Category: Research

A vibrant movement is changing the landscape,
economic outlook, and vitality of cities across the
country. The recent recession affected many low-
income communities—taking with it manufacturing
centers, jobs, and people while leaving behind
abandoned homes and vacant lots. Now a new
crop of urban farmers, along with activists, and
community organizations are turning that land
into productive use and turning around their
communities.

Urban farming brings a multitude of benefits to
struggling communities: improved access to healthy
food, workforce training and job development, and
neighborhood revitalization. Innovative programs
and policies are cropping up nationwide; and city
governments are creating urban agriculture-friendly
policies to support urban farming.

While the movement is exciting, PolicyLink is
committed to ensuring that it is an inclusive one.
Many of the emerging policies could better target
low-income communities and communities of
color—the very communities that would so greatly
benefit from the economic opportunities and
revitalization offered by urban farming.

It’s past time to expose the truth about religion myths, frauds, fantasies and fiction from End-times to Virgin Birth to Sun Worship.

Urban Farming Toolkit (for web).pdf

 

Building_Soils_For_Better_Crops.pdf

We have written this book with farmers, farm advisors, students, and gardeners in mind, although we have also found copies of earlier editions on the bookshelves of many of our colleagues. Building Soils for Better Crops is a practical guide to ecological soil management that provides background information as well as details of soil-improving practices. This book is meant to give the reader a holistic appreciation of the importance of soil health and to suggest ecologically sound practices that help to develop and maintain healthy soils. Building Soils for Better Crops has evolved over time.

The first edition focused exclusively on the management of soil organic matter. If you follow practices that build and maintain good levels of soil organic matter, you will find it easier to grow healthy and high-yielding crops. Plants can withstand droughty conditions better and won’t be as bothered by insects and diseases. By maintaining adequate levels of organic matter in soil, you have less reason to use as much commercial fertilizer, lime, and pesticides as many farmers now purchase. Soil organic matter is that important.

Organic matter management was also the heart of the second edition, but we decided to write a more comprehensive guide that includes other essential aspects of building healthy soils, such as managing soil physical properties and nutrients, as well as a chapter on evaluating soil health (chapter 22). In addition, we updated
farmer case studies and added a new one. The case stud-
ies describe a number of key practices that enhance the
health of the farmers’ soils.
Many chapters were rewritten, expanded, and reorganized for the third edition—some completely. A chapter on physical properties and issues was divided into two (chapters 5 and 6), and chapters were added on the principles of
ecological soil management (chapter 8) and on irrigation
and drainage (chapter 17). The third edition, while still
focusing on farming and soils in the United States, has a
broader geographical scope; the book has evolved into a
more comprehensive treatise of sustainable soil management for a global audience.

The Black Radical Tradition_0.pdf

ltcwp44.pdf

The African-American farmer is a rare breed in the United States. The loss of landownership and farming operations has contributed to the poverty of many rural communities in the South, where almost all remaining black farmers live. Since about 1970 the research literature on this issue has blossomed. One of the commonalities found in the literature is the sense of hopelessness in
stemming the tide of black land loss. Indeed, an oft-cited prediction in earlier works was that there would be no black farmers in the United States by the year 2000. On the other hand, another commonality in the literature is the view that the black farmer and rural landowner must be sustained, even brought back.

Among the several reasons for the decline in the number of African-American farmers is that young people are not entering the field to replace the  increasingly elderly population of existing black farmers. Farming is not exactly glamorous work. It is likely that younger generations are put off by the communal memory of slavery and sharecropping. In addition, Civil Rights and Affirmative Action policies have allowed young black men and women to aspire to professional careers once closed off to them. Why then do some argue for young people to enter farming and for older people to remain or return to farming? They could instead, for example, encourage the improvement of poor rural communities through education, training, and
economic development. The first answer is that both of these remedies are recommended; they are not mutually exclusive. The second answer is that farming is no longer a toiling-behind-a-mule-and-a-plow venture but rather a technical and managerial occupation—one which, despite many odds, some
African-Americans choose. Finally, agriculture and landownership offer more than just economic benefits to rural black communities.

