Editor’s Note: This post is part of a multi-part series exploring some of the key sustainable agriculture and food systems challenges that the farm bill can address. Through a series of posts comparing the House and Senate Agriculture Committees’ proposals, we provide an assessment of how each chamber’s bill would address a given challenge, and our recommended path forward. Our first post focused on local and regional market access. Future posts will explore how the next farm bill can tackle issues in meat processing, crop insurance, organic and sustainable agriculture research, and more.

Urban agriculture is a longstanding practice in communities to serve as a form of food sovereignty, resistance, mutual aid, and entrepreneurship. Urban farmers and community garden networks cultivate, process, and distribute food utilizing micro-scale and innovative production techniques. While these practices predominantly exist in urban and suburban areas, incorporating support for these practices throughout the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) has the potential to extend economic and social benefit beyond urban centers.

USDA and Urban Agriculture

The Office of Urban Agriculture and Innovative Production (OUAIP) promotes the viability of urban farms and addresses food insecurity in neighboring communities. The Office itself is a fairly new USDA initiative, yet it has already had a significant impact in communities nationwide. The Office invests in organizations and localities through grants and cooperative agreements to: 

• Increase the capacity of agricultural production in urban areas and through innovative methods; 
• Research and develop local policies or zoning regulations that support agricultural production in urban and suburban areas; 
• Develop and implement food waste reduction or management plans that promote soil health through compost;
• Provide educational opportunities to youth and communities that encourages gardening and promotes health and well-being.

Additionally, USDA has recently established seventeen new Urban Service Centers with urban conservationists to bring farm financing and conservation funding to urban areas. In light of historical distrust and skepticism of USDA within communities of color, the Farm Service Agency funded organizations in these seventeen regions to conduct outreach about incoming new services. However, a number of these partners were not community organizations that held established relationships with urban producers in those regions or had experience in urban production methods. Many of these agreements were initiated earlier this year, and to date, only a few of the new Urban Service Centers have physical locations. Therefore, the effectiveness of these partnerships to drive farmers to new USDA services remains to be seen. OUAIP received funding for the first time in FY2020. It saw small but steady increases (from $5 million to $8.5 million) from FY2020 – FY2023, but has since been caught in annual funding fights, risking its progress.

Farm Bill Opportunity

The National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition (NSAC) has worked with Congressional leaders to identify legislative opportunities to ensure investments better reach farmers and the Office has stable funding, which was introduced as the Supporting Urban and Innovative Farming Act (S. 2591, H.R. 5915) last year.

Both the Senate and House Agriculture Committees include a number of these provisions in their respective farm bill strategies. 

The Senate offers a comprehensive solution to addressing funding shortfalls and improving the accessibility of supports to urban producers by incorporating the vast majority of provisions from S.2591: 

• Expanding the responsibilities of the office to better serve the conservation and business planning needs of urban producers; 
• Enabling community partners to act as an extension of the Office through cooperative agreements, prioritizing organizations that have established relationships with underserved population and experience providing technical assistance to these producers; 
• Generating business growth for urban producers by supporting microgrant opportunities and expanding grant eligibility to farmer cooperatives; and
• Investing in the long-term development and growth of the Office by providing mandatory funding at $10 million annually. 

The House also includes approximately half of the provisions from H.R. 5915 that would: 

• Improve the delivery of USDA conservation and business planning services to urban and innovative farming operations; 
• Create more access for funding among producers by supporting microgrant opportunities and expanding grant eligibility to farmer cooperatives; and
• Enable community partners through cooperative agreements. 

Unfortunately, the House bill does not include a directive or prioritization for organizations with urban farming experience like the Senate does. This would likely lead to the Farm Service Agency partnering with institutions and inexperienced nonprofits that have the capacity for managing federal grants but not necessarily the experience in supporting urban farmers. Furthermore, the House bill does not provide any mandatory funding. As a result, the House approach could result in additional unmet demand as the applicant pool widens but the funding pool remains unstable. 

The Final Path

Adequately resourcing the Office of Urban Agriculture and Innovative Production is only one step to ensure all scales and agricultural production techniques are represented in USDA programming. Any final farm bill must additionally: 

• direct USDA to consider and develop resources that meet the unique needs of small scale farmers operating in urban and metropolitan areas, 
• create opportunities for trusted community partnerships to lead outreach and build relationships between growers and USDA through cooperative agreements,
• expand the reach of grants by funding farmer cooperatives and offering microgrants to urban farmers, and
• invest in research and data collection to understand the prevalence and economic impact of urban and innovative production. 

Senator Stabenow (D-MI) has proposed a more comprehensive approach to addressing urban and innovative production services throughout existing USDA services. However, neither the House or the Senate offer the financial resources to fully implement the urban, indoor, and emerging agricultural data collection initiative authorized by the 2018 Farm Bill. Incorporating these practices consistently into the Census of Agriculture is imperative for USDA to adequately understand and serve these producers.