The Cornell Small Farms program recently released a series of online courses designed to help growers, nonprofits, and urban planners gain knowledge to support urban farm development. The Promise of Urban Agriculture courses are free for anyone to enroll until January 31, 2025.
Cornell worked with Rooted, a Madison, WI based nonprofit, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Agricultural Marketing Service (AMS) to create the courses. They also draw on the research conduct for the University’s report, The Promise of Urban Agriculture.
“There was interest in trying to figure out how to take all that research and put it into action,” Molly Riordan, Chair of the Food Systems Planning Division of the American Planning Association and co-author of the report, tells Food Tank. The courses provide an opportunity for growers to learn from their peers, says Riordan. “This isn’t academic best practices. This is what people have been doing in other cities and this is what we can learn from it,” she says.
Marcia Caton Campbell, former Executive Director at Rooted, says that growers’ expertise drives the content. “One of the things we were committed to in the courses was making sure that practitioners had a large voice,” she tells Food Tank.
The first two courses—Deciding Where to Grow in the City and Urban Farm Planning and Management—target urban growers who are curious about expanding their operations. “The goal is that people who have a little bit of farming knowledge and experience are finding opportunities in the grower’s courses to figure out how to scale up, and the real nuts and bolts of what it takes to do that,” Riordan says.
The third course, Urban Farming by Community Nonprofits, supports people curious about moving into the nonprofit sphere. In addition, it helps current organization staff who want to incorporate urban agriculture into their work.
The fourth course, Urban Agriculture Skills for Planners, is for urban planners, policymakers, and extension staff at universities. The planners course aims “to help them better understand the context in which urban agriculture takes place. And it helps planners identify and eliminate the barriers to urban agriculture,” Caton Campbell tells Food Tank.
Riordan sees urban farming as a gateway. “[It’s] a kind of starting point for a lot of different people’s journey into understanding food systems, understanding social justice, and thinking about how they can use their own assets, talents, skills, resources, to work toward a food future that values the wellbeing of people and animals and the planet,” she tells Food Tank.
Riordan and Caton Campbell agree that the benefits of urban agriculture are difficult to quantify. “Community gardening is as much about the social gathering and community connection as it is about food production,” Caton Campbell says.
The courses are free to pique people’s curiosity. “We’ve just been really excited to share this information, and we want more people to be exposed to it,” says Riordan. “Even if they don’t go through the whole course, but they glean a couple of really good things, that feels like a win for us.”
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Photo courtesy of Jonathan Kemper, Unsplash
