Planting Resistance: Why New York Should Let Its Communities Grow

Voices from the Land is a collaborative op-ed and video series between Farm School NYC (FSNYC) and the New Harvest Project (TNH) that highlights urban and rural farmers, policy that impacts their work, and what we can do to uplift legislation reflective of their needs to direct future policy decisions. This project is funded by the Regenerative Agriculture Foundation (RAF) through the Rural Advancement Foundation International - USA (RAFI).

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On the surface, New York City supports green space, sustainability, and urban agriculture. But if you spend time in food justice spaces, a different picture emerges—one where the city’s policies lag far behind the people already doing the work.

I didn’t come to food justice and urban farming through academia or policy fellowships. I came to it by putting my hands in the soil through AmeriCorps and the Green City Force program. Building community gardens in public housing developments across New York City helped me see the direct link between growing food and community resistance. 

In many of the neighborhoods I worked with, access to fresh food is uneven, and public investment is inconsistent. Across NYCHA’s Bushwick Houses to Castle Hill in the Southeast Bronx to Canarsie, Brooklyn, you see the same trend. The invested infrastructure has few amenities and no real pathways towards community engagement. We see one supermarket, a liquor store, some fast-food options, no loitering signs, over-policing, a lack of green space, and living conditions that could be better. We see community members struggling to put food on the table, walking past chained-up gardens and green spaces that no one can access. 

Ask a simple question—can New Yorkers grow food on public land?—and you’ll find yourself in a bureaucratic loop. The New York City Department of City Planning, the agency that regulates zoning, says that the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation is responsible for what can be grown where in the city. But Parks and Recreation says they aren't responsible for that, despite having programs like Greenthumb, which directly supports community gardens under their purview and manages 30,000 acres of the city’s land. 

This lack of clarity prioritizes a certain landscape. The current version of public space prioritizes aesthetics and recreation over sustenance. Playgrounds covered in rubber mulch, manicured bushes, and decorative flowers are acceptable. But apple or orange trees lining our city streets and edible greens in our parks are less so, despite being easy ways to boost fresh food access. The city also has existing models like Concrete Plant Park - a Bronx Food Forest or Swale, a food forest on water - that can speak to the scale, resources, and the capacity needed to sustain local food forests. 

Of course, planting fruit trees is not an easy fix. Transitioning to food-producing landscapes would require long-term investment—soil remediation, integrated pest management, and community stewardship. This requires intention, investment, and time. 

Growing Food in Public Space

Right now, the way our public space is utilized reflects a deeper message—that food is something to be bought, not grown or shared in community. In my practice as an urban farmer, food justice organizer, and artist, I am working to combat this ideology directly. 

My project, The Art of Community Tree Gardens, puts this philosophy forward—food should be free, and our public spaces should support radical free growing— in both practice and policy.  Radical free growing is an anti-colonial grassroots approach to growing food. It reminds us that land and food have been weaponized against people of color for centuries. This kind of growing allows us to reclaim our history, our space, and our culturally relevant foods. Creating economic freedom and a greater connection with the Earth around us. 

In East Flatbush, Brooklyn, I’m installing “tree satchels”, which are mobile, self-sustaining growing systems attached to street trees. Made from food-grade burlap sacks and customized with cotton rope to wrap around tree trunks, these satchels will hold lightweight and nutrient-rich soil. They can support up to 100lbs, so the growth of herbs, leafy greens, root vegetables, and native medicines will be easy to maintain. What is exciting about the tree satchels is that they transform ordinary blocks into living food systems. This will allow communities to create foraging pathways through a localized system. 

Our info session was hosted virtually on April 25, 2026, and walked community members through the ethos and process of this project. We spoke about how easy it is for garden spaces to get co-opted in the city. One person can create barriers to entry for entire groups of people. The Art of Community Tree Gardens offers another pathway towards growing food in the city landscape. By optimizing trees, we reclaim ownership of the land, creating systems that allow the land to provide for us, and vice versa. The activation will run from May 16, 2026, to July 11, 2026, consisting of 6 local workshops for community members to create, design, and actualize these tree satchels. 

