On an unseasonably mild, misty day in November, a crew of volunteers spends their afternoon at a community garden on St. James Avenue in Walnut Hills, a neighborhood on the east side of Cincinnati. Small plots and raised beds are overflowing with bushy green plants, still full of tomatoes and peppers at varying stages of ripeness.

The rich, earthy soil has been fed by the compost that volunteers turn every few weeks in bins at the back of the garden. Five volunteers, wearing rain boots and dirt-smudged gardening clothes, are spread out among the garden plots, chatting as they pick tomatoes and arugula under a gray sky that is sprinkling rain on both vegetables and gardeners.

Gary Dangel, a retired resident in this neighborhood, converted three vacant lots into gardens eight years ago and has been managing them, raising money to maintain them and growing food for the community ever since. The four gardens he oversees are all, “open harvest, meaning everybody can come in at any time and pick whatever they want,” he says.

Dangel adds that the unifying theme of the eight community gardens in Walnut Hills, “is addressing food insecurity, improving access to affordable, locally grown food.”

One community organization Dangel works with is La Soupe, a nonprofit dedicated to diverting food waste from the landfill and providing healthy meals for people facing food insecurity. La Soupe, which has been operating in Walnut Hills since opening a new facility there in 2020, is located just a stone’s throw away from one of Dangel’s community gardens.

Volunteers harvest at the garden and walk produce directly to La Soupe, where it’s prepared and distributed to community partners across the city.  “It’s super fresh,” Dangel says. Not only is the food grown without any pesticides or herbicides, but it also “only travels a couple 100 feet to go from the farm to where the kitchen is,” Dangel says.

That is notable in a city where urban agriculture and sustainability enthusiasts are attempting to provide food that is healthier for the body and the environment. For a community gardener like Dangel, an important question to consider is, “What’s the carbon footprint of this box of tomatoes?” That idea has helped drive his efforts to turn abandoned lots into gardens in what he calls an experiment to “grow hyper-locally to serve a neighborhood that doesn’t have a grocery store.”

This goal to use local food production to improve access to healthy food and simultaneously improve the health of the environment is not singular to the community garden on St. James Avenue in Walnut Hills. In an era when food production and distribution make up one third of greenhouse gas emissions, a focus on local food systems has become a lodestar, a unifying mission that has the potential to address problems ranging from climate change and diminishing soil health to food insecurity.

Urban agriculture, a general term that refers to food production and distribution that occurs within urban and suburban areas, is one major area of focus for those working to create a more resilient and equitable food system in Cincinnati. But some advocates and food system experts believe our current issues are too big and complex to be solved by current urban agriculture efforts.

Organizations and individuals across Cincinnati are working in different ways to help end food insecurity and create a more sustainable local food system that can support everyone in the city. Green Umbrella, a local non-profit working to respond to climate change with regional solutions, runs a Food Policy Council whose mission is to create a resilient regional food system.

Maddie Chera, the director of the Food Policy Council, is focused on bringing organizations and people together to create a food system “that incorporates environmental resilience, the ecological environmental health of our region, and economic resilience,” she says.

For Chera, the importance of the mission of the Food Policy Council lies in the idea that issues surrounding food, climate and health are all connected and they’re all urgent. She says Cincinnati is well-positioned to be able to solve these problems because of the multitude of passionate people and organizations committed to this work.

Chera added that there are occasions when local food advocates’ priorities can seem at odds with one another, with some focused more on public health and food insecurity and others focused on climate impact. While someone dedicated to feeding the food-insecure might argue that their community members can’t afford to think about climate planning because they need to feed their families today, another advocate might be more focused on health of local soil in order to support the continued success of local farms.

From Chera’s perspective, they’re both right, “We need to make sure everybody has enough to eat now, but also in the future,” she says. To do that, the Food Policy Council is working not only to improve immediate access to food, but also to maintain, “farm businesses, functioning supply chains and soils that have nutrients in them,” Chera explains.

The Civic Garden Center of Greater Cincinnati (CGC), another local organization doing essential work in this space, participates in urban agriculture by providing programming and supporting more than 60 community gardens in the Greater Cincinnati area.

