(EVENT) Urban Agriculture: Federal, State, and Local Policy Initiatives

January 10, 2024

Panelists: Blake Glover (New York State Conservationist, USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service); Leslie Glover II (Program Manager and Senior Technical Advisor, USDA Office of Urban Agriculture and Innovative Production); Qiana Mickie (Executive Director, New York City Mayor’s Office of Urban Agriculture); Brian Steinmuller (Assistant Director, Division of Land and Water Resources and Soil and Water Conservation Committee at the New York State Department of Agriculture and Markets)

Host and Moderator: Annette Nielsen (Executive Director, Hunter College NYC Food Policy Center)

Recording available here (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yuu0ugiQFgk)

Takeaways:

Hunter College’s New York City Policy Center hosted its first Policy for Breakfast event since the onset of the COVID crisis. The event has a unique structure: attendees gathered in person for a panel conversation spanning about an hour, with time for networking before and after the panel. The session’s topic was huge in scope and an hour was not nearly long enough to get into the finer details of urban agriculture policy across three levels of government. The panel did a great job introducing the perspectives of its guests and their understandings of and visions for urban agriculture. Host Annette Nielsen half-jokingly proposed a follow up, full-day seminar on this topic to which I say: yes, please! More specific takeaways, below.

The panelists shared overviews of their offices’ work in the urban agriculture space. This was an easier task for Leslie Glover II and Qiana Mickie, given that their offices focus specifically on urban agriculture. The USDA’s Office of Urban Agriculture and Innovative Production (OUAIP) administers two grants, one meant to expand capacity for urban growers, and one to expand municipal capacity for circular food systems via compost. The OUAIP also supports the People’s Garden initiative. The NYC Mayor’s Office of Urban Agriculture (MOUA) released a report in October outlining a framework for their efforts in the City.

Both offices are relatively new with strong visions and energetic leadership, but remain untested as to how much structural change they can affect within their institutions (the USDA and New York City executive government, respectively). Qiana Mickie was appointed to lead the MOUA in September 2022, and Brian Guse (the Director of the OUAIP) started in his role in March 2022 and the office has been administering grants since 2020. Both offices also sit within other offices/ agencies: the MOUA is housed under the Mayor’s Office of Climate and Environmental Justice, and the OUAIP is nested under NRCS, which itself is nested within FPAC. Both budgets are minuscule relative to the offices in which they sit: the MOUA is more of an internal coordinating team, and the OUAIP operates to the scale of tens of millions of dollars against a backdrop of tens of BILLIONS spent per year by NRCS (to say nothing of the hundreds of billions of dollars available to the USDA at large). The MOUA has won millions of dollars in grant funding to support Farm-to-School initiatives for NYC, but it is unclear exactly how these programs will support urban agriculture specifically.

Blake Glover from the New York NRCS office has less of a focus on urban agriculture in his daily operations, though he and Leslie Glover II (no relation) teased the variety of NRCS programs available to urban growers: technical support and cost-share programs like those for water access and high tunnels are highly popular with urban producers around the state (and country), though somewhat limited due to eligibility requirements that were usually written without urban growers in mind. Updates to these policies in the 2018 Farm Bill expanded eligibility, but conversations about what legislation (from Congress) and what policies (through USDA rules and regulations) can be changed, and how. This is the focus of the urban service center pilot currently launching across the country. They discussed the work done in New York City to fund wider water access for GreenThumb gardens, but, of course, not every garden in NYC is sanctioned by the GreenThumb program - nor should this kind of formal relationship with city government be a requirement for aid. This conversation reminded me of NYS Legislature Bill A1909/S1082 which was signed into Chapter by the Governor in 2023. This bill exempted certain non-profit gardens from payments for water access in NYC, and seemed to primarily if not solely benefit GreenThumb gardens. I am still waiting for a response from the Assembly sponsor’s office (Zinerman) for clarification on this point. The NRCS representatives also mentioned the 12 “mini USDA” regional business hubs currently in the process of launching. According to an Agriculture Dive overview, “Regional Food Business Centers will be virtual hubs for connecting small and mid-sized farm businesses, processors, aggregators and distributors to the technical assistance they need to level up.” The project comes as a result of American Rescue Plan funding from 2021 intended to address regional supply chain failures brought to life by pandemic food shortages. With a stated focus on resiliency, it is clear that this project has laudable goals to bolster small and mid-sized, “local” food business. However, it does not necessarily support urban agriculture, especially not the kinds of community-based urban agriculture which builds resiliency within communities outside conventional, commercial systems.

The representative from the NYS Department of Agriculture and Markets (NYSDAM), Brian Steinmuller, had the least to say about urban agriculture specifically. His focus is on Soil and Water Conservation Districts (SWCDs), which look vastly different in rural areas (where most SWCDs do their work, and where they focus on helping large-scale farmers reduce agricultural impact to the surrounding waterways and environment) and urban areas (where SWCDs see soil-based urban agriculture more as green infrastructure). While Steinmuller acknowledged the innovative work done by urban SWCDs in New York, he was scarce on the details regarding NYSDAM’s stance on urban agriculture or specific interventions and policies that NYSDAM plans to implement to scale urban agriculture. He did shout out the Department’s Division of Agriculture Development, specifically the work of the Community Gardens Task Force. This Task Force is comprised of community garden leadership from across New York State and has made specific recommendations that NYSDAM is already acting upon; for example, to fund the development of a community garden leadership program, which Cornell will administer beginning this year. Steinmuller, in addition to Leslie Glover II, emphasized the opportunity that could be offered by the State’s administration of federal specialty crop block grants. While I have no specific success stories of how these have been implemented in the urban agriculture space, I can share more on these opportunities here. NYSDAM, New York State Executive agencies in general, and the New York State Legislature can do more to support urban agriculture. Recommendations for state government can be found in the 2022 urban agriculture report that I co-authored, available here (https://harvestny.cce.cornell.edu/submission.php?id=163&crumb=urban_agriculture|7).