The Art of Community Tree Gardens draws inspiration from Banksy, not in style but in strategy. The gardens will appear without announcement. I’ve done no official mapping, no social media announcement, or branding on the satchels. The goal is for people to interact with something unexpected and alive and get curious about the multitude of ways public space can be better used.

The decision to do a blitz activation of the project is political. In a city where surveillance is unevenly distributed, and immigrant, Black, and Brown communities face heightened scrutiny, visibility can carry risk. By keeping the project hyper-local and initially unpublicized, I hope to encourage participation and show people we can scale. That we can create independent food systems outside of the structure that’s set up for us. This project is public, but others won’t have to be. Block by block, community by community, we can each change what it means to see and interact with the trees around us. 

Redefining Community and Knowledge

Another key theme that has emerged in my work is how we define community. That term can be vague and inaccurately represent a so-called underserved population. That dominant framing can flatten and generalize the uniqueness of neighborhoods and lived experiences. Community is expansive and should be reframed as a network of shared space, resources, knowledge, and experiences. A hub of information and support that allows each individual to grow within the collective. 

One barrier that I’ve noticed in environmentalism is that expertise must be credentialed. Degrees, institutions, and affiliations become gatekeepers. But in the neighborhoods where I’ve worked, expertise looks different. It looks like the wisdom of elders who know which plants and pollinators thrived where. This kind of knowledge and wisdom is rarely captured in policy reports. 

An emerging space tied to knowledge keeping is oral history. I’ve gotten to engage in this kind of knowledge-keeping through working with the National Public Housing Museum in Chicago. The museum documents the stories of people connected to public housing nationally. I started working with the museum in 2023 and completed their Beauty Turner Academy Oral Historian Program in 2024. I've continued my relationship and am now going through their Apprenticeship program and participating in their Archival Working Group. My work consists of collecting interviews, doing transcriptions, and connecting Public Housing Residents with the museum. 

Through my project, I hope to bring the oral histories of East Flatbush to light. Showcasing the growing already happening within the community. This project also raises an uncomfortable question: why must communities operate in the shadows to demonstrate what’s possible? Why does innovation so often require working around the very institutions that claim to support it?

We know that large institutions and governmental systems move slowly, bound by regulation and liability. But the flip side of that is maintaining control. Letting go of some of that centralized power could give our communities real authority over public land. Considering this country’s history, that is a difficult task. 

We need public land that is not just maintained, but activated. Where food is not just purchased, but grown. Where expertise is not just certified, but lived.

The Art of Community Tree Gardens is one step toward activating our public land. New York City should recognize and support local efforts like this and create pathways that invest in our long-term ecological systems and public health. 

Either way, the seeds are already in the ground.

You can watch Chantel’s full interview on Voices From the Land Here

Food As the Entry Point

Voices from the Land is a collaborative op-ed and video series between Farm School NYC (FSNYC) and the New Harvest Project (TNH) that highlights urban and rural farmers, policy that impacts their work, and what we can do to uplift legislation reflective of their needs to direct future policy decisions. 
This project is funded by the Regenerative Agriculture Foundation (RAF) through the Rural Advancement Foundation International - USA (RAFI).

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Food is the entry point to advancing justice as it is communal, cultural, and conversational.

It’s also a critical part of breaking down barriers and a way for people to get to know themselves. Food may seem like a simple entry point, but it is also a part of a fundamental truth: food is infrastructure.

It is as essential to a functioning society as housing, transportation, and energy. But often, food and these very same issues are thought of, solved for, and regulated in silos. This also contributes to the failure to treat the city’s deepening inequality, worsening public health, and accelerating climate vulnerability.

But there is a different model we can turn to, as I am living it. 

