Research & reports

Ednaldo Michellon, Jaqueline da Silva Rosa, André Coelho Braga, Victor de Canini Cezar, Tiago Ribeiro da Costa, Wellington Fernandes Pereira · Cadernos de Agroecologia · Brazil (Maringá)

The REDIfeira project, part of the University Extension Program in Parana, Brazil, aims to boost the production and commercialization of family agriculture products through monitoring and technical assistance. This work presents the case of the FEPORg – Maringa Organic Products Fair and Region, which was established through community initiative with support from Maringa City Hall, the REDIfeira project, CerAUP, and PPCPO.

Natalia Caroline de Souza Aguiar, Marcelo Alves Ramos, Múcio Luiz Banja Fernandes · Asian Journal of Applied Sciences · Brazil

This study analyzed the views of thirteen teachers in a public school in northeastern Brazil regarding the importance and use of a medicinal garden planted in 2014. Interviews revealed a lack of interest among teachers in using the school garden, despite most recognizing its importance as a didactic resource. The findings suggest that intervention projects in schools require teachers to be prepared for their use, highlighting the need for a teacher training plan.

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.

Cirlene Jeane Santos e Santos · · Brazil (Maceió)

This article describes didactic foundations and field activities in the Agrarian Geography discipline at the Federal University of Alagoas, Brazil, aimed at enhancing student learning. Students engaged with urban agriculture and animal husbandry in Maceió/AL, finding that direct interaction with reality facilitated meaningful learning beyond classroom content. The results indicated that students integrated various course contents to understand the relationships in these spaces.

Matthew T. Moore, Brent Clothier, Alexandra Toland · · United States

A dialogue chapter built from an October 2013 interview with Matthew Moore conducted by Alexandra R. Toland, with additional reflections from soil scientist Brent Clothier. Since the interview, the digital farm collective Moore describes has evolved into a farm-to-table hospitality business partnering with city parks, creating one- to two-acre urban farming education centers in and around Phoenix, Arizona, funded by restaurants that also deliver affordably priced meals to local communities. Across both Moore's and Clothier's contributions, the central question is one of scale: how to "scale up" food production under the pressures of climate change and urbanization while building systems of value that honor the soil's services rather than its speculative yield.

Haley Stanko, Lindsay Naylor · Local Environment · United States

A paper examining Philadelphia's 2008 prioritisation of healthy food access as part of sustainable development, in a city where almost 25% of the population is considered food insecure, prompting government agencies, NGOs, and community leaders to try to increase food access through expanded food production and land access. The paper argues that urban agriculture, gradually incorporated into sustainability narratives over the preceding decade, both provides advocates a platform to inform policymaking and risks stripping away the political and activist origins of the struggle for access to food, land, and green space, contending that this depoliticisation through incorporation into sustainability planning may serve to increase existing inequities in the city. Examining measures enacted under the Philadelphia Greenworks Sustainability Plan at the policymaking level, the paper's preliminary findings suggest a disconnect between urban agriculture advocacy and policymaking, and it states that further work is needed to understand the impacts of formalising urban agriculture in Philadelphia.

Megan M. Gregory, Scott Peters · Journal of Agriculture Food Systems and Community Development · United States

A case study within the Food Dignity community-university research partnership examined a participatory action research (PAR) project on cover crops with community gardeners in Brooklyn, New York. Engaging gardeners in cover crop monitoring strengthened their knowledge of ecological processes such as nitrogen fixation, field days supported leadership development, and sustained in-person support enabled implementation of cover cropping practices; challenges included reconciling community-defined priorities with the constraints of a dissertation project and providing sufficient one-on-one support given limited funding for community-based partners.

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.

Duncan Hilchey · Journal of Agriculture Food Systems and Community Development · United States

This reflective essay recounts the U.S. farm-to-school movement's evolution from a mid-1990s workshop grappling with National School Lunch and Fresh Fruit and Vegetable Program protocols to the present, noting that the National Farm to School Network is now well established with federal and foundation support and that nearly half of U.S. schools purchase at least some local farm products. It traces this as a 20-year progression from the 1970s resurgence of farmers markets and 1980s community supported agriculture, extending now into farm-to-college, farm-to-prison, farm-to-hospital and farm-to-childcare programs.

Emilly Macedo Prado · · Brazil

A quantitative, cross-sectional, descriptive and observational study in a neighborhood of the municipality of Palhoça, Santa Catarina, Brazil, examined how a community garden affected participants' food choices and culinary traditions. Data came from interviews with 37 participating families and the garden association's president, analyzed with descriptive statistics (absolute and relative frequencies) at a 95% confidence interval. The community garden was found to contribute to participants' food choices and the maintenance of their culinary traditions, and this was linked to improved quality of life.

Eduardo Vergara Pérez, Alfredo Viuda López, Israel Acuña Galván · Boletín Científico INVESTIGIUM de la Escuela Superior de Tizayuca · Mexico

This study developed a semi-automatic monitoring and control system for a 4.5 m² community garden in an urban area of Mexico, using a mid-range embedded system to control physical growing variables and communicating wirelessly with a server for highly portable data storage, querying and control via a web page, applied to the organopónico (organic-substrate intensive) cultivation technique. The system proved functional for legume and solanaceous crop species, yielding produce within a time frame comparable to commercial growing methods.

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.

John Diaz, Laura A. Warner, Susan T. Webb · Journal of Agricultural Education · United States

This study used a Delphi approach with a panel of 74 experts to build consensus on outcomes for developing and evaluating school garden programs. Noting that prior evidence on school garden program effects has relied on individual case studies or intervention trials, leaving considerable room for error, it identifies 38 consensus outcomes that agricultural education professionals and other stakeholders can use as a foundation for program development and evaluation.

