’s Cary Rivard, director of the OHREC research farm, noted that this is part of the Growing Growers program, which has produced 275 graduates since 2004, of which 22 percent started a farm, 67 percent went to work on farms, and a substantial number of others went to work in other parts of the food system. As one high school teacher said who had instigated the program for 13-to 17-year-olds, “We need ‘hands-on’ programs like the one at KC Farm School because we don’t want our kids spending their life on a couch!”
Not far from KC Farm School is Juniper Farm, which is part of the Cultivate KC network but with a very special purpose: to give “New Americans” (immigrants and refugees) with agrarian backgrounds a fighting chance to farm in the USA. Walking onto Juniper’s property is an exercise in visual contrasts, with the Kansas City, Missouri skyline looming to the east and the remnants of a vacant, 250-unit public housing project surrounding three sides of the 9-acre farm oasis. Hoop houses, assorted agriculture hardware and out buildings, and 18 neatly tended quarter-acre plots gracefully slope downhill toward the Missouri River.
Over the course of a 4-year program, this infrastructure is put into service to prepare recent arrivals from such places as Somalia, Thailand, Burundi, Congo, and Burma—with cultivation methods required for the American Midwest. Just as importantly, they are also equipped with the marketing tools necessary to meet the consumer demand they’ll find in metro Kansas City farmers’ markets and beyond. Juniper is the antithesis of the scruffy community gardens often found scattered among orphaned wedges of city land. It’s a beautiful place with a serious purpose. By the time these New American farmers get their production and marketing mojos working, people like Biak Par, Ca Saw, and Ngun Tial are earning an admirable $15,000 to $20,000 a year from product sales off a quarter acre of land.
Juniper Farm, Kansas City, Kansas, Surrounded by Vacant Public Housing
On the same site, Juniper also manages a 100-member CSA as well as sales to restaurants and a food hub that provide their farmers with additional sales revenue. By the end of the four-year training period, farmers are expected, with Juniper’s assistance, to find a place of their own, preferably a half-acre piece of land with a house on it. Over the past 10 years or so, 46 farmers have graduated from the program, and, according to Juniper’s records, 32 are still farming.
When I asked farm staff how easy it is to find suitable land, they told me it’s getting harder. Even with 10,000 vacant lots in the KC metro area, land is growing less affordable. While Kansas City, Missouri has a comprehensive 14-year urban agriculture land use ordinance on the books (Kansas City, Kansas, where Juniper is located, has almost nothing), it doesn’t make it any easier to compete against new multi-story residential projects, gas stations, and fast-food restaurants hungrily eyeing the same empty land.
Urban agriculture’s challenges aren’t based on inherent flaws in its concept or methods, but rather in the systemic failures of American land use policy. The ruthless efficiencies demanded by modern capitalism are deployed to exploit land for its so-called highest and best use. This means wringing the greatest financial return from every square foot of land. To do that, developers and city officials must dismiss or minimize the softer and more diversified returns of recreation, beauty, food production, environment, skill-building, mental and physical health, to say nothing of that old fashion idea called quality of life that just about every household seeks from the place they live.
Leaving Juniper Farm, Cary takes us past the property’s southern end, which is still used by Somali-Bantu farmers for food production (a project that was originally funded by a USDA Community Food Project grant). Nearby, we stop for a moment at the site of the housing project’s former basketball court. Rather than young people lobbing long arcs of 3-pointers, the site now sports the framing of a just-erected 54-feet-by-96 feet greenhouse, soon to be sheathed in plastic, that will be integrated into Juniper’s program. “It took lots of volunteers, donated equipment from the research farm, private donations, and plenty of muscle to build that thing,” Cary tells me with both satisfaction and a hint of relief. “And it started by ripping up and hauling 14 dump truck loads of tarmac off this site!” It’s what the Olathe staff do in their “spare time”—they find creative and flexible ways to make their expertise and resources available to the community.
