University of Rhode Island team wins $970,000 grant to map alternative urban food networks
Although always a part of city life, urban agriculture has recently attracted increased attention in the United States, as a strategy for stimulating economic development, increasing food security and access, and combating obesity and diabetes.
Kristen Curry
URI
Apr12. 2023
Excerpt:
At URI, Taylor’s “home garden” is a quarter-acre plot at the Gardiner Crops Research Center on Thirty Acre Pond Road at the bottom of the Kingston Campus. His plot, visible from Plains Road, represents in microcosm the immigrant foodways he’ll be studying for his research for the grant during the next few years. At URI’s Agrobiodiversity Learning Garden and Food Forest, he grows crops that are integral to the food traditions of Rhode Island’s diverse communities: South American sweet potatoes, Mexican tomatillos, Haitian tomatoes, Mediterranean herbs, Asian bok choi, and produce from an African diaspora garden. Taylor tends the garden with students in URI’s Plant Sciences and Sustainable Agriculture and Food Systems programs and URI Master Gardeners, demonstrating how sustainable farming reinforces community-building in any setting.
With the learning garden, he follows a lead set by generations of immigrants who moved to Providence and cities like it, bringing their growing practices, and sometimes seeds, with them.
“My diverse personal, professional, and educational experiences inform my teaching and research at URI,” says Taylor. A descendant of five generations of Pennsylvania farmers, he grew up on a 100-acre integrated crop-livestock farm near Pittsburgh. Taylor began gardening at the age of six and started a market garden while in high school. He left the farm to attend the University of Chicago, where he studied philosophy. He then managed federal education studies for 10 years before returning to school to study horticulture and practice landscape architecture.
