It Takes a Region

Join us on a fascinating urban agriculture tour in Newark led by Tobias Fox. Grab a quick breakfast at the Atrium and meet in the lobby of NJCU. Charter bus will leave  at 9am sharp. Tour will begin at Greater Newark Conservancy (32 Prince St Newark, NJ 07103) at 10:00am. We will visit SWAG (South Ward Agriculture Group) Farm, Beth Greenhouse @ Newark Internal Medicine, we will check out Bikes for Food and a local farmers market then have lunch together at The Greater Newark Conservancy. After lunch we will share seeds and seed stories. See description for Seed Swap.

Seed and Story Swap will be happening at Greater Newark Conservancy (32 Prince St. Newark, NJ 07103). Transportation will NOT be provided unless you are part of the Newark Urban Food System Tour.
Come exchange seed and story with us. This is a seed swap and conversation to encourage and celebrate sharing and saving of seed across our region. We will exchange seed, get tips for saving seeds, and help build & maintain our community-controlled seed supply by sharing with each other. We will share stories of the importance of seed saving, and of the foods and medicines our people have been growing in this city over the generations and the work to carry it on now. We will focus on the communities of color in NYC, our own communities and ancestry as Black & Latinx women working with seed, and are excited to expand and exchange across the region beyond NYC.

The seeds we share today are our living archive, tools and sacred bits of life that help us connect to our histories and build our sovereign futures. When we control and share seed, we shape our own lives and ensure that we will have seed to all work from the next season, year, and generation.
This is a SEED SWAP. Please BRING SEED to share with others! We welcome growers of all levels of experience but with a commitment to grow and care for the seeds you go home with!

We work with the Ethnobotany Project NYC, which is growing and connecting people back to the ancestral foodways of New York City thru history, education, and seed. We are stewarding a teaching garden and seed library, and building skills and community around seed sovereignty in New York City.Come create and share with us!

This session will guide potential or beginning farmers to understand basic but essential economics in farming choices and the implication of risk. The importance of this session is to enable beginning farmers, especially urban farmers to digest basic economics of decision making before delving into farm business. 

Can agroecology unite urban and rural efforts toward sovereignty, justice and solidarity? Often misunderstood as merely an ecological approach to agriculture, or a set of regenerative, sustainable, climate-friendly practices, agroecology aims to work through power divisions among us, especially racism, colonialism, and patriarchy, as well as to address rural-urban differences. In this session, attendees will discuss urban and rural agroecology projects in the Northeast with project participants and build connections and ideas to grow agroecology in our region.

Despite popular depictions, farming often includes stressful, demanding, and dangerous work. Many farmers navigate long hours, low pay, regular crises, and social isolation as a standard part of their livelihoods. These stressors have caused the CDC to list farming as one of the highest risk occupations for mental health. These risks are even higher for farmers who hold targeted identities, such as through their race, gender, sexuality, and immigration status. Join us to learn about the impact of mental health in farming, connect with other farmers over your most victorious and difficult moments of the season, and explore strategies for supporting health and wellbeing on and off the farm. 

Amid rising interest in growing food in cities, many cities have developed policies to promote and regulate urban agriculture. Some cities are creating soil safety guidelines to reduce risks for urban agriculture practitioners from exposure to contaminants harmful to human health such as lead and arsenic. During this interactive workshop, attendees will work with researchers and community partners from the Safe Urban Harvests study to explore the challenges in generating and using real-world evidence to inform science and policy decisions. Attendees will help lay the groundwork for soil safety policies that minimize barriers to urban agriculture and maximize public health protection.

In an age of agricultural mergers and urban hyper-growth, the farmers of the 17 member farms of the Baltimore Farm Alliance are scaling down instead of up. Building healthy soils through time-tested methods, we steward acreage ranging from less than ⅛  acre to a maximum of 8 acres. We also resist the idea that our farms exist to entice developers. Coexisting with our neighborhoods, each farm has put down roots, developing individual strategies to get food into the hands of neighbors. Even as we all work for a just transition, we take diverse approaches to farming: panelists’ farms range from high-tunnel intensive, to food forest building, to open-field organic vegetable operations.

Participating in farming activities provides meaningful work for people with special needs and offers positive health benefits. For farms and food processing industries, populations with special needs can contribute to production and are an oft-overlooked consumer base.  Increasing accessibility by removing physical barriers in the landscape is only one step in welcoming special needs populations to participate on the farm. We will explore ways to design programs and landscapes to build inclusivity in our farm and garden projects, and discuss some of the economic opportunities on farms and in food production which draw on the skills and strengths of special needs populations.