My food justice work takes place in two primary spaces. The first is that I’m the food and agriculture coordinator for the IRC New Roots Program, a green space program open to refugees, immigrants, and recent asylum seekers, focused on food access and education. Alongside free educational workshops, the program also holds community-based farms. The first is a half-acre farm in the South Bronx, off the Grand Concourse, and a smaller community garden in Woodside, Queens. All community members in the New Roots Program are welcome to come and get free produce, no questions asked. Sometimes people approach with a kind of shame in the fact that they are food insecure, and we want to dispel that. Many people,across New York City, particularly those in my community of the South Bronx, are food insecure. I want to make clear that these people are the working poor—meaning we work and are employed, but still have to juggle expenses such as rent, utilities, medical bills, and groceries.  

The other space I tend to is the Kelly Street Garden, which is where I call home. The garden runs along the back of four affordable housing buildings and is embedded in the community.  I extend the same level of care and programming here as I do with the IRC New Roots Program. Growing up in Jamaica, my mother would tell us to go pick something in the yard for dinner. I never realized then, but looking back, we were wealthy because we were on our own land. My father would grow watermelon, mangoes, oranges, lemons, corn, breadfruit, and so many other vegetables and fruit.  Now as I steward the Kelly Street Garden and work with the New Roots Program, I remember how privileged I was growing up. 

But outside of those spaces, nowhere is the food system disconnect more visible than in the South Bronx.

The Hunts Point peninsula is home to one of the largest food distribution centers in the country, with 4.5 billion pounds of food passing through its Food Distribution Center each year. Yet much of that food never reaches the people in the immediate area. While the center is critical to the entire region, its aging infrastructure, the pollution it brings to the surrounding area, and its location in a flood zone make it no longer sustainable. The environmental pressures it imposes on the South Bronx exacerbate many of the area’s health issues. Heavy-duty trucks come and go from the hub at all hours, and just a few blocks away is the Bruckner Expressway, which adds further environmental pressure. 

This is not an accident. Intentional policy decisions have concentrated these burdens in already marginalized neighborhoods.

Climate Policy Must Include Food Systems and Land Access

Urban agriculture is also climate policy.

New York is a concrete jungle. And we continually prioritize this kind of landscape despite intensified heat, flash flooding, and increased air pollution impacting the city. Community green spaces counteract these effects. We know that these green spaces absorb stormwater,reverse the heat island effect, and improve mental health—so why aren't we building that way?

To me, this is a policy failure.

If lawmakers are serious about climate resilience, they must move beyond siloed approaches. It's not just about affordable housing or maximizing land use. It’s about paying attention to what makes a livable city. When you integrate the natural environment, we can then begin to properly address housing, education, and public health. My request for urban planners is to think about how you can push the boundaries of greening a building. How can vegetation grow on the side of a building? How can we have more permeable surfaces for water to penetrate?  This is how we move  toward climate adaptation.

Climate adaptation directly connects to a more just and sustainable system. This can start with food sovereignty.  Land should be for the commons, and farmers and communities should have control over how food is grown, distributed, and consumed. All of us should have access to and be able to steward land and grow the types of culturally relevant food we need. This kind of sovereignty would require us to be in deep community. But as of now, the only way to have access to land is through monetary gain. That is part of a larger conversation of colonialism and capitalism. 

Access to land is the foundation of any community-led food system. Without it, food sovereignty is impossible. Yet here in New York City, land access remains one of the greatest barriers to scaling community agriculture. We cannot continue to have just a few people owning the means of production. Even farmers who believe in mutual aid, are mission-aligned and justice-oriented, have a hard time embracing food sovereignty because the current system just does not favor it. 

One promising concept introduced by Mayor Mamdani is the city-owned grocery. This aligns with my belief that food should be free or, at the very least, low-cost and accessible.  However, will these grocery stores be connected to the local food system? Local and regional farmers need to be brought to the table as this could be a critical entry point to make the city self-sufficient. City-owned grocery stores could also be what takes the food and agricultural economy out of corporate hands. 

Investing in the Next Generation

We need to equip the next generation with the tools and lessons to achieve community-led food systems. More intergenerational spaces and more opportunities must be created for young people to lead. The community gardening movement in New York has long been sustained by grassroots organizers—many of whom are now aging out of leadership roles. Without intentional investment in younger leaders, knowledge and infrastructure could be lost.

A more just and sustainable future will not come from maintaining the systems we have—it will come from having the courage to dismantle them and build something rooted in land, care, and collective responsibility.

You can watch Sheryll Durrant’s full conversation with Iris M. Crawford-Maskell here.

If Farm School NYC Closes, What Will the City Lose?

On a humid Friday evening in early September, staff at Farm School New York City (FSNYC), an urban agriculture education organization, called an emergency town hall to share a critical update. They were at risk of closing—as early as the end of the year— and were starting an emergency fundraiser with a $250,000 goal. FSNYC staff shared that federal funding cuts had further deepened their funding gap and put their work with various community partners in jeopardy.

FSNYC equips NYC-based residents with the tools, training, and support needed to practice sustainable agriculture and advance food sovereignty, food justice, and liberation. It is one of the few urban agriculture education spaces that has a sliding-scale tuition model, making it accessible to everyone. With proper funding, organizations like FSNYC equip learner farmers and land stewards with the knowledge to build sustainable businesses, forge food justice movements, and rebuild relationships with the land. If FSNYC is forced to further reduce capacity or permanently close, what historical, cultural, and institutional knowledge will New York City lose?

An Uncertain 2025

This year has been full of questions and meetings for the organization’s staff, board, and alumni network. “At the same time, we are trying to figure out what will happen with our jobs and our programs,” said Frances Pérez-Rodríguez, the program coordinator for FSNYC, in an interview with NPQ.

In 2024, FSNYC applied to several federal programs administered by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), including the USDA Urban Agriculture and Innovative Production Grant program, Farm Service Agency Grants and Cooperative Agreements, and the Thriving Communities Grantmaker Program, among other opportunities. Its largest federal grant is part of a 27-organization cooperative agreement.

“We had organizations giving microgrants out to farmers, uncertain if they would get that money back and when,” said Dyaami D’Orazio, FSNYC’s programs director, in an interview with NPQ.

Once the Trump administration transitioned in early January, FSNYC’s grant awards kept getting delayed and were eventually frozen. This put the organization in immediate limbo between January and May. During that time, D’Orazio said, “we were planning our programs and starting to sound the alarm about whether Farm School was going to be able to make it.”

In analyzing their cash flow, staff worried that the organization might have to close as early as August. By early spring, FSNYC had to lay off three staff members, and reduce hours for some of the remaining staff. Fueled by a strong desire not to disrupt programming, FSNYC leaders successfully petitioned the federal government to apply for reimbursements. But while they were able to recover some funds, they are nowhere near being in the clear.

“Our cash flow is still uncertain, and we [still] have a pretty big gap,” D’Orazio said.

FSNYC has been operating at a deficit for some time, still striving to provide good pay and benefits for its staff. Despite these challenges, the organization has been able to maintain relationships and tap into its network.

The Way Forward

The current gap in FSNYC’s funding is $500,000—the amount needed to get them somewhat comfortably into 2026, keeping staff at full capacity with benefits. Most recently, FSNYC received a one-time $100,000 emergency grant, but that is just enough to close the gap for the rest of 2025. The organization’s fundraising campaign remains open for support.

At the emergency town hall, attendees discussed options for the organization’s future that included a possible merger and implementing a subscription model for FSNYC’s offerings.

“People are shocked, worried, and activated to help in ways that they can,” Pérez-Rodríguez said.

One critical part of FSNYC’s ethos is being part of the Black Farmer Ecosystem, a collective working to shift power and ownership to Black farmers in New York through advocacy, policy, and capital. The Ecosystem includes FSNYC, Soul Fire Farm Institute, Northeast Farmers of Color Land Trust, Black Farmers United-NYS, Corbin Hill Food Project, and Black Farmer Fund. Pérez-Rodríguez explained that the ecosystem is figuring out how they can better align to further fortify the network.

Within the US context, farming has always been political for land stewards and farmers of color. “We teach urban agriculture but also have a social justice focus,” said Cris Izaguirre, a farmer, cultural worker and facilitator at FSNYC.