Takefumi Kurose, Kenichi Yabuki · Toshi keikaku hokokushu/Toshi keikaku houkokushuu · United States (New York)

This study focuses on zoning code revisions in declining post-industrial U.S. cities burdened with vacant houses and lots, analysing the treatment of residential areas with many vacant lots through a case study of the comprehensive zoning revision undertaken by the City of Buffalo, New York, whose population has sharply declined. The city initially proposed a new "urban interim use" designation for residential areas with many vacant lots to promote temporary uses such as urban agriculture and curb disorderly new development, but this designation was dropped from the final plan due to opposition from residents in the affected districts; instead, some vacant-lot-heavy residential areas were rezoned from multi-family-permitting general residential use to single-family use, restricting density and the direction of new development to gently guide land use in areas left surplus by population decline.

Sheri Dorn, Lucy Bradley, Debbie Hamrick, Julie Weisenhorn, Pam Bennett, Jill Callabro, Bridget K. Behe, Ellen M. Bauske, Natalie R. Bumgarner · HortTechnology · United States

The National Initiative for Consumer Horticulture (NICH), a diverse consortium of leaders in the United States, aims to provide a unified voice promoting the benefits and value of consumer horticulture (CH) by uniting national research efforts with the goals of stakeholders across industry, the public sector and home gardeners. As of this 2018 report, NICH members had set three broad goals: recognizing CH as a driver of the agricultural economy; highlighting that CH restores, protects and conserves natural resources through research and education; and cultivating healthy, connected and engaged communities through CH. Three committees (Economic, Environmental, and Community and Health Benefits), representing about 30 members, had focused on these goals over the preceding 10 months; their chairs presented results and future directions. The Economic and Environmental committees pursued campaigns to better market CH benefits and to increase environmental benefits by changing consumer behavior. After reviewing current research, the Community and Health Benefits Committee identified a gap in research specifically on the benefits of CH and personal gardening, as distinct from benefits attributed to forests, horticultural therapy, indoor atriums, community gardens, parks and other public places, and concluded that closing this gap requires strategic collaboration among a more diverse group of industry representatives, specialists and scientists.

Susana Clasen Moritz, Micheli Mari da Costa · · Brazil

A report on the Horta Comunitária Semeando Saúde community garden established in 2012 at the Centro de Saúde Santo Antônio de Lisboa health center in Brazil, where residents and health professionals collaborated to grow and consume healthy food. The project describes increased intake of healthy foods and knowledge-sharing among participants, with no quantitative outcome data given.

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.

André Ruoppolo Biazoti, Guilherme Borducchi, Lana Lim, Mariana Marchesi · Cadernos de Agroecologia · Brazil (São Paulo)

A Brazilian paper describes the experience of the Community Garden of the São Paulo Cultural Center (CCSP) as an experimental space for promoting agroecology and citizen involvement in food production. It discusses agroecology as a form of activism in which the collective work and practical learning of volunteers contribute to the transformation of citizens, the strengthening of community ties, and the promotion of closer relations between farmers and consumers.

Patrick D. Murphy, Clemencia Rodríguez · · United States

In Philadelphia, a robust number of environmentally friendly initiatives — including collective gardens, urban agriculture, composting facilities, and pollution-cleansing strategies such as using plants to remove lead from soil — have engaged mostly older citizens, while local youth remain indifferent and rarely show interest in creating or maintaining green spaces in their neighborhoods. Drawing on participatory media models from Communication for Social Change and lessons from Environmental Communication, a chapter details the design and early stages of Urban Green Spaces and Digital Technologies, an initiative using media and digital platforms to encourage children and youth to engage with urban green spaces. Founded on the concept of "voice" — where storytelling, empowerment and political agency intersect — the initiative aims to connect urban youth in Philadelphia's low-income, primarily Black and Latino communities to local green spaces. Intended outcomes include increased youth engagement with urban green spaces and increased awareness of environmental justice issues such as sustainability, food security, climate change, and the significance of green spaces.

Aline Souza, Daniel Calbino · Revista Em Extensão · Brazil

A study in the municipality of Sete Lagoas, Minas Gerais, Brazil, internationally recognized for 34 years of urban community gardening, examined a community garden established within the Association for the Protection and Assistance of Convicted People (APAC), which reports lower recidivism than traditional prison systems. Using participatory qualitative research (questionnaires, field diaries and photographs), the study analyzed effects on 30 subjects in recovery over 17 months. Results pointed to the garden serving as a means of income generation and producing social and psychological gains such as strengthened social interaction and greater food and nutritional diversity.

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.

Pedro José Santos Carneiro Cruz, Renan Soares de Araújo · Interagir pensando a extensão · Brazil

A report on the "Integrated Health and Nutrition Promotion Practices in Primary Care" (PINAB) program, a university extension initiative guided by popular education principles, carried out in the Boa Esperança community in João Pessoa, Paraíba, Brazil. The program organized activities around two operative groups, "Horta" (garden) and "Health in the Community": the first prioritized building a community garden, and the second held meetings to discuss environmental and local health, quality-of-life and sustainability issues, integrated with cleaning, conservation and planting activities for vegetables and medicinal herbs. Participatory and dialogical methods — conversation circles, creative dynamics and posters expressing local popular culture — were used, positioning the garden as a space for learning through labor and for building solidarity, welcome, dialogue and shared knowledge.

Silvia Regina Nunes Baptista, Emilia J. de M Silva · · Brazil

A report on territorial struggles over land, water and urban agriculture in the west zone of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. It describes a recent process of convergence between two movements that had appeared to share few common approaches or agendas: the struggle against evictions in favor of housing rights, and the struggle for land, water and urban agriculture. It states that, against a historical backdrop of violated access to land, a specific event favored both struggles simultaneously.