Kymisha Montgomery is the urban agriculture coordinator at CGC, where she oversees the community gardens and holds trainings and classes throughout the year. She holds an 11-week civic garden development training in the spring to teach people, “how to grow food, how to fund a space to grow food and how to sell those products,” she says.

Then during the summer, Montgomery hosts classes on site at community gardens where she teaches about soil health, pest control and nutrition. “We not only talk about the nutritional value, but we’re actually harvesting in front of the participants,” Montgomery says.

The value of this kind of hands-on education is evident for Montgomery when she sees eyes light up when people see a carrot come out of the ground and immediately become more connected with the food they eat, “That’s the whole purpose of those garden classes – for people to see, smell and taste the difference,” Montgomery says.

The city itself is also committed to supporting urban agriculture as a means to promote environmental sustainability and food security. The Green Cincinnati Plan, a document published by the City of Cincinnati’s Office of Environment and Sustainability, includes a chapter dedicated to food. This document, written with the help of local experts and organizations like Green Umbrella, lays out goals to eliminate systemic racism and environmental damage in the food system by promoting local food production and distribution. 

Additional actionable goals include increasing local production of food, eliminating food deserts and developing a climate safe food system plan.

Cincinnati has a history of segregation and red lining that have contributed to the continued inequities in food access in neighborhoods across the city, “Food pantries, soup kitchens, urban orchards and community gardens are trying to solve parts of this,” says Alan Wight, an adjunct instructor at the University of Cincinnati and Cincinnati State.

Wight, long interested in humans’ relationship with nature, started gardening at Gorman Heritage Farm and says he became interested in whether growing food locally, “could support our modern industrial society.”

After years of working in local food production and studying food systems and food access, Wight says he doesn’t think that, “urban ag or community gardens are solving the larger problems that we want them to – food apartheid, food sovereignty, food insecurity. They’re great laboratories to do this but they just don’t produce the amount we need.”

For Montgomery, it’s partially about scale, but importantly, “food apartheid and food insecurity are systematic problems,” she says. “We have to acknowledge the systems that have been put in place that led to it and try to decrease some of those barriers.”

Food apartheid, a term often used in place of the older term “food desert,” is defined in the Green Cincinnati Plan as, “a system of segregation that divides those with access to an abundance of nutritious food from those who have been denied that access due to systemic injustice.”

Some of the goals outlined in the plan that aim to address this problem include providing funding for urban agriculture projects, engaging with community members to determine the best ways to increase food access and developing career pathways to grow urban agriculture employment.

For Montgomery, supporting entrepreneurs in urban agriculture is an essential component of the effort to get more people involved and ultimately create a distribution system that gives more local food to community residents. Though she acknowledges there is no overnight solution, she says that, “the city is heading in a very positive direction.”

While organizations and the city continue to work toward solutions, community gardening offers a starting place for those who want to make a difference in their own neighborhoods. It also provides additional value that shows up in different ways for different people.

Montgomery sees the important cultural role community gardens play for immigrant communities from places like Cameroon, South America and Nepal, “New Americans from other countries have come here and tried to put down roots, literally, but the foods they’re accustomed to, they can’t find here,” Montgomery says.

Community gardens give them the ability to plant and grow culturally important foods together. From Chera’s perspective, community gardens, “provide a meeting place and a place for people to connect with their neighbors, be outside in their community.”

The green space, the social connection and civic engagement are “another really valuable part of community gardening and urban agriculture in addition to actually producing food,” Chera says.

For the volunteers and residents who grow and harvest produce at the St. James Avenue garden in Walnut Hills, the human relationships built there have always been just as important as the amount of food they’ve grown and distributed, “Observationally, we’re growing food for a food-insecure neighborhood. The added benefits of it are hard to track,” Dangel said after one of his regular volunteers came over to give him a hug and wish him well until the spring growing season.  

When Dangel and his volunteers spend time together harvesting vegetables, “We’re not talking about tomatoes,” he says. “We’re talking about the world and our fears and worries and hopes and dreams.”