Research & reports

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.

Eugene Mohareb, Martin Heller, Peter Guthrie · Environmental Science & Technology · United States

Using data from the literature and government sources, this study quantified life-cycle greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions of the United States food system at an estimated 3,800 kg CO2e per capita in 2010, with cities directly influencing about two-thirds of food-sector emissions. Assessing selected mitigation measures, the study found that up-scaling urban agriculture and expanding home grocery delivery would each cut only about 0.4% and roughly 1% of total food-sector emissions respectively, whereas changes in waste management and a 50% reduction in post-distribution food waste would cut total food-sector emissions by 5% and 11% respectively.

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.

Jefferson Pietroski Mota, Tamyres Ferri, Souza Manoella Cristina · · Brazil

A narrative account of the Horta Orgânica do CCA (HOCCA) project at the Federal University of Santa Catarina (UFSC), Brazil, from its founding to its consolidation. It describes converting neglected shared campus spaces into food-growing areas and spreading ecological-farming knowledge to the university and community through technical and thematic workshops. No quantitative outcome measures are reported.

Maria Júlia Ferreira, Hugo Baesso, José Luis González Geraldo · Cadernos de Agroecologia · Brazil

A report on the teaching and learning process during Vegetable Crop Science and Medicinal Plants classes at the Southeast IF MG (Instituto Federal), Campus Muriaé, Brazil, in which second-year students of the Integrated Technological Course in Agroecology implemented an organic, sustainable school garden in the first semester of 2016. Students applied classroom knowledge practically to the fully organic cultivation of vegetables, focusing on lettuce (Lactuca sativa) and chives (Allium schoenoprasum). An area of 1,000 m² was subdivided into twelve usable plots of 45 m² each. The techniques and procedures used are described as applicable to any garden pursuing an entirely sustainable way of life without chemical inputs, providing benefits for both the environment and human health.

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.

Natalia Matesanz Ventura · Dialnet (Universidad de la Rioja) · United States (New York City)

A case study of more than 50 gardens dotting the Loisaida neighborhood in southeast Manhattan, New York City. Since the 1960s, city agents — neighbors, artists, and architects such as Matta-Clark and Fuller — have built the green spaces and public facilities the neighborhood lacked, activating community and self-managed spaces through affective, dissenting processes. Using architectural forms whose generative parameters depart from traditional design and existing hegemonies, these actors have appropriated the city and reprogrammed public space by creating common space. Stands, domes, and casitas (tiny houses), with their vernacular and kitsch forms, constitute a network centered on the historical lot of La Plaza Cultural. The community gardens form a DIY network of delocalized but interconnected spaces with their own codes, positioned against the real estate market, media encroachment, globalization, and the private appropriation of public resources.

Kate Gardner Burt, Hersh B. Luesse, Jennifer Rakoff, Andréa Cardoso Ventura, Marissa Burgermaster · American Journal of Public Health · United States

An online survey of 99 school gardeners from 15 U.S. states, conducted in June 2017, examined barriers of time, funding, staffing, and space to integrating and sustaining school gardens, using a 29-item survey analyzed with descriptive statistics and inductive content analysis. Barriers were ranked from greatest to least as time, staff, funding, curriculum, and space; the most frequently cited time-related challenges were insufficient time for classes to use the garden (66% of respondents) and insufficient time for staff training (62%). Respondents also reported low engagement within the school community, and while an overall lack of funding was the most common funding-related barrier, gardeners were largely unaware of how to obtain additional funding.

Matheus Fernandes Iida Domiciano, Andressa Giovannini Costa, Tatiane Melo de Lima, Bruno Nery Fernandes Vasconcelos, Leidiane da Silva Rodrigues, Cleuder Roque Arruda de Matos · Cadernos de Agroecologia · Brazil

A university extension project (UFU's PEIC, with the Nucleus of Agroecology Studies of Cerrado Mineiro, NACEM) installed and maintained a vegetable garden at a nursing home for the elderly in Monte Carmelo, Minas Gerais, Brazil, involving university teachers, students, community volunteers, and elderly residents. The project reports indirect social and economic benefits, including interaction between students and elderly residents, inclusion activities for the elderly, and sale of garden produce to the community, which contributed to the residents' diet quality.