DR6_final-3.pdf

ualitreview-2013.pdf

This literature review seeks to identify current trends, efforts, and gaps in researching urban agriculture impacts in the United States. Using both peer-reviewed research and agency reports, it considers geography, rhetoric, and research methods in order to compile a snapshot of the state of urban agriculture. Although most of the literature is concentrated in the U.S., articles
from Canada, the UK, Cuba, and UN reports were included in order to provide international perspective. The review begins with a discussion on the methodology for finding and choosing this literature, followed by a summary of the scope of the literature. The main body of the review addresses various impacts that were identified in the literature and concludes with a review of
challenges and barriers, existing gaps, and further research needs.

263-700-1-PB.pdf

The low academic performance of African American children has become a staple of the American educational system. At this point, conversations about Black children and failure are merely good ‘coffee talk’ for many. Afrocentric (Africentric / African centered) education is the only culturally centered comprehensive approach to addressing problems of miseducation, but there are complications: often African centered efforts are given short shrift in school systems, ignored in educational research, and most interestingly those asked to discuss or lead Afro-centric efforts are often opponents of the theories. While all of the aforementioned complications still exist, a band of African centered teachers continue to make a difference for students. This article focuses on the philosophies and pedagogies of three African centered teachers who are well-known for their impact on African American students. Descriptive vignettes are used to provide thick, rich descriptions of these African centered teachers.

BUILDING THE CASE FOR RACIAL EQUITY IN THE FOOD SYSTEM.pdf

The food system works for some, but fails too many of us.  Yet, we already have a glimpse of the possibility of a just and healthy food system.  To get there, we must use a critical race lens to diagnose what is wrong with our current system, assess entry points for change, and determine ways that we can work together to build a better system for all of us.  This report shares an analysis of what it means to build a racially equitable food system – from field to farm to fork – and lays out steps toward achieving that goal.

In this report, we:

Describe how policies impact racial equity in the food system.  Through the stories of two children, Brenna and Johnny, this report walks us through the structural race analysis along the food chain, highlighting how key policies shape opportunities for children, farmers, and laborers. We share how:

• Housing and school policies impact children’s opportunities to access healthy foods, especially urban children of color;

• Land policies and institutional discrimination have led to historically high rates of land loss for farmers, particularly Blacks and Native Americans, and people living in rural areas;

• Farm Bill policies and vertical integration in the food industry favor the production and distribution of unhealthy foods over healthy foods;

• Social Security and wage policies have set back advancement for laborers across the food chain, especially women, immigrants and people of color.

Identify potential policy solutions and strategic opportunities to create a more racially equitable food system.  Building on our analysis, we identify policy and strategy entry points that can lead to a more sustainable and racially equitable food system from long-range efforts to immediate-term solutions. For example, we can:

• Surface opportunities to craft broad, intersectional policy solutions. The challenges we face are not singular and therefore require change on multiple levels across many different sectors. We must identify strategic entry points for multiple issues. Working simultaneously to address these is essential to longer term, transformational shifts;

• Forge partnerships across urban and rural communities.  We mustbuild power for more transformative change, such as leveraging government and institutional food purchasing practices to support production and distribution of healthy foods and to create new job opportunities for residents of these areas;

• Support indigenous and community leadership through small business financing and community capacity building.  We mustbuild on existing creative and innovative work happening in communities and ensure that work is sustained and led by those who are most impacted by our broken food system;

• Advocate for labor rights and a more balanced ownership of the food system. We must change wage policies to reflect true living costs, support community projects and participatory action research where the system fails to meet demand and need, and surface community land trust options;

• Invest in immediate solutions in our communities, schools, and farms.  We mustpromote better land-use ordinances to support urban agriculture; improve access, affordability of, and transit to healthy foods; effectively implement the Affordable Care Act’s community benefit requirement; increase reimbursement rates and provide better kitchen infrastructure to cook and process healthy foods on-site; and shift agricultural investments away from unhealthy foods to local farmers producing the healthy foods we need like fruits and vegetables.