Pimbert outlines three dimensions of urban agroecological transformation that are needed, including economic, with new forms of organization and relocalized wealth production as well as “creation of free time for citizens to shape and re-govern urban spaces” . Volunteerism has a place in a transformed, equitable, environmentally sustainable local food system, although reliance on it as the primary source of labor is undesirable. Our findings around labor in particular stand in contrast to the often-referenced benefit of urban agriculture as a job creation tool . At least in the current political economic landscape of the East Bay, urban farms do not generate enough economic revenue or city investment in order to hire many full time positions; this remains a goal of many operations and opportunity for policy intervention, especially with respect to enhancing the resilience of urban agroecosystems to economic disturbance.Farms in our case study display a strong focus on reducing hunger and promoting food equity, namely through culturally appropriate diets, and the emphasis on human and social values. Due to the plethora of produce going home with volunteers, circulating at neighborhood crop swaps, and gleaned or harvested by community members that is not weighed and tracked before it is consumed, it is understandably difficult to quantify the “food security” impacts of urban agriculture . While food security may be difficult to quantify, it is nevertheless being addressed by urban farms in unique ways . In school gardens, for example, produce that is not used for classroom cooking demonstrations sometimes goes home with students or families excited to find culturally relevant crops growing in their neighborhood. Supporting healthy, diversified and culturally appropriate diets are an important element of agroecology. The diversity and quality of produce grown, especially when it is an item that might not otherwise be available to a family in a “food desert,” contribute greatly to the value produced on urban farms. One farmer interviewed described how one school garden site serves students from Hispanic, African American, Middle Eastern, Asian, and Eastern European families. The garden teacher spoke about the diversity of crops relevant to various cultural food traditions; for example, the chayote plants were of particular interest to Latinx students excited to bring them home to their mothers, while African American students eagerly collected bunches of collards, and Middle Eastern mothers came to the garden in person to collect fava beans and figs.

In this way, urban agroecology contributes to food security and nutrition as well as biodiversity. It also serves to reaffirm cultural identity and a sense of place for immigrant and refugee families. Agroecology places a strong emphasis on human and social values, such as dignity, equity, inclusion and justice contributing to improved livelihoods of [urban] communities . Our study demonstrated that the majority of farm respondents placed food security, education, and environmental sustainability above profit, sales and yield. Forty percent of respondents self-identified as “Educational” farms, and most others offer educational workshops and demonstrations as part of their focus on horizontal knowledge-sharing. Agroecology seeks to address gender inequalities by creating opportunities for women. The majority of our study respondents were also women. As a grassroots movement, urban agroecology can empower women to become their own agents of change.Our results suggest the opportunity to reconceptualize and refocus the urban food policy discussion in U.S. cities around urban agriculture in a way that includes and values their social, educational, and cultural services. Urban farms are recreational and cultural heritage sites bearing comparison to public parks and museums, while also producing invaluable healthy food in areas that most need it. They provide important respite, social connection, and stress reduction to urban residents, often particularly in need of peaceful spaces. In the words of one farmer, “Urban farms can be havens of peace, health, and community, but it requires heavy involvement and advocacy from those communities for the long term in order to be successful” . Agroecology calls for responsible and effective governance to support the transition to just, equitable and sustainable food and farming systems. In an urban environment, this requires the creation of enabling policies that ensure equitable land access and producer control over access to land, especially among the more vulnerable and historically marginalized populations. Land access is expressed most frequently as an obstacle to scaling urban food production by survey respondents, and it is certainly more of a challenge for lower-income and minority groups interested in cultivating their own “commons” . There are examples among our East Bay survey respondents of collective governance at the farm and community level, such as one farm site which is owned cooperatively by three non-profit organizations that collectively serve minority and formerly incarcerated populations, aspiring beginning farmers, and the local community through a cooperative goat dairy, fruit tree nursery, and annual vegetable production plots.