Emma Sutphen · Clark Digital Commons (Clark University) · United States

This practitioner report examines the Giving Garden, a community garden at Coogan Farm established in 2013 by the Denison Pequotsepos Nature Center in New London County, Connecticut, and its effects on community health and regional food security. Based on participatory research drawing on the author's experience as a 2017 summer intern and subsequent Assistant Garden Manager, the garden contributes to reducing local food insecurity by supplying seasonal fruits and vegetables grown through biointensive, regenerative practices. Findings suggest Giving Garden members experience a heightened sense of community, recipients of garden produce achieve greater overall health, and educational programs teaching sustainable farming practices promote more ecologically friendly household farming and gardening.

Ednaldo Michellon, Janaina Miyashiro Simon, Aldeir Isael Faxina Barros, Victor de Canini Cezar, Jaqueline da Silva Rosa, Wellington Fernandes Pereira · Cadernos de Agroecologia · Brazil

The municipality of Maringá, Brazil, has 37 community gardens that make use of abandoned or underutilized natural resources while improving participating families' environment and quality of life. Since 2008, the Reference Center for Urban and Periurban Agriculture (CerAUP), created amid social movements advocating for public policy support of urban and periurban agriculture, has provided technical assistance and voluntary extension services for such projects. This study used a questionnaire with participants of the Villa Atenas community garden to assess satisfaction with cultivating medicinal plants, the plants cited, their forms of use, plant parts used, and purposes of use. Results showed high satisfaction with the space used for cultivating medicinal plants, but only superficial knowledge among participants of the plants used and their purposes, leading the authors to conclude that popular and scientific knowledge about these plants needs wider dissemination.

Roberta Hoepers Mascarenhas, Adrian José Ramos, Ana Beatriz Boos dos Santos, Eduarda Nunes, Emile de Lima Pollheim, Eric Schwamberger, Gabriela Santos Patriarca, Julia Novak Baumgart, Kassia Kathellyn Barboza, Lucas Augusto Venske, Mara Alice Pereira, Maria Eduarda Batista Tiago, Naira Zesuino, Rossie Katherine dos Santos, Samuel Carvalho de Matos-Filho, Vinícius Verwiebe, Helenadja Santos Mota, Tatiane Sueli Coutinho · Anais da Mostra Nacional de Iniciação Científica e Tecnológica Interdisciplinar (MICTI) - e-ISSN 2316-7165 · Brazil

A community medicinal-herb garden project in Brusque, Brazil, catalogued 32 medicinal herbs through a literature review and selected 28 of them for planting and further study, aiming to raise community awareness of natural treatments through a booklet and talks at schools in the Brusque municipal school network. The first activity was carried out with students from APAE, a special-education institution.

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.

Ebrahiem Babiker, Stephen Stringer, Hamidou F. Sakhanokho, John J. Adamczyk, Arlen D. Draper · HortScience · United States

'Muffin Man' is described as a new public-domain, edible ornamental cultivar of rabbiteye blueberry (Vaccinium virgatum), a species commercially important in the southeastern United States for its tolerance of common biotic and abiotic stresses, developed amid growing interest in edible landscaping as an alternative to conventional ornamental landscapes. The abstract text is truncated and provides no further cultivar details.

Robin Sakina Mama · · United States

A book chapter examining a community garden developed at Monmouth University, a small private liberal-arts university in suburban New Jersey, United States, as a form of university-community collaboration. It discusses the garden's growth, successes and lessons learned, noting that community gardens are commonly started to address food insecurity but often expand into other functions such as neighborhood revitalization, community pride and a sense of ownership, with the building of social community described as central to the endeavor. The chapter is descriptive and reports no quantitative data.