After years of meeting and planning, Philly’s citywide Urban Agriculture Plan is finally here

Kiasha Huling’s introduction to planting and growing came when she was just a girl, snapping peas and picking okra on visits to her grandparents’ farm in rural North Carolina. She said her grandfather’s work on those 40 acres of land created opportunities for her mother and her mother’s siblings, which she now benefits from, too.

“It’s what put in place ... generational financial stability. And there’s opportunities [here] for that. There’s a lot of opportunities for that here in Philadelphia.”

Huling is one of several gardeners who tend to the Holly Street Neighbors Community Garden in West Powelton. Across 16 beds, they grow high-yield staples, such as tomatoes, collard greens and cabbage, as well as culturally specific crops such as Southeast Asian herbs and spices, and okra, just as in Huling’s childhood. The gardeners reap and distribute these crops to their Holly Street neighbors, providing them with both essentials and foods that matter to them culturally.

Holly Street is just one of the more than 400 community gardens, farms and growing spaces in Philadelphia, where people grow healthy foods for themselves and their communities, connect with their cultures, find respite, and transform once-vacant lots into productive use. But despite this widespread community embrace for urban agriculture, growers and city officials both acknowledge that the practice is under threat. Land access and displacement caused by development are the primary concerns, but growers have also called for more support, coordination and investment in urban agriculture from city agencies.

That’s why after years of advocacy from the urban agriculture community and some city officials, Philadelphia commissioned its first citywide Urban Agriculture Plan in 2019, titled “Growing from the Root.” The plan, for which a near-final draft was recently published, outlines an extensive set of policies, programs and resources that would sustain and support urban agriculture across the city over the next 10 years.

“It’s not an accident that Black people live in areas that have lower access to quality food,” said Ashley Gripper, an assistant professor at Drexel’s school of public health and co-creator of Land Based Jawns, a group that provides agricultural education and training primarily for Black women.

Poor Black and Latinx communities around Philadelphia frequently experience “food apartheid,” giving them limited access to good-quality supermarkets and heavy concentrations of fast-food restaurants. In contrast to the more commonly known phrase “food deserts,” food apartheid “refers to the racist structures, systems, and institutions that have led to an inadequate, inequitable, and unjust food environment for Black Americans and other marginalized groups,” Gripper wrote in a recent research paper.

» READ MORE: Supermarkets spent 60 years avoiding North Philly. But Black entrepreneurs have fought to bring — and keep — them there

She explained that there is a direct correlation between the presence of urban agricultural spaces and locations with low incomes and food apartheid. “People have started these gardens as a way to feed themselves and feed their neighbors. They’ve started community gardens to beautify ... neighborhoods where there’s been disinvestment from the city or extraction,” Gripper said. “What’s happened with our gardens is that they’ve become … spaces for us to organize for our resistance and for our freedom.”

Gripper is clear when she describes Philly urban agriculture’s greatest challenge: land. As Philadelphians moved out to the suburbs from the 1950s to the 1990s, they left behind tens of thousands of vacant lots, which is now where many of the city’s growing spaces thrive. But as urban agriculturalists now receive receive fewer resources and less programming support from the city than they once did, the land that many of their gardens sit upon isn’t legally theirs.

“A lot of us are growing on land that we don’t own or that we don’t have any type of land security for,” Gripper said.

That means the city can sell off the land to pay taxes or to developers, even if the space is filled with active gardens and green space. There have been some efforts to streamline the convoluted processes involved with land sales and ownership, most notably with the creation of the Philadelphia Land Bank, which has been criticized for its ineffectiveness. But as the city continues to prioritize development, urban agriculturalists are concerned with what it means for their gardens and farms.

» READ MORE: West Kensington’s community garden is a refuge. Advocates are trying to give all Philly neighborhoods similar spaces.

“As somebody who is the grower on vacant space, it’s very disheartening and it stops a lot of people from investing fully in a space because they know that space could be taken from them,” Gripper said. “We are the ones who are stewarding the land and caring for the land, and then [others] come in and sell it and reap a profit off of our work.”