To judge the value of urban agriculture, a judgment that in this case applies as well to the underlying value of Olathe’s Urban Food System Initiative, you have to ask the most important stakeholders—the students. Presently, the initiative has 37 graduate students (an additional 23 have graduated from the program since its inception) of which I was able to chat with nine, including two alumni. Over lunch, as well as a Zoom call, I discovered a strong undercurrent of passion for sustainable food, farming, and social justice. Their backgrounds varied considerably—some grew up on large, traditional Kansas farms, two students were from Ghana, while others had no or limited agricultural experience.
Alex had just finished his first semester and was engaged with the agrivoltaics work at the research farm. He told us that he chose the program because of something he called “self-ownership,” which was a form of self-sufficiency. “I hadn’t grown anything from seed in a long time; now I spend all my time at the research farm learning skills so that I can own myself.” His political analysis of the food system targets planners and certain agribusiness interests that he feels have an anti-urban food system bias that deters progress toward individual self-sufficiency. For him, urban agriculture’s major benefit is its “undoing of consumer indifference toward food.” He was the source of the most memorable quote during my time in Kansas: “If someone who doesn’t love you controls you, they own you!” I would catch Alex the following day at the research farm where he was wearing a floral coolie hat and doing as poorly as I did corraling goats.
Comfort is a young woman from Ghana working on a masters in advanced food systems. Her reasons for being in the program are perhaps a bit more sobering than the American students. As she said, “I’m from Africa, which has lots of food insecurity and high rates of food-borne illnesses.” Those starker realities are why she’s working with Eleni in the laboratory on food safety. “I’m here because I want to help the poor people in my country, not like the corporations who are there to profit.” After seeing snow for the first time in her life, she naturally wondered how one grows food in the winter, and “then I see hydroponics, greenhouses, and food growing inside buildings!”
Besides the majority of students who are in their twenties, there are a few older, what might be referred to as nontraditional students. Vanessa, perhaps in her early 50s, already has a degree in clinical social work, is a master gardener, and uses a version of horticulture therapy with children in a high-poverty area of Wichita. Drawing from her training, she starts with Maslow’s hierarchy of needs to explain, “If we don’t have food and can’t eat, we can’t do anything.” She says that as a child she went to a school where 80 percent of the students qualified for free and reduced-price meals. “I grew up on paper food stamps, before SNAP/EBT! For me, autonomy and choice are social justice issues. I’m in this program to make the food system more resilient.”
All the students and alums had fascinating stories, deep wells of commitment to food system change, and well-thought-out reasons to be in the Olathe program, but Ryan’s story struck a particular chord. He’s in line to become the sixth-generation owner of his family’s traditional Kansas farm, but before he signs on the dotted line, he’s exploring alternatives which included a B.A. in social work and, currently, working at the Kansas Rural Center. At a practical level, he liked that the university program was online which meant he didn’t have to commute 2½ hours to the campus. But philosophically, he felt that “Olathe is more ‘on the ground’ and applied…it’s uplifting for small farmers and not there to serve corporations.” He wondered out loud “if there’s space within a conventional agricultural system to care about people,” but immediately checked his thoughts with, “Is that too harsh? Am I repudiating my family’s agricultural lifestyle?” Ryan’s thesis at this point in his exploration is that urban farming offers an antidote to large-scale, agricultural anomie because of its “proximity to people and the nature of relationships.”
As might be expected, the Urban Food Systems Initiative’s core staff are tenacious defenders of not just their respective disciplines but the object of their scholarship—urban food systems. While they will acknowledge their inherent bias, they conduct their work with rigorous methods and an allegiance to the data and evidence. I’m sitting around a faculty table with Tricia, Cary, and Eleni with hopes of digesting the massive load of stimuli I’ve ingested so far. Eleni eases my discomfort a little bit when she says, “What you see now [physically and programmatically] took 14 years of work.” She’s referring to a confluence of timing, history, circumstances, advocates, and funding—some of which is intentional and some of which is luck—that makes up their story. For instance, much of their classroom teaching (not the lab or research farm) was online before the onset of Covid, which actually helped to increase the number of students threefold to an average of 32 per class. Money helped as well. “We gained trust and respectability when we received the $1 million GRIP grant,” she said.
