For the past 50 years, Lisa Barkley has lived as a resident in a small urban town in Pennsylvania. She’s watched the neighborhood’s barren city landscape transform into a robust agricultural system. 

“One day I realized I had a magnolia tree out here, we had lavender growing, and it was just changing from a street doing nothing on it to a garden; it’s just almost unreal.” 

Urban agriculture, an age-old approach to managing food insecurity, is also emerging as a solution to the effects of climate change in New Jersey. 

According to the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection, New Jersey is warming up “faster than the rest of the Northeast region and the world”, which can be attributed to the “high urbanization of the state”. The report establishes that droughts, lower agricultural yield, and adverse health effects due to these high temperatures can be expected. 

Researchers have outlined a multi-faceted approach to amending food insecurity in Trenton, with urban agriculture at the heart of it. 

Urban agriculture can appear in many forms, such as community gardens, urban farms, rooftop greenhouses, and more.

It is a proven approach to increasing food access for city residents, such as those in Trenton. 

Food that is grown within the city doesn’t have to be transported, resulting in lower transportation costs and increasing access to fresher produce. Nutritional options will be more readily available for citizens, and local food production creates an avenue for economic growth.

Barkley explained that local gardens have aided in meeting food needs throughout her community. 

“[The] food that is grown is distributed to the community for free, or sometimes the children will become little entrepreneurs and they’ll sell [a small bag of vegetables] for a dollar.” 

There have already been success stories of cities like Barkley’s creating agriculture-friendly zoning in urban areas via legislation and community involvement.

According to an article written in the Vermont Journal of Environmental Law in 2010, Seattle, Washington enacted legislation that allowed urban farming activities in certain districts. 

A report discussing the effects of this policy listed “numerous benefits of local food production: it ensures fresh food for local residents with higher nutrient content compared with food shipped over large distances; it enhances community relations, especially farmer-consumer relationships; it reduces poverty by allowing residents to sell crops cultivated on unused urban plots; and it increases the City’s degree of self-sufficiency”.

Similarly, in Cleveland, Ohio, the city established legislation to create an “Urban Garden District,” causing an “explosion” of urban agriculture on personal and professional fronts.

ISLES is a Trenton-based organization that has been working on food access in the area. This group is among several community groups that have taken the initiative of improving food security into their own hands by establishing urban farms.

“I’m committed to the work of ISLES, which is critically important in these uncertain times, because of our mission to foster self-reliance and healthy, sustainable communities,” said Isles’s Chair of Board Linda Revelle in a virtual interview. “[This mission] is reflected in our urban gardens, where local residents can improve their health and nutrition by growing healthy fruits and vegetables.”

Climate change has brought an influx of new environmental challenges; legislators are adapting their policies to meet these challenges. 

In 1975, New Jersey enacted the Municipal Land Use Law, which provides guidance on “the use of lands within the municipality in a manner which protects public health and promotes the general welfare”. 

This policy grants the municipal government the authority of zoning and designating land. This allows the community to play a more active role in bettering their environment, meaning their needs can be directly addressed.

According to experts, legislation plays a pivotal role in establishing urban agriculture as a long-term solution to food insecurity and climate effects in urban areas like Trenton. 

In the oral history book, “The Land Speaks”, researcher Walter Greason describes how a non-profit organization, Urban Tree Connection, has worked with the community in urban town Haddington to fight the environmental decline of the area for decades. 

“[W]idespread adoption of local strategies for garden creation, maintenance, and harvest has the potential to reinvigorate low-income communities,” Greason concluded. “At the same time, we are reminded that decisions made at the federal level as well as successive city administrations have taken very different courses. These have had very powerful consequences for the persistence of community commons and food production.” 

Implementing these solutions has had a ripple effect on environmental education in these communities as well.

“[The children] are learning what particular vegetables are good for what part of the body. For instance, we know that carrots are good for their eyes and that cranberries are good for their kidneys,” Barkley said. “They know good bugs from bad bugs, not to mess with the praying mantis, and they know good weeds from bad weeds– children can identify things like that.”

Farmers markets are an additional solution that many cities have taken up, however, they have experienced some pushback. 

A group of researchers working with the National Institutes of Health made several efforts to alter their respective food landscapes. One such initiative was the integration of farmers markets as a primary food outlet. 

According to a report by the team, “[s]urveys and focus groups indicated that word of mouth generated awareness about the market, but people felt it was inconvenient for regular shopping.” 

The researchers concluded that incentives are needed to implement a centrally-located farmers market, meaning community consultation is a must.

Urban agriculture is an increasingly popular solution to climate change’s effects on food security in local communities; however, according to Barkley, it takes legislative action as well as active community participation for the initiative to take off. 

“It’s a work in progress,” Barkley said, “It’s the domino effect.”