City and county governance bodies have an opportunity to strengthen the resilience of urban agriculture operations and opportunities for farmer collaboration by providing subsidies and incentives for social and ecosystem services. City-level efforts to compensate or recognize farmers for ecosystem services such as soil remediation and carbon sequestration, for example, are not yet realized. Further examples of responsible governance from our data include recommendations for public procurement programs to source food from aggregated urban produce . Our respondents are engaged in circular and solidarity economies, key features of agroecology, including bartering, sharing,air racking and exchanging resources and produce with those in their social networks. They are also interested in collaborating in a localized effort to strengthen the link between producers and consumers by aggregating produce and sharing distribution . As cities work to fulfill their role in providing basic services to citizens, farmers are pointing out an important opportunity to provide refrigerated transportation, storage, and organizational infrastructure to transfer all possible produce grown on urban farms to the best distribution sites. Communication platforms, transport systems, and streamlined procurement in this arena following from other regional “food hub” models could improve the landscape for urban food distribution dramatically . All urban farm respondents are also engaged in closed-loop waste cycles: through composting all farm waste onsite and collecting food scraps from local businesses, farms are involved in a process of regeneration, from food debris to soil.Through extending the UAE framework from farms to urban policy and planning conversations, more efficient pathways for addressing food insecurity in part through strategic centers of urban production and distribution can emerge in cities of the East Bay and elsewhere in the United States. Finally, agroecology relies on the co-creation and sharing of knowledge. Top-down models of food system transformation have had little success. Urban planners have an opportunity to address food insecurity and other urban food system challenges including production, consumption, waste management and recycling by co-creating solutions with urban farmers through participatory processes and investing in community-led solutions. In our systematic review of the literature on whether urban agriculture improves urban food security, we found three key factors mediating the effect of UA on food security: the economic realities of achieving an economically viable urban farm, the role of city policy and planning, and the importance of civic engagement in the urban food system .

A radical transformation toward a more equitable, sustainable and just urban food system will require more responsible governance and investment in UA as a public good, that is driven by active community engagement and advocacy. One of the alarming consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic crisis has been the devastating impact it has had on farms across the country, particularly at a time when unemployment has reached record highs, there are massive lines at food banks, and agricultural work is one of a limited number of jobs that is deemed essential. But many farms that provide produce to food service businesses such as restaurants, school cafeterias, hotels and cruise lines, have seen their orders vanish overnight as a result of shelter-in-place orders across the country and have plowed their fields under . Farmers can’t afford to pay the labor, harvesting, and storage costs for a crop with no buyer. At the same time, the world is facing a dramatic shortage of COVID-19 tests for both the SARSCoV-2 virus responsible for the pandemic, as well as for antibodies that indicate whether a person has been infected by the virus in the recent past. COVID-19 tests are essential to determine who is currently infectious and who has recovered from the virus, yet two major roadblocks remain—an on-going shortage of the components needed to build these tests and a need to improve antibody test reliability. Getting past these roadblocks will allow us to reopen the country and the world. Not only do these tests need to be quickly developed, validated, and approved by the FDA, but they will need to be globally affordable and deployed at an unprecedented scale . How can new bio-technologies use harvested plant biomass to help address both crop surpluses and COVID-19 test shortages, while keeping farmers in business and farm workers employed? As a case study of the potential for plant-based bio-manufacturing technologies to meet the described challenges, consider that on April 15th, 2020, a California farmer plowed under about 350 acres of romaine lettuce, valued at $1.46 million U.S dollars, and laid off 150–200 seasonal workers due to the loss of the restaurant and food service markets, which shut down as a result of COVID-19 . At a typical yield for romaine lettuce in Monterey County these 350 acres correspond to about 3 million kgs of fresh romaine biomass that was plowed under for this one farm. Rather than plowing this crop under, it could have been harvested and used to produce the proteins needed for making COVID-19 tests. DARPA made a $100 million investment in 2010 to demonstrate the large-scale production of therapeutic proteins in plants within contained bio-manufacturing facilities to respond to pandemics. With the exception of the production of ZMapp antibodies to combat the 2013–2016 West Africa Ebola outbreak the technology has been fallow for this purpose. In the U.S., large scale plant-based recombinant protein production facilities have been built in Bryan, TX , Owensboro, KY , and North Carolina .