Urban Farms Can Provide Food Amid Disaster – But They Need Help

Urban farms are important for communities and the people who work on them: In addition to providing food amid local scarcity and security against disaster, they also can be places of social connection, empowerment and improvement. People operating urban farms could do better at all those things, but they need help getting there.

That’s the conclusion of Ana Zepeda, a graduate student in the UC Davis Department of Plant Sciences. She interviewed people who participate in urban farms on the island of Puerto Rico in 2019, two years after Hurricane Maria struck the island and devastated its infrastructure.

Her recommendations provide insight for policy-makers concerned about food security plus anyone concerned about eating in the wake of a natural disaster.

“We found that the social connections that grew around these urban farms was really important to the participants and the surrounding communities,” Zepeda said. “But for these spaces to be everything they can be, they need financial and educational support.”

Zepeda offered these insights as part of her master’s degree project in the international agricultural development graduate group and worked with Amanda Crump, an associate professor in the department. A paper describing Zepeda’s findings has been published in The Professional Geographer.

Puerto Rico is a territory of the United States. When Hurricane Maria hit as a Category 4-to-5 storm in September 2017. Most residents were left without electricity, water and cell phone reception, and other infrastructure was badly damaged.

Survivors also were left with little food. Due to export-oriented industrialization going back decades, the island’s agriculture has withered, producing an estimated 15% of its food. People had already established urban farms before the disaster, on plots ranging from backyard gardens to an entire city block.

Two years later, Zepeda visited the island to understand the little-studied role of urban farms in the lives of the people – mostly women – who work them. Her conclusions come from interviews she conducted with nine women involved with the farms.

Zepeda conducted the work as part of her doctoral research. Funding for this work came, in part, from a Jastro-Shields Graduate Research Grant from UC Davis.

Communities can include urban farms in disaster planning

In the capital of San Juan, most of the urban farms are run and operated by women, typically in  communities with fewer resources – a combination that reflects global trends. Zepeda found they often tended the farms after working both at paid jobs and as homemakers. She identified the farms as feminist spaces where the women could envision social change – in particular, responding to long-standing food insecurity made painfully apparent by the hurricane’s impacts.

Women she interviewed pointed to their motivation to feed their families, and to their island’s climate and soil, making it great for agriculture even on empty city lots. They expressed hope that young people would see the layers of benefit, especially strengthening the supply of nutritious, affordable, locally produced, and decide to join the movement as volunteers.

Zepeda’s work also noted the resilience of the women farmers, who continued to work their city plots despite the lack of support in both funds and labor. But, resilience “is rooted in overcoming adversity,” Zepeda cautioned in the paper. “We should (recognize) what causes adversity and how we can work to diminish adversity in the future.”

Zepeda argued that investment in urban agriculture can strengthen social infrastructure and create more resilient, reliable local food systems.

Some of the steps that would help people get there, Zepeda argued, are:

• Increased collaboration among urban farms would enable farmers to share knowledge, resources and best practices. This would also nurture social networks that would support the farms’ long-term development.
• Creating a collective of urban farms would improve coordination and open opportunities for partnerships with universities and government agencies, which could then offer research support, funding and policy guidance. 
• Financial support is needed so farm managers can get paid.
• Farmers should develop plans to protect their farms from hazards such as extreme weather.
• Government involvement would be helpful for establishing clear policies and providing oversight.

Background on the disaster & related links

You can read Zepeda’s paper here: “Urban Farms as Social and Resiliency Spaces in San Juan, Puerto Rico Following Hurricane Maria.” Among the authors is Clare Bannon, an associate professor in the UC Davis Department of Human Ecology.

Hurricane Maria came on the heels of another huge storm, Irma, that had badly damaged the island’s electrical infrastructure. Maria’s winds of at least 133mph left most residents in the dark, roads impassable and many buildings destroyed. Nearly 20 inches of rain caused many rivers to flood. It took 11 months for electricity to be fully restored. Damage was estimated at $90 billion for Puerto Rico and the nearby U.S. Virgin Islands. Nearly 3,000 people died, according to a government report, and possibly more.

Information about Hurricane Maria’s impacts on Puerto Rico were drawn from the United States National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the National Institute of Standards and Technology.