Those things and the fact that food security was built into the mission of the larger Olathe campus helped them outlast a string of CEOs, including one of whom was obsequiously pro-industry and decidedly anti-urban food system. With both pride and a note of defiance, Eleni said, “We earned the right to be here because we were successful.” And their right to remain for something close to eternity will be assured if they are successful in securing a $10 million grant from the AFRI Sustainable Agricultural Systems (SAS) program, an application whose chances of success are enhanced by the $1 million GRIP grant.
Bonding with the region’s urban agriculture community, achieving academic and institutional respectability, and mustering the necessary multi-disciplinary brain trust and resources have positioned the Urban Food System Initiative at the national forefront of urban agriculture. But what of the concept itself? Does small scale farming, even gardening, to say nothing of the often feisty, sometimes obstinately undefinable world of peri-urban and urban agriculture have a future? When millions of hungry mouths are added to planet Earth every month, or even when well-intentioned local officials push growers off a city lot to make room for 10 units of much-needed affordable housing, how will urban agriculture argue its case?
These questions are precisely the ones the UFSI’s GRIP grant is addressing. Tricia Jenkins is using the Community and Agriculture Resilience Audit Tool (aptly acronymed as CARAT) “to assess how urban agriculture production sites influence community food resilience, community health, food production, and environmental sustainability by doing surveys in communities.” One obvious application of this tool, Tricia explains, is that once they’ve identified and have metrics for urban agriculture’s co-benefits—assuming that “feeding a hungry world” is not the primary goal—then both academics and practitioners will have stronger leverage with public officials to make land use decisions more favorable to urban agriculture. Ultimately, they expect to create an AI tool that will enable city planners, for instance, to identify the multiple values of placing, let’s call it the Fats Domino Urban Farm, at the corner of 12th Street and Vine.
Cary puts the argument another way. “We see people with diabetes and other
Cary Rivard Showing Off OHREC’s Greenhouse on Rails
health problems that are the result of a broken food system that doesn’t value real food,” he says, “The symptoms of that broken system are seen most acutely in urban communities.” These seemed like slightly more idealistic sentiments than you’d expect from a man of science. But then I remember riding with him in an ATV across the research farm’s fields and dirt roads as he enthusiastically showed off low-cost agrivoltaics systems, high tunnel greenhouses that could be moved manually along rails, fruit and vegetable seed trials for small-scale, commercial production, dozens of master gardeners tending community garden plots and dispensing advice to thousands of people across the county, and eager packs of graduate students managing all this apparatus while dutifully recording every minutia of data. All of this is low-tech and low to moderate cost—not computer-controlled, energy intensive, multimillion-dollar price tags, indoor vertical agriculture systems accessible only to venture capitalists. This is the nuts and bolts, applied research that the 21st century urban and peri-urban grower needs to competitively feed—if not a hungry world—at least a hungry city.
The question of whether or not urban agriculture can feed a hungry world seemed increasingly ironic to me. Has conventional, large-scale agriculture as we know it in the US fed a hungry world? Not if you ask the 828 million people that the U.N. identified as food insecure, or the 40 million U.S. citizens who were identified similarly by the USDA; not if you ask the 35 percent of Americans who are obese, or the over 10 percent who are persons with diabetes; not if you ask folks and farmers in western Kansas where the Ogallala Aquifer is drying up; and not if you ask those of us choking on record heat from greenhouse carbon emissions, 25 percent of which are agriculture generated.
The Urban Food System Initiative at K-State Olathe doesn’t pretend to have answers to all of these immensely important questions, but at least there is a place with the demonstrated competency, capacity, and partners to take up the challenge of feeding our cities. And it just so happens to be in Kansas.