Churches lead U.S. urban farming drive to tackle pandemic hunger
Hunger, high prices and economic instability are driving local efforts to boost food security.
By Carey L. Biron
Thomson Reuters Foundation
21 February 2022
Excerpt:
Benson Ongeri has been growing vegetables on a small plot on the grounds of a church in Rochester, Minnesota, for a half-dozen years, but he hadn’t seen such a sudden spike in interest from prospective new members until the COVID-19 pandemic hit.
The nursing student had first applied for a plot to grow vegetables from his native Kenya that he could not find in local markets, at a time when he and his family lived in an apartment with no access to land.
Even with Minnesota’s shorter growing season, Ongeri said a single 20-by-30-foot (six-by-nine-meter) plot produces more than enough to feed his family through the year.
For growers, “these plots are really significant to us because we can produce as much vegetables as we need,” he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
With the pandemic and related economic upheavals having drastically worsened food insecurity across the United States, a growing number of people are seeing the potential for small-scale urban farming to feed families who can’t find or afford fresh fruits and vegetables.
Ongeri got his plot through a Rochester project called the Village Agricultural Cooperative, which is made up of more than 160 families farming about 10 acres (4 hectares) across the city, said project director Amanda Nigon-Crowley.
Village projects are also on other church land, leased farmland and civic sites.
Many of the growers are from immigrant families who have been buffeted by the pandemic, she said, recalling one grower from Mexico whose family was struggling to cope with higher food prices and loss of work.
“Because she was able to grow so much of her own food, she doesn’t think she was impacted as much,” as the grower and her family might have been, Nigon-Crowley said.
She said surveys of the farmers involved in the project suggest the plots are producing enough to allow families to fill their freezers for the winter and even give food away.