At one of the public meetings, a participant wrote on a note: “I remember the joy of eating fresh snow peas off the vine, snacking on fresh raspberries, and making my freezer full of fresh pesto to last all winter. My toddler loved watering the garden. I miss it so much. ... A developer from NYC bought [the land].”

The plan leaders said that, all in all, more than 600 people of different races and ages participated in these different community engagement processes.

“Our intent was for the plan to hold values of transparency, of justice, of inclusion, and to truly reflect what growers have been saying over the years,” said Ash Richards, the city’s director of urban agriculture.

To get started, Richards contracted with a grassroots coalition of Black and Brown growers called Soil Generation to help build the planning process, as well as an urban planning firm, Interface Studio. Once other members of the urban agriculture community saw people they knew with Soil Generation, such as Gripper, were leading the process, they trusted it more and were willing to participate.

“Soil Generation was a coalition that many of us at some point have been a part of, have participated with, and know are real advocates of urban agriculture,” said Noelle Warford, the executive director of Urban Tree Connection, a nonprofit that develops and sustains gardens and farms in West Philly. “I think it really offered a lot of credibility to how [the] planning process would roll.”

From there, community participation came in numerous ways. Warford was one of urban agriculturalists on the plan’s steering committee, which was made up of Philly gardeners, seed keepers, community development corporations, and other urban agriculturalists, as well as city agency representatives.

There were focus groups with community members who met to discuss specific topics, like Indigenous land rights, agricultural education and anti-gentrification efforts. And most of all, hundreds of community members participated in three public meetings, where they were able to talk about their own experiences in urban agriculture and inform leadership of the problems they faced.

“I hope that if anything, [the plan] will become a tool for organizing.”

At one of the public meetings, a participant wrote on a note: “I remember the joy of eating fresh snow peas off the vine, snacking on fresh raspberries, and making my freezer full of fresh pesto to last all winter. My toddler loved watering the garden. I miss it so much... A developer from NYC bought [the land].” The plan leaders said that all in all, over 600 people of different races and ages participated in these different community engagement processes.

The end result was a 240 plus-page plan that detailed a series of recommendations and action steps that would help preserve urban agriculture — like creating a separate office for urban agriculture within the parks department, or to develop strategies for reducing the number of gardens and farms that are sold off via sheriff’s sales.

On top of coordinating the community’s input with with officials across several city agencies, the pandemic forced leadership to move the latter two public meetings virtually. There was conflict between Soil Generation and Interface Studio over racial power dynamics, which Richards took months to mediate successfully.

Even with the challenges along the way, community members were pleased with how the end result and how the plan was formed. “[This] sets a precedent of the way a planning process should go,” Warford said.

Plan leaders recently concluded their final official period of community input, where people were able to review the latest draft plan to give any last bits of feedback. But Richards insists that the Urban Agriculture Plan will be a living document, and that community members will still have opportunities to share their concerns.

“This is not written in stone... We’re going to continue community engagement for the course of the whole plan,” Richards said.

As the plan moves from concept to reality, the largest remaining question is enforcement. While the constant collaboration with city agencies ensured that the recommendations and policies within the plan were feasible and supported, nothing binds those people to enacting them. Richards acknowledged this potential pitfall, and they suggested that it means community members will have to continue their advocacy and holding city leaders accountable. “Advocacy and policy action go hand in hand. And so we still need advocates to continue to speak out, continue to show up for this plan and for Parks and Rec to continue the work that we’re doing,” they said.

“I hope that if anything, [the plan] will become a tool for organizing,” said Warford, explaining how advocates and community members will now have something extensive and detailed to point to if leaders don’t follow through on the plan’s recommendations.

To the urban agriculturalists around Philly, the plan is a promising step, but their work continues. “The most revolutionary and radical change is not going to come from the city or within the city agencies. If we are doing this work for the wellbeing and healing of Black people, and by extension all people, then we have to have multi pronged approaches to the issues,” said Gripper.

“That’s what drives change. That’s what we’ve seen across history has driven the biggest type of institutional change, is from the people on the ground.”