Research & reports

R John Little · OpenSIUC (Southern Illinois University Carbondale) · United States

A research study evaluated fertility requirements for 'Sweet Hungarian' Peppers and 'Savor' Charentais Melons grown in a three-inch extensive green roof medium on the Southern Illinois University campus. Six treatments were applied to peppers and four treatments to melons, each replicated three times. This study contributes to optimizing appropriate fertility treatments for green roof agriculture.

Kelly Gordon, Adrianne Lickers Xavier, Hannah Tait Neufeld · Canadian Food Studies / La Revue canadienne des études sur l alimentation · Canada

The Healthy Roots initiative in the Six Nations community in southern Ontario, Canada, aimed to promote traditional food consumption among First Nation families facing food insecurity. A small number of participants who consumed only locally available foods reported improved blood glucose control, positive weight changes, and increased traditional food knowledge. The program also fostered new relationships and partnerships, including with the community organization Our Sustenance, to further community-based initiatives like developing a Haudenosaunee Food Guide.

Kathryn Engle · UKnowledge (University of Kentucky) · United States (Kentucky)

This project explores the agricultural heritage and social landscape of the Stinking Creek community in Knox County, Kentucky, focusing on the Lend-A-Hand Center Grow Appalachia Gardening Program. Through participatory research, it examines the diverse economy and potential for post-coal futures in central Appalachia. The program developed agricultural initiatives, re-localized food systems via home and community gardens, and established a farmers' market over three years.

Shiuhhuah Serena Chou · ISLE Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment · United States

Urban foraging reemerged at the turn of the twenty-first century as a mode of urban food production, leading to a diverse body of literature including field guides and personal accounts. This literature suggests that the resurgence of urban foraging, as seen in works like Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma (2006) and Tama Matsuoka Wong's Foraged Flavor (2012), may be more than a fad. The practice of finding, harvesting, and consuming edible wild plants challenges the idea of American cities as food deserts, presenting urban spaces as sites of cultural and environmental sustainability.

K. Michelle Glowa, Monika Egerer, Vicki Jones · Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems · United States

This case study of the Beach Flats Community Garden in the United States theorizes an "agroecologies of displacement," arguing that farmers are increasingly uprooted through involuntary displacement and that this displacement and dispossession actively reshape agricultural practices in farming communities. The authors argue that food movements, and transformative agroecology in particular, cannot be understood without a historical analysis of displacement and dispossession under capitalist land systems — framing land loss and forced relocation, not secure access, as a structuring condition of the garden's agroecology.

Michelle Rekowski · Digital Commons at Illinois Wesleyan University (Illinois Wesleyan University) · United States

This is a profile of Colleen Connelly, a nineteen-year-old in her third year running the Sunnyside Community Garden in West Bloomington, Illinois. She co-founded the nonprofit as part of an entrepreneurship program at Normal Community High School to provide fresh produce to the community, aims to give residents a space to learn actively about the food they grow toward economic and environmental sustainability, and frames the garden as a food forest that works with the existing landscape rather than against it.

Silvia Iveth Moreno Gaytán, Mercedes A. Jiménez Velázquez, Martín Hernández Juárez · Revista española de estudios agrosociales y pesqueros/Revista española de estudios agrosociales y pesqueros · Mexico

A qualitative social-research case study, conducted 2014-2017 in the eastern Metropolitan Zone of the Valle de México, examined how the organization Union de Colonos e Inquilinos Solicitantes de Vivienda Libertad practices urban agriculture in the CANANEA housing complex as part of popular-neighborhood strategies for food sovereignty. The case study concludes that agroecological, fair-trade urban agriculture generates food-sovereignty dynamics at the city scale that challenge conventional production, consumption and trade models.

Luana do Carmo Araujo de Oliveira, Cristiana Guimarães Alves, Bruno Martins Dala Paula · Revista da Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais · Brazil

A Brazilian essay reflects on the role of urban agriculture (AU) in the use and occupation of urban space and its connection to migration processes. It frames AU as a multifunctional practice integrating ecological, social, cultural and political aspects, and discusses its sociopolitical, symbolic and cultural dimensions — its capacity to promote rights and social cohesion, community bonds, expression of traditional practices, and resistance to the dominant socioeconomic lifestyle model — in relation to cultural identity and new territorialities in migration experiences.

