Farm on Ogden and the VeggieRx produce prescription programme, Chicago

A 20,000-square-foot urban agriculture facility opened in 2016 in a historically disinvested food desert in Chicago, Illinois, by the Chicago Botanic Garden together with Lawndale Christian Health Center. It anchors VeggieRx, a produce prescription programme in which clinicians refer patients to the farm for free produce boxes, nutrition counselling and cooking classes.

Clinicians at the health centre refer patients to the farm under a produce prescription model. Referred patients receive free produce boxes and take part in nutrition counselling and cooking classes. The evaluation covering January 2016 to December 2021 included 680 participants.

A cross-sector partnership between a botanic garden (growing and horticultural capacity) and a community health centre (referrals and clinical care). Produce is dispensed free as a prescription, with costs carried on the health and philanthropic side rather than recovered through produce sales.

A retrospective, propensity-score-weighted cohort study covering January 2016 to December 2021 compared 680 VeggieRx participants with 978 weighted controls and found a mean body weight difference of −6.71 pounds (−4.7%) at eighteen months. The design is observational, not randomised, so residual confounding such as selection by motivation cannot be excluded. The programme also does not change the income and retail structures that produce the food desert, and its costs rest on the health and philanthropic side.

This entry is compiled from the public sources, official sites and research below.

• PaperAn Urban Farm-Anchored Produce Prescription Program's Impacts On Weight Reduction (Health Affairs, 2025) ↗pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov