Urban Networks, Micro-agriculture, and Community Food Security

Abstract

The white paper first outlines the state of inequity in food security/sovereignty in our area of focus, taking into account historical context as well as emerging and ongoing effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and community and policy responses to it. We then discuss a food acquisition intervention, structured as a longitudinal, collaborative research, and service-learning effort known as Everybody Eats. The white paper provides detailed discussion of competing understandings of agriculture, horticulture, and the social problem of food insecurity; the preliminary data that has led to a current collaborative effort to enhance the skillset of people previously not understood as food producers and provisioners, but only as end-user consumers; and the new iteration of the project wherein specific sets of expertise from diverse disciplines are deployed both to offer a more robust intervention, and bring new methodologies to bear in assessing the ecology of a local foodshed. We propose mobilizing existing resources and expertise of the Land Grant/Cooperative Extension system to act as a regional hub for facilitating full community food security (caloric and nutritional adequacy) and food sovereignty (participatory decision-making regarding living spaces and culturally appropriate foodways). Finally, we illustrate how a nexus of faculty, working from a service-learning advocacy perspective and embedded in a participatory action framework, provides a mechanism for bringing together and sustaining a community of intellectually diverse researchers and stakeholders.

A new face of food security: A global perspective of the COVID-19 pandemic

“…The adverse impacts of COVID-19 on agricultural production were mainly due to the labor shortage, lockdown policies [ 5 ] and movement restrictions [ 27 , 63 , 64 , 70 ]. A range of household coping strategies included decreasing the frequency of grocery shopping, shifting to online shopping, improving practices in home vegetable gardening, reducing consumption of high price commodities, reducing junk food consumption, and increasing the consumption of protein and nutrient-rich food items [ 29 , 50 , 51 , 70 ]. Moreover, government policies have played important roles in ensuring food access during the pandemic.…”

Impacts of Crapemyrtle Bark Scale on Consumers and the Horticulture Industry

“…The horticulture industry is an important part of the U.S. economy [6,43,44]. It is facing several challenges [43][44][45], a major one being pest infestation. Crapemyrtle, the main focus of this study, is no exception.…”