Promoting Sustainable Agriculture

By Marlene Cimons, National Science Foundation

The concept of urban agriculture may conjure up images of rooftop, backyard or community gardens scattered among downtown city streets and surrounding neighborhoods.  But in the Seattle area, and within and beyond the Puget Sound region, it means a great deal more.

“Urban agriculture doesn’t necessarily equate to production that occurs only in a metropolitan urban area,’’ says Jason Niebler, who directs the Sustainable Agriculture Education (SAgE) Initiative at Seattle Central Community College. “It means we are providing for growing population food needs from surrounding rural landscapes, as well as from the core urban landscape.’’

Picture a series of concentric circles, with an urban core that produces some food at varying capacities, surrounded by a series of outlying rings of small farms that become increasingly more rural with distance. The hope is that such land use planning, from the inner core to the outer rings, will encourage local ecologically sound sustainable food production. This, in turn, will create local jobs and decrease reliance on distant food products that originate from petroleum intensive large scale farms.

That’s the idea behind SAgE, believed to be the nation’s first metropolitan-based community college sustainable agriculture program that emphasizes farming practices across  diverse landscape types from urban centers to surrounding rural environs.  “It’s small scale agriculture with an urban focus,’’ Niebler says. “Any urban population, large or small, can practice sustainable agriculture, improve food security and protect the environment, which ultimately results in resilient food systems and communities.”

SAgE is a part of the National Science Foundation’s Advanced Technological Education (ATE) Program, which is providing the project with $157,375 over two years. ATE’s goal is to support  projects that strengthen the skills of technicians who work in industries regarded as vital to the nation’s prosperity and security. The support largely goes to community colleges who work in partnership with universities, secondary school, business and industry, as well as government agencies, which design and implement model workforce initiatives.

“It’s important to change our food system because it has significant environmental and human impacts the way it is currently structured,’’ Niebler says. 

The SAgE project focuses on the environmental, socioeconomic, political and cultural issues related to sustainable food systems within Puget Sound watersheds through student and community education and research, and technological innovation.  The curriculum offers courses that cover such issues as agricultural ecology, urban food systems, food politics and ethics, soil science, sustainable food production and technology, the integration of food and forests, and career opportunities.

“We’ve created a curriculum that is fundamental in nature,  addressing the principles of sustainable agriculture and what a food system is—how it functions both locally and globally,’’ Niebler says.  “These courses are challenging, robust and inspirational. One of the really wonderful things about them is that we offer service learning opportunities, where students volunteer a portion of their time to working with local partner organizations. They can do a research project, or a service learning option.’’

The city of Seattle is supporting the move toward sustainable agriculture efforts on the local level. Last year, in fact, the city council adopted a campaign to promote urban agriculture efforts and increase community access to locally grown food.  Among other things, Seattle has initiated a local community gardening program known as P-Patch, and oversees 75 community gardens distributed throughout the city. Together, they equal about 23 acres and serve 4,400 gardeners who last year worked an estimated 17,000 hours to maintain the common areas.

“This is an example of urban agriculture that is transformative, and it’s the type of development we are teaching about in SAgE,” Niebler says. “There are numerous possibilities for economic community development for people who want to work in the food system, from land use planning, to actual food production to working in food banks—or to creating new farms.’’