Kate Cairns · Children & Society · United States

Drawing on ethnographic research with a youth urban agriculture program in Camden, New Jersey (USA), a paper explores the interdependency of food relations through young people's accounts of food insecurity. It shows how young people articulate food insecurity experiences through the lens of maternal foodwork, describing efforts to support mothers struggling to provide amid poverty. By depicting how these teens share foodwork with their mothers, the paper challenges common conceptions of generational feeding relations and reveals the inadequacy of individualizing approaches that assume an autonomous food consumer.

Andrew Koval · Educational Media Reviews Online · United States

Review of the 2011 documentary "Urban Roots" (dir. Mark MacInnis, 93 min), which follows Detroit's shift toward urban agriculture after the decline of its auto industry. The film covers food justice, party stores, food deserts, conflicts with local government and zoning rules, and the social stigma linking farming to slavery within the African American community. The review recommends it for academic and school libraries supporting students in agriculture, city planning and economics.

Amy J. Williams · VCU Scholars Compass (Virginia Commonwealth University) · United States

This project proposes a grocery store and garden design for a food desert neighborhood in Richmond, Virginia, US, where grocery chains avoid low-income areas and where about 49 million people nationally experience food insecurity (citing Whittle et al., 2015). Its methods combine case studies of community gardens, farms, and markets with resident interviews and a literature review; drawing on that literature, it reports that autonomy over a garden keeps participants invested in their community, that convenience stores are prevalent in the studied neighborhood, and that marketing of nutritious foods is less common than for packaged foods though point-of-sale kiosks show promise for marketing fresh produce to children.

Monica M. White · University of North Carolina Press eBooks · United States

Using historical methods to analyze extensive archival records, this chapter examines Freedom Farms Cooperative, a 680-acre agricultural cooperative that activist Fannie Lou Hamer started in 1969 in Sunflower County, Mississippi, which included a pig bank, a Head Start program, community gardens, a commercial kitchen, a garment factory, a sewing cooperative, a tool bank, and low-income affordable housing as strategies to support African Americans who had been fired and evicted for exercising the right to vote. Freedom Farm offered sharecroppers and tenant farmers education, retraining, health care, and disaster relief for those who wanted to remain in the Mississippi Delta, and the chapter presents it as a historical model of collective and shared ownership for rebuilding communities around food production.

Micajah Daniels, Courtney Coughenour · Digital Scholarship - UNLV (University of Nevada Reno) · United States

A research project examining the association between food insecurity, community gardens, and property value in Southern Nevada, United States. It set out five research questions—where community gardens are located, what agencies are doing with gardens to address food insecurity, perceived supports and barriers to using gardening for food insecurity, whether housing values changed after community gardens were established (using existing public data), and stakeholders' perceptions of property-value changes—and conducted interviews with key community garden stakeholders. The abstract does not report specific numerical findings from these inquiries.

Fanny Carlet, Joseph Schilling, Megan Heckert · Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems · United States

This article investigates the current state of research and practice regarding urban agriculture as a strategy for regenerating shrinking U.S. cities. It examines how repurposing vacant land for food production can address urban blight and food insecurity. The study highlights key findings and provides observations for public officials and practitioners on leveraging this research to enhance urban agriculture for vacant land treatment.

Michelle Glowa · · United States (San Francisco)

In the San Francisco region, highly competitive land markets increasingly force landowners to use properties for purposes other than gardening, despite the popularity of urban agriculture. This situation compels gardeners to develop strategies to gain and maintain land access, linking gardening to broader land politics and urban design. The chapter explores how gardeners influence space production and property institutions.

Gretel Van Wieren · Worldviews Global Religions Culture and Ecology · United States

This paper explored religious approaches within the food and faith movement in the U.S. by examining the work of three religious, community-based farming projects. These projects are characterized by ritual practices and narrative tropes as they address social, ecological, political, and ethical challenges posed by current food systems. The study concluded that these religious farms should be considered sacred spaces for how they ritualize and symbolically interpret agricultural and food practices.

