Research & reports

Samantha Senda-Cook · Argumentation and Advocacy · United States

Gifford Park, a neighborhood in Omaha, Nebraska, United States, has been recreating itself through urban agriculture like many neighborhoods across the country. This case study conceptualizes urban agriculture as a "place ballet" — describing interactions between places and bodies — extending the idea that places can function as spatial arguments. The analysis found that urban agriculture reveals a complex material argument about the positive impacts places and bodies can have on communities and their members, while simultaneously overlooking the economic and racial privileges inherent in these efforts, and concludes that the place-ballet concept itself carries its own implications of economic and racial privilege.

Grace Claire O'Neil · ScholarWorks -A service of University of Vermont Libraries (University of Vermont) · United States

This guide established a baseline of soil health for community gardens in the Burlington, Vermont, area of the United States. Ten sites in the Winooski Valley area were soil-sampled in fall 2018, and eight sites in the Chittenden County vicinity were sampled in spring 2019 for comparison, using the Modified Morgan's Universal Extraction Solution to quantify phosphorus (P), potassium (K), calcium (Ca), magnesium (Mg), pH, and percentage of organic matter, along with testing hypotheses about nutrient concentration changes from 2011 to 2018 under till and no-till management. Nearly all soils sampled in the Winooski Valley area were found excessive in phosphorus, potassium, and magnesium, most likely due to soil amendment application. Comparing the 2018 tests with tests done by Burlington Parks, Recreation, and Waterfront in 2011, only potassium had increased significantly, and tillage (till vs. no-till) did not affect nutrient concentrations. The guide notes concern that these excess soil nutrients could be exported from the gardens via erosion and leaching, given the gardens' proximity to the Winooski River and Lake Champlain.

Matthew Potteiger · Journal of Agriculture Food Systems and Community Development · United States

A review of The Community Food Forest Handbook by Catherine Bukowski and John Munsell of Virginia Tech, a systematic analysis of 30 community food forest projects — landscapes producing food modeled on forest ecosystem form and function. The review reports that only one of the 30 projects has existed for more than 10 years, and situates the food forest movement, like earlier urban agriculture and CSA efforts, as a grassroots phenomenon that has spread across the country with little coordination among individual projects.

Kristen R. Birdshire, Adrian L. Carper, Christy E. Briles · Urban Ecosystems · United States

A study examined bee community responses along a high-plains semi-arid urban-rural gradient in Denver, Colorado, United States, using percent impervious surface across 12 sites to define urbanization extent and combining field assessment with geospatial analysis of local and landscape characteristics; wild bees were collected and analyzed against urbanization using linear modeling. Bee abundance and diversity decreased with increasing urbanization, indicating a negative impact of urban areas on bee communities. All bee guilds responded positively to local floral richness and negatively to landscape-level urbanization, suggesting a shared response pattern across bee types.

Servicio Nacional de Meteorología e Hidrología del Perú (Senamhi) · Servicio Nacional de Meteorología e Hidrología del Perú (Senamhi) · Peru

Peru's national meteorological and hydrological service (Senamhi) reported on 1 April 2020 that moderate rain fell over Lima the previous night. The rain began around 6:30 p.m. and lasted about 30 minutes, reaching up to 2mm in La Molina and Santa Anita and up to 3mm in Chosica and Santa Eulalia. Senamhi noted that Lima receives less than 15mm of rain per year, with winter (June-August) garúa drizzle consisting of very fine droplets over several hours, unlike summer rain driven by Andean humidity transport.

World Future Council · World Future Council / futurepolicy.org · Brazil

A World Future Council policy profile explaining how the Brazilian city of Belo Horizonte guaranteed the right to food through Municipal Law 6,352 of 1993, establishing a food and supply secretariat (now SUSAN) coordinating 20 interlinked programmes with a 20-member advisory council, funded by 2% of the city's annual budget. It reports that the infant mortality rate fell from 34.4 to 3 deaths per 1,000 live births between 1993 and 2006, that the 2019 Emergency Food and Nutrition Assistance Programme (PAAN, Law 11.193/2019) serves 1,000 families a month, and notes the (as-yet-unmet) national requirement that 30% of school-meal funding go to family-farm purchases.

