Research & reports

V. Ernesto Mendez, Christopher M. Bacon, Roseann Cohen, Stephen R. Gliessman · Agroecology · United States

This chapter discusses the rise of movements for just and sustainable food systems in the United States over the last 15 years, encompassing areas like urban agriculture and food sovereignty. It notes that while most practitioners in US alternative agrifood movements do not use the term "agroecology," they share similar principles. The chapter also describes the evolution of agroecology from a farm-scale focus to a systems-based, transdisciplinary approach for sustainable food systems.

Mariah E Reitz · Digital Commons - Otterbein (Otterbein University) · United States

This research aimed to determine if a community garden would benefit a suburban township, Blendon Township, in addressing food insecurity and food deserts. A survey evaluated fruit and vegetable consumption, healthy food affordability, and education, as well as the garden's effect on participants' families. Through a literature review and survey assessment, the results indicated that Blendon Township needed a community garden due to its proximity to Columbus and suburban setting.

Sabine Lefkowitz · · United States (Portland)

This thesis examined the relationship between socioeconomic status (SES) and outdoor time in Portland, Oregon public elementary schools. The study found that higher SES elementary schools spend more time outdoors than low SES schools. This disparity amplifies existing disadvantages for children in high-poverty schools, suggesting an inequity in outdoor time provision.

Patricia Keane, Alejandro Ortega Hortelano, Jeanette Linville · Journal of Public Health Management and Practice · United States

As an evaluation of the "Healthy Kids, Healthy Cuba (HKHCuba)" program in a triethnic rural community in New Mexico, 12 partners participated in a group model building (GMB) session to introduce systems thinking. The session identified 27 influences as feedback loops from behavior over time graphs and 5 subsystems from a causal loop diagram. Results showed that in addition to strategy-related influences like access to healthy food and community garden participation, a sense of cultural pride, community, and social engagement, especially among youth, were highly salient.

Geneviève S. Metson, Elena M. Bennett · PLoS ONE · Canada (Montreal)

This study quantified the role of urban agriculture (UA) in phosphorus (P) cycling in Montreal, Canada, using existing data and surveys of local UA practitioners. In 2012, Montreal imported 3.5 Gg of P in food, with 2.63 Gg accumulating in landfills, 0.36 Gg discharged to local waters, and only 0.09 Gg recycled through composting. UA was found to be only a small sub-system in the city's overall P cycle, contributing just 0.44% of the P consumed as food. Although recycling rates within the UA system are high, the land area dedicated to UA is too small to accommodate all P waste produced on the island.

Selina Dorking, Paige Eisen, Joseph J. Godfrey, Regina López, Steven A. Smith · ScholarWorks - GVSU (Grand Valley State University) · United States

In the Heartside neighborhood of Grand Rapids, Michigan, United States, the non-profit Heartside Gleaning Initiative (HGI) has been addressing food insecurity since 2014. During the winter semester of 2015, the "Food Fighters," a team of Grand Valley State University students, collaborated with HGI to tackle the challenges of food waste, food insecurity, and community sustainability. Their efforts resulted in the Heartside Glean Ride mobile food cart plan and a brochure for Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) boxes, designed to increase food distribution.

Pai Liu · TigerPrints (Clemson University) · United States (Atlanta)

This study explored how urban agriculture can be effective in cities by comparing and evaluating eight U.S. case studies against six criteria: locality, experience, economy, health, community engagement, and resources. The research aimed to develop a new model for sustainable urban agriculture to improve urban living environments. Results indicated how these six criteria interact to form an integrated framework for a "perma-urban farm," with a design application along Atlanta's Beltline as an example.

Angela Y. Y. Kong, Cynthia Rosenzweig, Joshua Arky · HortScience · United States

This study evaluated the effects of organic and inorganic nitrogen (N) inputs on N dynamics within substrate typically used on rooftop farms during an 8-week greenhouse experiment in the United States. Substrate without added N inputs (control) was compared with synthetic fertilizer and three organic N inputs: composted poultry manure, municipal green waste compost, and vermicompost. Few differences in N cycling and yields were found among treatments receiving organic N inputs, despite differences in carbon-to-nitrogen ratios. Crop yields from the synthetic fertilizer and municipal green waste compost treatments were higher than other organic N input treatments. Inorganic N levels in the synthetic fertilizer treatment decreased from 129 mg N/L to 113 mg N/L, while control and organic N input treatments showed nearly 10-fold decreases from 79.5–117.8 mg N/L to 12.8–16.6 mg N/L over 8 weeks. The greatest losses of ammonium and nitrate via leachate were measured from the synthetic fertilizer treatment.

