Perspective: USDA does a disservice by not investing more in urban agriculture
Last year, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Urban Agriculture and Innovation Production (UAIP) office supported 52 urban agriculture projects
By Bre Holbert
AgDaily
December 22, 2023
Excerpt:
My challenge to the USDA, its UAIP office, and even the NRCS is to invest more in urban agriculture. We can solve many health problems within our underserved communities, we can funnel urban students into careers related and adjacent to agriculture, but we can also slow the process of urbanization if we help urban communities to make the purpose of farmland. To share that, farmland is crucial to our survival and not stagnant, it is a part of our culture — it is crucial to our futures.
We can’t do that unless we invest more in agriculture literacy, agriculture nutrition programs, agriculture scholarships, and others to ensure that our urban communities are not only supported in urban agriculture projects but mindful of agriculture that lives and breathes around them in our agrarian communities that still exist.