Bennett A.B., Lovell S. · PLoS ONE, 14(2):e0212034 · United States (Chicago)

A study of 19 urban agricultural sites in Chicago examining how surrounding land cover (landscape scale) and on-site design (local scale) shape bees and pollination services. Bee responses varied by body size and nesting habit: increasing impervious cover lowered bee richness and reduced pollination services, while more local floral area boosted small soil-nesting bees. It recommends minimizing impervious cover at large scales and adding floral resources locally so urban agriculture can conserve pollinators in the surrounding ecosystem.

Pai S., Ai N., Zheng J. · Sustainable Cities and Society, 50:101683 · United States

Using Chicago as a case study, this analysis assesses the feasibility of decentralized community composting on portions of public parks in terms of cost and greenhouse gas emissions. It finds decentralized composting delivers outreach, landfill diversion and cost-saving benefits, with an estimated net benefit of about $100 per tonne, indicating the financial viability of a city-wide strategy to compost household food waste locally.

Kumudu P.P. Kopiyawattage, Laura Warner, T. Grady Roberts · Urban Agriculture & Regional Food Systems · United States (Columbus)

This qualitative study used semi-structured interviews to describe factors influencing the intention of urban food producers in Columbus, one U.S. city, to continue farming in urban settings. It found that perceived complexity can negatively influence attitude and hinder intention, while subjective norms shaped by peer growers and family members may heighten the intention to continue. The findings also revealed personal characteristics, such as education and access to resources, that may enhance perceived behavioral control.

Sarah Grace Davenport, Joanna Mishtal · Culture, Agriculture, Food and Environment · United States (Florida)

Based on 2017 ethnographic fieldwork, this paper critically examines the sustainability initiatives and practices of an urban farming program in Florida, exploring the extent to which they consider a community's race and socioeconomic class. The authors argue that the program's initiatives overlook food justice concerns and apply the same approach across disparate communities, focusing on environmental rather than community benefits. They call for incorporating social justice themes into sustainability agendas.

Juily Phun, Elise Dang · AAPI Nexus Journal: Policy, Practice, and Community · United States (San Gabriel Valley)

This article focuses on a service-learning program at Cal State LA (Food Justice, the Body, and the Environment in the API Community) that partners with schools across the San Gabriel Valley to build culturally relevant produce gardens for students in a region with a large low-income Asian American population. The essay centers on the partnership process, noting that a lack of procedural transparency within university structures is one of the greatest barriers to community–university partnerships.

Jae Ho Lee, David Matarrita-Cascante · Sustainability · United States (Austin)

Using a survey of gardeners at three plot-based community gardens in Austin, Texas, this study examined how past gardening experience moderates the motivations behind community garden participation. Results showed that greater gardening experience strengthened the effect of emotional motivations on participation, while it had no effect on the relationship between functional motivations and participation.

Candis Hunter, Dana Williamson, Matthew Gribble, Halle Bradshaw, Melanie Pearson, Eri Saikawa, P. Ryan, Michelle Kegler · International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health · United States

Drawing on the Theory of Planned Behavior, this mixed methods study examined community gardeners' beliefs about and intentions to conduct heavy metal soil testing. It combined five focus groups of garden leaders in Atlanta, Georgia with a questionnaire administered to 500 community gardeners across the United States, finding that soil testing intention was associated with attitude, subjective norms, and perceived behavioral control.

Rachel Romero, Deborah A. Harris · City & Community · United States (Austin, TX)

This study uses in-depth interviews with urban farmers and their supporters and with residents of gentrifying East Austin to examine competing definitions of "community" in the dispute over rewriting Austin, Texas's urban farm code. Drawing on the concept of "interpretive communities," it argues that when communities feel threatened they coalesce to defend their position, showing how class, race, and ethnicity remain tied to environmental justice.

Junhong Chen, Zhifeng Gao, Xuqi Chen, Lisha Zhang · Sustainability · United States

Drawing on a national U.S. survey of 795 respondents, this study analyzed how motivation, perceived barriers, and advertising methods shape consumers' past, current, and future participation in community-supported agriculture (CSA). Younger consumers, higher-income families, and supporters of sustainable agriculture were more likely to renew subscriptions, and members were sensitive to the timing, price, and location of food distribution. The effects of barriers and advertising varied with members' participation status.