Rachel Grewell · · United States

The Urban Farm and Garden Alliance (UFGA) conducted a measurement project from summer to fall 2015, involving UFGA gardens and backyard gardeners weighing and measuring produce. The project also included a community survey on the social impacts of gardening. Based on these results, community-friendly guides were designed to help collect and disseminate data on both social and vegetative yields in urban gardens.

Geneviève S. Metson, Elena M. Bennett · Elementa Science of the Anthropocene · Canada

A study of Montreal, Canada, examining the potential and barriers for phosphorus (P) recycling through organic waste, noting that currently only 6% of P in Montreal's waste is recycled. Combining semi-structured interviews with 19 key stakeholders, participant observation over more than 1.5 years, and document review, the study identified key barriers and facilitators to achieving a high level of organic waste recycling through composting. A provincial law mandating 100% recycling of organic matter was found to have great potential to facilitate increased P recycling, but this potential is inhibited by a lack of shared vision about the roles of government, the private sector, and citizens in producing high-quality compost, along with cultural inertia, lack of knowledge, and lack of infrastructure. Urban agriculture, which benefits from strong citizen support and is both a consumer and producer of compost, could help overcome some of these barriers, but limited access to garden space and training, and diversity in the fertiliser qualities gardeners want, somewhat limit this potential.

Connie Everson · Studies in the Education of Adults · United States

This study examined informal learning among members and farmers in community-supported agriculture (CSA) in the United States. CSA began as a loosely formalized, vaguely socialistic agreement between consumers and farmers, but as it became more institutionalized, education came to hold a near-equal footing alongside the nutritional offerings. The author's research found that goodwill generated by the farmers translated into a shared sense of community, in which information and knowledge were freely shared between CSA members and their farmer. Informal learning was found to be an intricate part of participation in the CSA experience: while individuals joining a CSA did not anticipate or expect a learning experience, the season-long process was strongly conducive to many forms of informal learning.

Christopher Wharton, Renée Shaw Hughner, Lexi MacMillan, Claudia Dumitrescu · Ecology of Food and Nutrition · United States

A US study conducted a series of focus groups to identify the motives for joining community supported agriculture (CSA) programs, the experiences of CSA membership, and diet-related outcomes. Using the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) as a framework to categorize findings, the data suggested that CSA membership could serve as a strategy for promoting healthful diets and behaviors. Participant numbers and the specific location are not stated in the abstract.

Martín Leonardo Battaglia · CSA News · United States

An article describing the Graduate Extension Scholars (GES) program at the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences (CALS), Virginia Tech, United States. Citing the National Academy of Sciences (2009), it notes that future agronomists will increasingly come from cities and suburbs rather than rural areas, making youth outreach to build interest in agriculture a recruitment concern. The GES program has graduate students develop educational modules for youth based on their own research, working with 4-H youth development agents; lesson plans are posted online, and networking through professional conferences of the Department of Agricultural, Leadership, and Community Education extends impact beyond individual classrooms or clubs. Per the National Academy of Sciences (2009), several urban agricultural education programs are already established, but higher education institutions are not well represented in most K-12 curricular programs. The article also references the 2013 Next Generation Science Standards.

