Preliminary statement of Specialty Crops Research Proposal Objectives

The need for local fresh food production has escalated during the past few years. Increases in home foreclosures, unemployment and inner city poverty are leading to hunger and malnutrition in US urban neighborhoods at an unprecedented scale. Children from poverty stricken areas are at most risk as food banks have emptied, food prices have risen, and access to fresh food is almost nonexistent in many inner city neighborhoods. The 2008 Federal Report on Food Security issued by the USDA in November 2009 indicates that 50 million people (14.6% of the US households) were food insecure in 2008. The report further shows that 17 million US children (one in every four children) lived in households in which food was scare at times and 1.1 million children were outright hungry, illustrating the vulnerability (as opposed to resilience) of urban ecosystems. Urban agriculture can play a huge role in enhancing self-reliance, restoring resilience and revitalizing affected neighborhoods by generating new employment opportunities in the production, processing, and distribution of fresh and processed fruits and vegetables as well as nursery and ornamental plants.  The increased availability of local produce will help mitigate hunger and malnutrition, while non-food plants can provide many practical and aesthetic purposes that enhance the quality of life in urban areas. Urban land banks have expanded during the past few years and cities are exploring ways to utilize land vacancies productively. We propose a trans-disciplinary, inter-institutional, and multi-state Coordinated Agricultural Project (CAP) to facilitate and enhance the production, processing, marketing, and utilization of specialty crops (fresh vegetables and fruits) in urban areas. Our long-term goal is to address the needs, characteristics, and potential of vibrant urban specialty crops enterprises and demonstrate their benefits to revitalization of poverty stricken neighborhoods. 

We plan to specifically focus on three P’s (People, Planet, and Profit). We propose to use an “inverted” Customer to Producer model (i.e. people first) as opposed to the typical Producer to Customer model. We will address production of specialty crops in urban areas at all scales from home and community gardens to full-fledged commercial operations, including those in seed and seedling delivery, designer soils and composting. In addition to the standard business models for commercial production, processing, and distribution, we plan to also explore community-based (distributed) business models including homeowner and community gardener cooperatives. We will also explore feasibility and benefits of producing and consuming specialty crops in schools, hospitals, nursing homes, public institutions, and private businesses. One of our goals would be to provide urban dwellers high quality, year-round, locally produced vegetables through efficient sustainable plant production systems supported with existing urban infrastructure.  By integrating commercial and non-profit production operations, it is desirable to achieve a broad based, community centered gardening network for seasonal production and commercial farms/greenhouses year-round production to meet urban food needs.

Proposed examples of specific objectives (please add using the attached model):   

1.     What zoning and tax abatements are most effective in creating space and facilitating urban protected environment production of specialty crops (e.g. greenhouses, high tunnels, vacant building reuse)?

2.     What educational programs are most effective in training home gardeners, community gardeners, school gardeners (K-12), and commercial producers in producing high quality and safe specialty crops?

3.     What processes and procedures are most effective for building urban soils for the production of high quality and safe specialty crops in urban areas?

4.     What are the most effective models to process and/or distribute food produced in home, community, school, and institutional gardens and in urban commercial farms?

5.     What are the most effective ways to increase consumption of locally-produced specialty crops (diet change, habits, attitudes and behavior change, etc.)? 

6.     Develop systems to increase yield and food availability using low-cost season extension plant production systems. We will meet plant production heating needs with energy harvested from waste heat or solar sources. We will develop approaches to recover energy and water from urban waste streams, and renewable resources for heating and irrigation needs of hobby gardening and commercial farming. The resource recovery effort will address two different production needs:

(i)              Season extension for low investment operations such as non-profit gardens including community, school, and workplace gardens. The targeted heating energy recovery are: 1) residual heat of gray water, and 2) solar heat.

(ii)            Year-round commercial operations that are much more energy intense than gardening operations. Potential waste heat could come from neighborhood factory, bakery, Laundromat K etc. It is also of interest to evaluate the feasibility of using greenhouses to harvest energy to meet heating needs of the plant production.

Please develop/write additional objectives/sub-objectives using the attached conceptual diagram. Also let us know if additional connections, etc need to be drawn/mapped on the diagram.        

One or more potential projects in each of the following cities (add more?):

Akron, Ohio

Cleveland, Ohio

Columbus, Ohio

Dayton, Ohio

Toledo, Ohio

Wooster, Ohio

Youngstown, Ohio
Chicago, Illinois

Flint, Michigan

Detroit, Michigan

Minneapolis, Minnesota 

Ashbury Park, New Jersey

Buffalo, New York

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Milwaukee, Wisconsin