Becca B. R. Jablonski, Martha Sullins, Dawn Thilmany McFadden · Sustainability · United States (Colorado)

This pilot study assessed the marketing performance of community-supported agriculture (CSA) relative to other direct-market channels using data from 42 Colorado farms between 2016 and 2017. Farms incorporating CSA sales tended to be smaller in scale and to use more diverse markets, and while they had lower average weekly sales, they showed the highest average marketing profit margins among direct-market channels.

Hernández López A., Avila Alejandre A.X., Mendoza Francisco N., Hernández López H. · Revista Mexicana de Ciencias Agrícolas · Mexico

Design, construction and testing of a low-cost seed germinator built from locally available materials that automatically controls temperature and photoperiod, with an Arduino Uno temperature verifier; total cost about US$58, competitive with commercial germinators.

Marshman J., Scott S. · Canadian Food Studies · Ontario, Canada

A study of five Ontario gleaning groups showing that modern gleaning contributes to community food security by reducing food waste, improving access to fresh food, and fostering social connections.

· Economic Geography · USA

Focuses on the unpaid 'surplus labor' that sustains urban agriculture sites, analyzing how it is appropriated and distributed. It shows these sites depend heavily on unpaid, contested embodied work central to workers' subject formation.

Mysha Clarke, Melissa Davidson, Monika Egerer, Elsa C. Anderson, Nakisha Fouch · People Place and Policy Online · United States

This paper argues that community gardens should be a prioritized element of green infrastructure to improve cities' adaptation to climate change. Community gardens can reduce urban heat islands, provide ecosystem services, and increase stormwater retention. However, a qualitative analysis of 18 policy documents for Baltimore, Chicago, and New York City, U.S.A., found that green infrastructure for climate change adaptation prioritizes rain gardens, bioswales, and green roofs, but seldom acknowledges the role of community gardens.

Seth A. Berkowitz, Jessica O’Neill, Edward Sayer, Naysha N. Shahid, Maegan Petrie, Sophie Schouboe, Megan Saraceno, Rochelle Bellin · American Journal of Preventive Medicine · United States (Massachusetts)

This randomized controlled trial (RCT) tested whether a subsidized community-supported agriculture (CSA) intervention could improve diet quality for socioeconomically vulnerable individuals. Conducted from May 2017 to December 2018, 128 participants from a community health center in central Massachusetts were randomized to receive either subsidized CSA membership or healthy eating information (control group). The intervention group showed a clinically meaningful increase of 4.3 points in the Healthy Eating Index total score (p=0.03) and lower food insecurity (RR=0.68) compared to the control group.

Michael Carolan · Journal of the American Planning Association · United States

This 2019 study, based on 82 interviews in Denver, New York, and San Francisco, investigated how traditional and digital urban agriculture converge and diverge regarding land use and gentrification. It found that both digital and traditional urban farming systems are linked to gentrification and inequitable land use patterns. Digital urban farming systems also operate in a regulatory gray area, with their "digital" aspects used to gain more zoning permission than traditional urban agriculture.

Mariana Peixoto Espósito, Bruna Caroline Lima de Souza, Dirceu Pereira Siqueira · LA Referencia (Red Federada de Repositorios Institucionales de Publicaciones Científicas) · Brazil (Maringá)

This article analyzes the fundamental right to food within national and international legal frameworks, focusing on its implementation in Brazil through public policies. It specifically examines the Urban and Peri-urban Agriculture Program and the Community Gardens Program in Maringá/PR, concluding that the Community Gardens Program is an effective public policy for realizing the right to food. The methodology included a bibliographic review and field research based on interviews.

Marilyn Sitaker, Jared T. McGuirt, Weiwei Wang, Jane Kolodinsky, Rebecca A. Seguin‐Fowler · Sustainability · United States

This study compared sociodemographic and geospatial contexts with farmers' experiences for two direct-to-consumer (DTC) models: a cost-offset CSA for low-income families and food boxes distributed via rural convenience stores, across two U.S. states (Vermont and Washington). Addresses of thirteen farms and DTC pickup sites were geocoded, and road network distances to supermarkets, farmers' markets, and farms were calculated. Most pickup areas were heavily car-dependent with limited public transportation. Despite modest profitability, both models were considered worth pursuing as they expanded farmers' customer base.

Wooley, Megan Katherine · Carolina Digital Repository (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) · United States

This study interviewed four community gardens in low-income neighborhoods across the United States about their programs and outreach activities. It also conducted an in-depth review of existing literature on community gardens and their benefits. The research noted that some difficulties exist with creating community gardens.