Dorceta E. Taylor, Kerry Ard · Environmental Practice · United States

A study of Detroit, Michigan, United States, combining environmental justice analysis with systems thinking to examine the city's food environment. Data were collected from ReferenceUSA, Orbis and the Michigan Department of Agriculture between 2011 and 2013 to build a database of food outlets, analyzed and mapped using SPSS 22 and ArcGIS 10.1. The study examined the locations of 3,499 food outlets across 34 categories, including 96 supermarkets or full-line grocery stores, 1,110 small groceries/convenience stores/mini marts/liquor stores, 279 specialty food stores, 306 pharmacies/dollar/variety stores, 1,245 full-service and fast-food restaurants and other food service outlets, 157 supply chain operations, 206 farms/community and school gardens/farmers markets/produce markets, and 100 food assistance programs. It found that although Detroit has areas lacking food outlets, characterizing the entire city as a "food desert" is misleading, and that the traditional food desert research approach — relying only or primarily on the presence or absence of supermarkets and full-line grocery stores — ignores many important venues people use to obtain food and the coping strategies people employ in response to limited food access.

Natoshia M. Askelson, Disa Lubker Cornish, Elizabeth H. Golembiewski · Journal of Agriculture Food Systems and Community Development · United States

A mixed-methods study of rural U.S. school food service directors in a midsized Midwestern state examined perceptions of voluntary school meal programs such as farm-to-school and school garden programs, using semi-structured telephone interviews (n=67) and an online survey (n=57). Directors reported little experience with these programs and perceived them as very challenging to implement, citing very small staff, lack of concrete knowledge about how the programs work, and lack of access to local producers and chefs as the main barriers.

Tainã Coelho Quevedo, Anilton Squena de Oliveira, Lauren Machado Gayeski, Marcelo Pereira de Barros · DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) · Brazil

Through Universidade Feevale's participation in Brazil's Projeto Rondon, workshops presented concepts and methodologies for developing community gardens and reusing organic waste and rainwater in two locations in Maranhao state. Three lectures were given and four community gardens, four composters, and two cisterns were built across four municipal schools, training 97 people. Environmental multipliers were trained through active community participation, and alternative cost-reduction techniques were made available for economically disadvantaged regions.

B.M. Mercado-Borrayo, Silke Cram Heydrich, Irma Rosas‐Pérez, Manuel Hernández Quiroz, Claudia Ponce De León Hill · International Journal of Phytoremediation · Mexico

In a natural wetland in the Mexico City Metropolitan Area — a major supplier of crops and flowers whose canals hold high concentrations of organochlorine (OC) and organophosphorus (OP) pesticides — bioaccumulation of these pesticides was studied in water hyacinth (Eichhornia crassipes), a plant considered a plague but suggested in the literature to have phytoremediation potential. In vivo bioaccumulation differences for OC pesticides were largely explained by their log Kow, while all OP pesticides showed bioaccumulation regardless of log Kow, and the higher bioaccumulation factors of some accumulated OC pesticides could not be explained by log Kow alone, suggesting passive transport into the plant. Translocation ratios showed water hyacinth to be an accumulating plant with phytoremediation potential for all the organophosphorus pesticides studied and some organochlorine pesticides, and an equation for free water surface wetlands with floating macrophytes showed pesticide removal by the wetland with room for improvement through better management.

James Tolleson · Southern Anthropological Society Proceedings · United States

This essay considers what may become of a manufacturing city like Detroit, once called the "arsenal of democracy," after being abandoned by industry, asking whether such cities can be rebuilt and redefined as models of self-reliant, sustainable, multicultural twenty-first-century communities, and situates Detroit's urban agriculture movement within that food-justice framing.

Joana Chan, Bryce DuBois, Keith G. Tidball · · United States (New York City)

This study conducted ethnographic research -- including participant observation, exploratory and in-depth interviews, and archival research -- at five community gardens in New York City's coastal "red zones" affected by Hurricane Sandy in 2012, from April 2013 to February 2014. It found that community gardens functioned as multi-purpose community refuges that hosted meaningful, restorative greening practices and developed supportive communities for residents and garden members in the aftermath of the disaster.

Bill Musser · · United States (Iowa)

This is an announcement for the CBHL 2015 Annual Meeting, hosted by Seed Savers Exchange (SSE) in Decorah, Iowa, United States, on June 16–20, 2015, during SSE's 40th anniversary year. The conference theme reflected growing public interest in creating edible landscapes.

