State officials criss-cross Pennsylvania for urban agriculture week
Redding and other state officials toured 11 gardens in Lancaster, Reading, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. First lady Frances Wolf and lawmakers from the House and Senate Agriculture and Rural Affairs committees joined the secretary throughout the week.
By Christen Smith
The Center Square
July 24, 2021
Excerpt:
State officials spent Pennsylvania’s fourth annual Urban Agriculture Week touring city gardens designed to combat food insecurity.
“Urban agriculture, it carries a lot of different meanings to people and I think it’s one of the things we saw all week,” said Agriculture Secretary Russell Redding. “In some communities, it is really about food insecurity and taking what they produce and putting it into the charitable system.
“They are simply just solving problems and they figured out that food is an instrument to solve some of these community problems,” he added.
Gov. Tom Wolf designated the week soon after passage of the 2018 Farm Bill, which provided for $500,000 annual funding of projects that tackle food deserts – a lack of access to nutritional options – and insecurity in the state’s cities.
Since then, the state has spent $1 million on the program that – combined with $1 million in matching local contributions – have supported 70 projects in 16 counties.
“I want to get to a point where we just speak of it as agriculture … it’s zip code neutral,” Redding said. “So there is a mutual respect – regardless of scale, regardless of location – that all of the principles that go into producing a crop in the open fields for traditional agriculture apply to the urban centers.”
