Seminar: "Urban Agriculture in the Garden State – Pathways of Advancement, Adaptation, and Assimilation" - Meredith Taylor

Department of Agricultural, Food, and Resource Economics Seminar

Meredith Taylor, MA, MPH
Family & Community Health Sciences Educator III
Rutgers University

Urban agriculture in New Jersey has long been recognized as an important source of affordable fresh food in underserved communities without access to grocery stores. Urban food production is also relied upon as a strategy for addressing a wider range of social, environmental, and economic challenges in these same communities, yet quantitative data demonstrating the positive impacts of urban agriculture in these other areas is scant. Policy shifts underway to recognize urban agriculture in New Jersey as a protected land use with quantifiable impacts have been complicated and misunderstood. Researchers within Rutgers’ agricultural departments and cooperative extension services are ideally positioned to highlight similarities between traditional farm operators and newly emerging groups of urban farmers but also illuminate ways in which urban food production is about more than just food.
   
This interactive seminar will first summarize needs assessment data and findings from three recent studies conducted by Rutgers and by the New Jersey Department of Agriculture, then transition to shared dialogue and envisioning of opportunities for collaboration across various units to collect much needed data exploring urban agriculture’s catalyzing potential for entrepreneurship in local food systems development, or its function as a protective environmental resource in mitigating excess heat in urban communities, reducing stormwater runoff in flooding events, or its regenerative capacity to restore urban soils and improve air quality.