Alejandra S. Coronel, 1 Climatología, Facultad de Ciencias Agrarias Universidad Nacional de Rosario (FCA-UNR), Rosario, Argentina;, Susana R. Feldman, Emliano Jozami, Kehoe Facundo, Rubén D. Piacentini, Marielle Dubbeling, Francisco J. Escobedo · AIMS environmental science · Brazil

Using digital sensors at eight sites in Rosario, Argentina, from September 2013 to August 2014 — three unvegetated sites in the city center, one city-center site with street trees, one urban agriculture site, one public park, and two peri-urban agricultural sites — this study measured air temperature and, defining a comfort range of 18–24°C, analyzed how different green areas used for urban and peri-urban agriculture and forestry (UPAF) affect daily temperature and cooling/heating requirements. Air temperature in the unvegetated city center was higher than at other vegetated sites during both day and night, except at the city-center site with street trees. Temperature effects in the roughly 0.2-hectare urban agriculture garden were similar to those of the larger, 2–3-hectare parks and gardens. Based on cooling degree days, three UPAF types were classified with progressively lower cooling demand — (1) treeless city center, (2) city center with street trees and public parks, and (3) urban and peri-urban agriculture areas — with the opposite ranking found for heating degree days. The authors state the results can inform the integration of UPAF measures into climate-change mitigation and urban planning policy in medium-sized cities in the developing world.

Saul Hernandez, Anthony Boynton, Interns · Community Literacy Journal · United States

An editor's note for the book review section of Community Literacy Journal. It recounts an ecological metaphor shared by a community garden leader at a Georgia community center, mentions raised beds built with a Knight Foundation grant and a seedling-distribution outreach effort, and surveys several book reviews in the same issue covering literacy and community-building, DIY culture, and race and education.

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

This 2015 editorial for the Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems and Community Development introduces the issue's articles, describing them as addressing barriers and limitations of local and regional food initiatives while also presenting opportunities and strategies. It highlights pieces including John Ikerd's proposed 'Food Ethic,' a viewpoint on local food, food democracy and food hubs, a paper on the limits of urban agriculture to deliver food, job training and income without outside funding, a study of municipal ordinances governing backyard slaughter, and an analysis of how farmers' market ownership structures affect market conduct.

Lydia G. Marquez‐Bravo, Dean B. Briggs, Hannah A. Shayler, Murray B. McBride, Donna Lopp, Edie B. Stone, Gretchen Ferenz, Kenneth G. Bogdan, R. G. Mitchell, Henry M. Spliethoff · Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry · United States (New York City)

A study analyzed 69 soil samples from 20 community gardens in New York City for 23 polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) and black carbon, sampling both non-growing areas and vegetable-growing beds, including beds with and without visible PAH sources, at each garden. The sum of the US EPA's 16 priority PAHs reached up to 150 mg/kg, with a median of 5.4 mg/kg and mean of 14.2 mg/kg, similar to levels previously reported for urban areas in the northeastern United States. Isomer ratios indicated petroleum, coal and wood combustion as the main sources, and PAH concentrations were significantly and positively associated with black carbon and modeled air PAH concentrations, suggesting a link between historical atmospheric deposition and current soil PAH levels. Median PAH concentration in non-bed areas (7.4 mg/kg) was higher than in beds from the same gardens (4.0 mg/kg) and significantly higher than in beds without visible PAH sources (3.5 mg/kg); beds in gardens with records of soil amendments had 58% lower median PAH concentration than beds in gardens without such records, suggesting that gardening practices in beds without visible sources contribute to reducing soil PAH concentrations.

Ashley Tryba · · United States

A paper on community gardens and urban farms in underserved and gentrifying areas of redevelopment in the United States combines case studies, interviews, quantitative analysis of land values, comparative analysis of vacant land policies, urban archival news documents and photographs, and empirical models of urban land use and food distribution. It states that urban agricultural programs rarely alleviate the pressures of food insecurity on a large scale, while showing that community food gardens function as an oasis from the food insecurity, violence and sexual harassment that urban areas often pose. The qualitative data support existing literature indicating that, if maintained, community agricultural projects produce social, economic, environmental and physical health benefits, and the paper argues that with government support, these small grassroots programs can have larger societal impacts.