While American agriculture has actively sought to erase the knowledge and contributions of Black and Indigenous farmers, the organization makes a point to work in partnership with many queer, trans, and BIPOC growers managing farms and gardens across the city and state.

“No one wants Farm School to close,” Izaguirre said. “Oftentimes we don’t always see the long-term impact of our work, but seeing alumni out in the field, and applying the resources and skills that they learned during their time at Farm School makes it all worth it.”

Existing in the Current Moment

When asked whether FSNYC would apply for government funding again, Pérez-Rodríguez emphasized that “nothing that the government creates is for the benefit of QTBIPOC people.”

The US government, they explained, particularly under the current administration, is actively working to oppress and exploit the bodies and labor of QTBIPOC people.

“That is the framework that most people at Farm School are coming to the work with,” Pérez-Rodríguez said.

The Farm School community has urged the organization to stop relying on government funds because of how quickly it can be taken away. “It is hard to keep asking our oppressor for this when it is owed to us,” said Pérez-Rodríguez.

At the same time, the organization is wrestling with the fact that in the past it was able to leverage government funds to expand its work. The next phase for FSNYC, as for many nonprofits across the sector, is determining how to depend on its network with more creative streams of revenue.

“With the current administration, there are DEI words that we can’t even use in order for our funding to not be cut,” said Izaguirre. All those words, he explained, encompass exactly what the organization does and stands for.

“How do we exist in this [current] world and in these [grant] proposals when the government is clearly saying: You cannot have this money?” said Izaguirre. Along with attacking the agriculture and farming industry, the current administration is taking away basic rights and resources.

“It is so clear to me that the impact of our work is in our students,” D’Orazio said. “The most powerful part of Farm School is that we are helping people understand the reality of what it takes to get food on someone’s table.”

This story also appears on NPQ

Know Your Farmer: Addressing the Heart of Food Insecurity in Kensington

Cities across the United States continue to deal with the lasting impacts of food apartheid, an intentional system of violence perpetrated through disparities in food access. Food apartheid also underscores how other structural injustices, such as redlining and over-policing, have limited the access to fresh, nutritious, and affordable food.

Kensington, a neighborhood in North Philadelphia is a prime example of food apartheid. But one Philadelphia farmer, Christa Barfield, owner of the community farm and greenhouse FarmerJawn, is looking to combat this issue directly with a new farm-to-corner storefront called CornerJawn, aimed at improving the health outcomes and social fabric of the Kensington community.

Barfield began dreaming up CornerJawn after a trip to Martinique in 2018, where she stayed in an Airbnb owned by Black Martinican farmers. Barfield was inspired by them to better understand the origins of food and its actors in her community: “Where are the farms, and where are people getting their food and why?” In her own neighborhood, corner-stores owners were hesitant to sell fresh produce because they were afraid it would not sell. That is when Barfield began to conceptualize a corner store that would offer “food as medicine” to the community.

The Need for Nourishing Food

While there are many places to buy food in Kensington, Barfield points out that there’s a lack of nutritional security. From 2021 to 2024, food insecurity in the Philadelphia area jumped from 13.6 percent to 21.2 percent. Statewide, one in seven Pennsylvania residents used the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) in 2024.

“Yes, you can find a mini mart that is selling some kind of nourishment, but is it really nourishing? That’s the true conversation here,” said Barfield in an interview with NPQ. “Localizing the food system is how you get to the heart of nutrition security, and that starts with knowing who your farmer is.”

Read the full story on NPQ

The USDA puts back missing webpages. What happens next?

Patrick Hendry via Unsplash

While the USDA agreed to restore critical USDA webpages that farmers and the entire agricultural industry depend on, what happens next?   

