The Untapped Potential of Urban Farming
Providing access to healthy and affordable food
We typically think of farming as vast fields we see when we venture outside city limits. Growing up in Ohio, I was familiar with scenes of unending cornfields.
Those farms have been the backbone of our food supply.
But with food prices rising faster than wages, the cost of fuel to truck produce and meat into our cities, the adverse impact large corporate farms have on the environment, and the inaccessibility of healthy and organic food for lower-income communities, it’s time to invest in urban agriculture.
This issue is particularly critical for many of our Black brothers and sisters.
For the last five years in a row, one in five Black men, women and children in the U.S. experienced food insecurity. That is three times the rate among white families. Almost nine million Black Americans can’t access enough food for a healthy lifestyle.
Sixty years ago, Dr. King demanded that we “march on poverty until no American parent has to skip a meal so that their children may eat.”
And yet here we are in the 21st century with Americans without access to healthy or even enough food.