Adela Chávez, Juan Ariosto Palacios Vásquez · DELOS Desarrollo Local Sostenible · Mexico

This research argues for the importance of not only studying climate change and its consequences but also consolidating professional training in urban food production to strengthen food security. It emphasizes the urgent need to provide learning units related to sustainable development, climate change, and food at all educational levels.

· Policy Press eBooks · United States (Detroit)

Dan Carmody, President of Detroit's Eastern Market Corporation, discussed the market's history and its importance for food access in Detroit. He addressed the role of urban agriculture and the new wave of gentrification, which has the potential to significantly impact the Market.

Deborah Hines, Sarah Balistreri · Sustainable energy developments · Latin America and the Caribbean

This chapter highlights successful Urban and Peri-Urban Agriculture (UPA) practices in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) that have improved food and nutrition security and increased dietary diversity. It introduces sustainable production techniques that reduce dependence on traditional energy sources and promote renewable energy. The chapter provides evidence that UPA activities can reduce poverty and hunger, generate food and nutrition security benefits, and create employment and income for poor urban households in LAC.

Pedro Vitor Pereira Guimarães, Maria Fernanda Berlingieri Durigan, Hyanameyka Evangelista de Lima-Primo · Cadernos de Agroecologia · Brazil

Cupuaçu is important for family and peri-urban agriculture and indigenous communities in the Amazon, contributing to local food security. This study aimed to characterize pulps from cupuaçu plants with varying susceptibility to witch's broom disease. Differences were observed mainly in chemical and physical-chemical characteristics among pulps, with emphasis on susceptible and highly susceptible plants. All evaluated pulps complied with established quality standards, but significant differences were found between physicochemical characteristics, proportional to the plants' susceptibility to witch's broom disease, particularly for soluble solids (SS) and titratable acidity (AT).

Owen Beatty · ScholarsArchive at Johnson & Wales University (Johnson & Wales University) · United States

This study analyzed food insecurity in the United States, focusing on populations below the poverty threshold. It found that large-scale agricultural production has led to "food deserts" isolated from affordable, quality food. Urban agriculture, by localizing production, was identified as a viable resource and potential solution for individuals experiencing hunger and those in food deserts.

Karla L. Hanson, Jane Kolodinsky, Weiwei Wang, Emily H. Morgan, Stephanie Jilcott Pitts, Alice S. Ammerman, Marilyn Sitaker, Rebecca A. Seguin‐Fowler · Nutrients · United States

This study surveyed 41 adults and children (2-12 years) in August 2015 and 23 in February 2016 from low-income households participating in a 50% subsidized Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) program in the United States. Participants' fruit and vegetable intake (FVI) was higher than US averages, and they more frequently met vegetable recommendations. While some seasonal produce was consumed more often when locally in-season, causality between CO-CSA participation and FVI could not be inferred due to potential self-selection bias.

Monika Egerer, Alessandro Ossola, Brenda B. Lin · BioScience · United States (California central coast)

This study conceptualizes community garden soils within the novel ecosystem framework, arguing that gardeners cultivate novel agroecosystems from their garden beds' soil. On the California central coast, community garden soils may not be influenced by land-use legacies associated with geographic location. Instead, intensive soil reworking by gardeners can wash out legacy signals and decadal chronological trends, leading to soil homogenization that reduces biophysical ties to the underlying earth.

Jennifer Jettner · VCU Scholars Compass (Virginia Commonwealth University) · United States

A mixed-methods approach examined race, racial diversity, and social capital in community gardens located in Southern urban food deserts in the United States. Results indicated that while gardeners were racially diverse across the sample, most community gardens were racially segregated, and the majority of gardeners appeared middle-class. Community gardens showed limited potential to advance social justice and indirectly enhanced community food security, primarily through the efforts of people of color, rather than directly benefiting food-insecure gardeners.

Zilma Borges de Souza, Lya Cynthia Porto de Oliveira, E. C. A. S. S. LIMA, Fábio Bruno Queiroga, Joyce Rodrigues · Cadernos de Agroecologia · Brazil (São Paulo)

This research analyzes the development, functions, social practices, and income generation of urban agriculture in Jardim Angela and Jardim Sao Luis, located in the M’Boi Mirim region of São Paulo, Brazil. It maps existing initiatives and prospects opportunities for agroecological food production in private and collective spaces. The study presents partial results from an interdisciplinary project involving three universities.