Since the start of the Trump Administration, farmers and the entire agricultural industry have been under siege. Alongside the administration's cuts to critical grants, by mid-February, the USDA had removed essential information from its main website and 18 subagencies, including the US Forest Service and Rural Development (RD), such as grants, technical resources, and interactive tools like the Climate Risk Viewer.  The Trump Administration targeted Inflation Reduction Act-supported programs, as well as those related to regenerative agriculture, organic farming, and climate resilience. However, a swift lawsuit quickly exposed the wrongdoing, and the missing content is now being restored.   

In February, Earthjustice, an environmental law firm, and the First Amendment Institute at Columbia University filed a lawsuit on behalf of the Northeast Organic Farming Association of New York (NOFA-NY), the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), and the Environmental Working Group (EWG). The lawsuit cited that three federal laws were violated: the Freedom of Information Act, the Paperwork Reduction Act, and the Administrative Procedure Act. All of these laws require adequate notice before changes can be made to official government websites. The laws also state the right to access key information and documents before they are removed.   

"One harm that has come out of the web page removals is that it significantly undermined an organization's ability to trust USDA, digital resources, to trust that they're up to date, [and] that they're accurate," says Jeffrey Stein, an associate attorney at Earthjustice in an interview. 

Farmers no longer had access to the information they needed to make informed decisions related to climate change risks, such as wildfires, extreme heat, and floods.   

NOFA-NY, one of the leading plaintiffs in the case, said that the removal of USDA webpages immediately impacted organic farmers. It also undermined NOFA-NY's work as an organic certifier. As a certifier, NOFA-NY has the authority to label a food producer's product as organic by verifying whether the producer meets the strict National Organic Program standards. Just as importantly, NOFA-NY acts as a liaison between farmers and federal resources.  The organization's technical advising team, which works directly with farmers in the field, had suddenly lost its ability to advise on specific practices and refer farmers to additional resources.

"Especially for [organic farmers] in meeting and maintaining farming practices through the National Resource Conservation Services (NRCS)—a lot of it was just gone," said Marcie Craig, executive director of NOFA-NY.  While the organization worked to pick up the pieces, "It's really educated us on exactly how farmers are accessing and what resources they're accessing," said Craig. Craig makes clear that these impacts hit farmers across the board.  

What was most unclear from the removal of webpages was the availability of funding. Farmers could no longer apply for or access funding programs. For example, with NRCS funding, farmers are expected to cover upfront costs and then receive reimbursement later following an official USDA inspection. "With all of the layoffs happening, who's going to do that?" Thus far, nearly 59,000 federal jobs have been lost since the start of the Trump Administration, NPR reports. At the USDA, 15,000 positions have been shed, reports DTN Progressive Farmer.    

For the USDA, some employees in mission-critical positions were offered resignation packages with five months' pay and benefits. Just shortly after, the agency began scrambling to fill those key positions. Late last month, a California federal judge blocked the USDA, alongside other agencies, from continuing its unlawful firings and department restructurings. However, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins firmly stands behind the belief that these layoffs will be about "realigning and refocusing USDA around its original intended mission." However, it is clear that many of the agency's moving parts are no longer functioning.   

Critical Webpages Return 

In mid-May, the USDA reversed its decision and restored the critical web pages that it removed. The agency announced its decision in a letter to the US District Court.  The reversal came as both a surprise and relief to the plaintiffs and farmers everywhere. On Wednesday, June 12, the plaintiffs provided an update to the court regarding whether the USDA is restoring the missing webpages in a timely and accurate manner, as promised by the agency.   

"As of right now, the USDA has restored all of the web pages and interactive tools that were identified in our complaint," said Stein. However, Stein explains that the restored web pages have a disclaimer stating that the content is under review and subject to change.   

On June 11, the plaintiffs filed a status report updating the court on the progress of the USDA in restoring climate change-related web content and data. The update also includes two critical requests from the plaintiffs—NOFA-NY, NRDC, EWG, and their legal team — which are for the government to provide a list of all the content that was removed, as well as an explanation for the declaimers.  As of now, the plaintiffs have no information on what the review process, conducted by the USDA, actually entails.   

Currently, the plaintiffs await the next steps.  Despite the uncertainty, the plaintiffs are grateful that there is some light at the end of the tunnel.