Reports & Publications
UADA's reports mergewhat local governments are doing and learning into one place, so a director starting a program in a mid-sized city can see what peers in Atlanta, Denver, or Philadelphia have already tried. Everything here comes from the people doing the work and is written to be used.
The report moves from rationale to implementation across nine chapters:
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Why local governments are investing in urban agriculture
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Governance and institutional design
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Building political support and institutional power
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Community engagement, shared leadership, and building trust
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Funding and scaling urban agriculture
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Solving common policy and program challenges, including land, zoning, water, soil, and markets
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A roadmap for building stronger programs
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The future of urban agriculture in local government
Also included are the Urban Agriculture Program Maturity Framework, a self-assessment tool that helps a program identify its strengths and choose its next investment, and a glossary of terms.
Who is it for
The report is written first for urban agriculture directors, food policy offices, and food policy councils, as a peer resource for seeing your own conditions reflected in a colleague's experience. It's also useful for mayors, elected officials, and department heads weighing the return on investment, for community partners who want to understand how local government decisions actually get made, and for public and philanthropic funders thinking about how grants can strengthen program stability.
The imperative now is to move from promising programs supported by committed individuals toward durable systems of public support.
That will require action not only from urban agriculture directors, but from mayors and elected officials, planners, public health and sustainability leaders, budget officials, community organizations, growers, funders, researchers, and other partners.
This report identifies nine priorities for that next stage:
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Establish urban agriculture as a durable local government function through permanent staffing, recurring funding, formal mandates, and integration into government structures.
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Provide staffing and authority commensurate with the role, including the capacity and institutional standing needed to work effectively across departments.
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Protect agricultural land for the long term through secure tenure, land trusts, conservation tools, inventories, and other mechanisms that support sustained investment.
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Modernize zoning and align implementation across departments so supportive policies translate into workable conditions for growers.
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Treat community partnership as core governance infrastructure, with meaningful shared decision-making and adequate resources for equitable participation.
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Fund urban agriculture according to the full range of public value it creates, connecting investment to food security, health, climate, economic development, equity, infrastructure, and resilience.
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Develop a shared framework for measuring public value so jurisdictions can demonstrate outcomes, benchmark progress, strengthen accountability, and build the case for investment.
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Integrate urban agriculture into long-range local planning, including comprehensive, climate, resilience, and food-system plans.
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Invest in professional networks and shared field infrastructure so jurisdictions can learn from one another, transfer successful policies, develop common tools, and accelerate progress nationally.
The report’s Urban Agriculture Program Maturity Framework provides one tool for putting this agenda into practice.
Rather than prescribing a single model or ranking jurisdictions, it allows local governments to assess their progress across five dimensions – institutional commitment, resources and capacity, community partnership, cross-government integration, and demonstrated impact – and identify the investments most important for their next stage of development.
The field has already demonstrated what urban agriculture can contribute. The task ahead is to build public institutions capable of sustaining those contributions at the scale communities need. Doing so means treating farms, gardens, growers, community partnerships, and the public systems that support them not as peripheral amenities, but as part of the civic infrastructure through which communities advance health, resilience, economic opportunity, equity, and quality of life.
Urban agriculture’s next chapter is therefore not simply about growing more food or creating more gardens. It is about building the policies, institutions, investments, and partnerships that allow urban agriculture to become a lasting part of how communities thrive.
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