Care farming and horticultural therapy

The link between farming and health care is not new. Medieval European monasteries kept physic gardens and healing courtyards, and nineteenth-century asylums widely practised 'work therapy' in which patients laboured on farms. Today that lineage has been organised into two evidence-based practices. One is horticultural therapy, in which professionals such as occupational therapists set treatment goals mediated by plants; the other is care farming (also called green care), in which working farms are opened up as settings for care.

In the context of urban farming, this theme matters because a garden can be at once a place to obtain a harvest and a place to restore people. As ageing, isolation and mental-health challenges deepen, community gardens and allotments are being re-evaluated as a kind of social infrastructure that sits upstream of medicine and welfare. From here, let us look at the science behind these effects.

Saying that 'digging in the dirt makes you feel better' can sound merely subjective, but measurable changes lie behind it. Working amid greenery lowers the stress hormone cortisol, shifts the autonomic nervous system toward parasympathetic dominance, and restores attention — responses observed repeatedly in both laboratory and field studies. Roger Ulrich's 1984 finding that hospital patients with a green view from their window recovered faster is its landmark.

From here we go a layer deeper into the four pathways that produce this 'healing' — stress physiology, the soil microbiome, body and cognition, and social connection. In the second half we then visit the national care-farming systems that have implemented these principles as policy, and close by drawing out what urban farming can learn from them.