By Amanda Hoover, news correspondent
Last month, Mayor Martin J. Walsh and the City of Boston’s Office of Food Initiatives announced the receipt of a $25,000 planning grant from the Local Food Promotion Program (LFPP), a division of the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA).
Following a growing urban agriculture movement in the city, Boston has started to look for ways to create community and cohesion within the expanding industry. The grant, which will fund an Urban Agriculture Visioning Group, serves to create common goals and collaboration among those in city agriculture.
“Urban Agriculture creates jobs and food access points in Boston’s neighborhoods,” Walsh said in a press release on Oct. 24. “Aligning the goals and strategies of all constituents engaged in urban growing will allow us to better leverage resources and to work more efficiently toward food system resilience in the City of Boston.”
The funding directly supports an independent facilitator who will recruit and organize members for the Urban Agriculture Visioning Group and provide direction for the city’s local food production. Planning grants such as this from the LFPP are key in establishing and expanding local and regional food businesses, according to a USDA spokesperson who wished to remain anonymous. They often include funding for market research, feasibility studies and strategic business planning.
Last December, former Mayor Thomas M. Menino passed Article 89 – the first urban agriculture zoning law that allows for commercial production and sale of produce within city limits. Now, the city is ensuring that urban, commercial agriculture can thrive in Beantown.
Aside from the independent facilitator, the visioning group is likely to include community gardeners, food production specialists, farmers market representatives and traditional and rooftop farmers from the public, private and nonprofit sectors, according to the USDA spokesperson.
The Boston Public Market, a year-round, locally-sourced direct market, plans to open its doors next to Haymarket in June. In conjunction, the desire to grow, market and eat locally has increased. While the grant will bolster local efforts, it is unrealistic to assume that Boston’s food system could become self-sustainable, according to Christopher Bosso, a professor of public policy at Northeastern University.
“It’s part of a larger conversation about connecting people to where their food comes from. Realistically, no one is going to assume that you’re going to grow enough food to feed that supply,” Bosso said. “We’re talking about commercial kind of scale efforts to grow food in urban areas, trying to create more local sources of food. A more resilient food system should have multiple sources.”
In addition to new urban farms and local markets, smartphone-savvy Bostonians can also get into urban agriculture using a new app called urb.ag. Created by the City of Boston, the Mayor’s Office of Food Initiatives, the Boston Redevelopment Authority and Fathom Information Design, the app acts as a preliminary guide to finding commercial agriculture opportunities within Boston and helps integrate the Boston Zoning Code with Article 89, according to urb.ag’s website.
Once users input their addresses, they can use the app to discover soil, compost and even chicken regulations for their rooftop or backyard farm. The app also directs users to the proper permits needed to conduct such residential projects. While the app was not funded by the grant, it represents an additional push toward cohesion in the urban agriculture sector.
“The city of Boston has been taking a real lead on this in many respects,” Bosso said. “Boston has been a real innovator in a city that doesn’t have a lot of free space. It doesn’t have huge acres available. Every piece of land in this city is claimed by someone for some purpose. This grant is really to fund a person who’s going to help in the process of helping Bostonians decide what they want.”
Photo courtesy Craig Dietrich, Creative Commons
