Scaling Urban Agriculture: How to Grow Systems That Last

Financial Sustainability Series | Part 1: The Foundation

On Saturday, October 25, I participated in an all-day Urban Agriculture Workshop sponsored by Food Forward Lorain – a gathering of growers, city leaders, and community partners envisioning the future of farming in Lorain, Ohio.

In her opening remarks, the Executive Director of Second Harvest Food Bank of North Central Ohio noted the value of community gardens but expressed the need to scale up to create meaningful, lasting change in the city’s ability to provide nutritious, local produce to all residents. Her comment underscored something many overlook: urban agriculture takes many forms and can occur in many spaces.

In Food Urbanism, Craig Verzone and Cristina Woods outline five dimensions of urban agriculture - site, grower, motivation, production model, and scale. Within each dimension they identify multiple types: fourteen (14) different sites (from balconies and plazas to industrial wastelands and urban farmland), fifteen (15) production models (from container and school gardens to urban and vertical farms). They describe nearly as many typologies for growers, motivations, and scales.

The combinations across these dimensions yield hundreds of variations of urban agriculture. The Food Urbanism framework is one of the most comprehensive and easy to understand for urban agriculture that I have encountered.

Situated about 30 miles west of Cleveland where the Black River meets Lake Erie, Lorain, Ohio was once a thriving industrial port and part of the U.S. Steel Industry. Today, the mills sit empty, the mall and strip malls throughout town are shuttered, and there are more than 3,000 residential parcels lie vacant – a stark reminder of past prosperity and future potential.

During the workshop, participants divided into three teams, each assigned a different site:

·       A cluster of parcels distributed throughout a residential neighborhood

·       A large parcel within a neighborhood

·       A planned redevelopment of the old steel mill on the river

Though few were likely familiar with the typologies in Food Urbanism, the teams intuitively selected motivations, growers, production models, and scales that fit their assigned site. That turned out to be the easy part. Once the visioning was complete, the next task was to build a financial model.

A financial model? Yes. For urban agriculture to take root, grow, and flourish at a scale that truly transforms community, it must be financially sustainable. And that, as the teams quickly realized, is complex.

In Nonprofit Sustainability: Making Strategic Decisions for Financial Viability authors Jeanne Bell, Jan Maaoka, and Steve Zimmerman define financial sustainability as “the ability to generate resources to meet the needs of the present without compromising the future” and programmatic sustainability as “the ability to develop, mature, and cycle out programs to be responsive to constituencies over time”. Programmatic sustainability is critical to financial sustainability – delivering programs that are not mission-aligned or draining resources from other programs is not financially sustainable. For those of us doing this work, these definitions resonate deeply.

The components of financial sustainability are strikingly similar to those of environmental sustainability:

·       Diverse funding streams – like biodiversity, diversity strengthens resilience.

·       Responsible stewardship of resources – managing capital as carefully as soil fertility.

·       Accountability – transparency that keeps the ecosystem in balance.

·       Effective management – tending and pruning systems for optimal health.

·       Efficient consumption of resources – minimizing waste in every cycle.

·       Reserves and contingency plans – storing energy for lean seasons.

·       Attracting and providing support to other members of the ecosystem – reciprocity as a core operating principle.

During the workshop the teams used financial tools designed for specific scenarios, but lacked the shared language and baseline knowledge needed to create financial models that could sustain their visions over time.

On my drive home as I was processing my experience at the workshop, I started to think about the three-day workshop I co-designed and delivered for the Ecological Society of America. The immersive workshop provided common knowledge and training to scientists leading and managing living collections, field stations, and laboratories. I realized the same kind of structured capacity-building is needed for growers.