Growing Urban Agriculture Resilience and Development (GUARD): Professional Development Program for Urban Agriculture Educators in the Southeast

Commodities

Practices

Due to rapid urbanization in the Southeastern United States (US), CUA is an increasingly important agricultural sector in the region. The project team’s peer-reviewed research on CUA farmers and the Cooperative Extension Service personnel (CES) who serve them identified two key needs to support the long-term sustainability of CUA. First, CUA farmers lack professional networks that provide mentorship and information sharing, and previous attempts to create these networks have failed. Second, local regulations and policies are the primary barriers faced by CUA farms, and neither CUA farmers not CES have the knowledge and skills to address these barriers. Our Growing Urban Agriculture Resilience and Development (GUARD): Professional Development Program for Urban Agriculture Educators in the Southeast will address both of these barriers. This train-the-trainer program and its informational tools and resources that will help CUA farmers navigate local policies and regulations. Via listening sessions, this project will also identify best practices for developing CUA farmer information and resource sharing networks and implementing training programs for CUA farmers. The GUARD program will create publicly accessible factsheets, educational training materials, and train-the-trainer resource guides, all of which will be reviewed and revised based on feedback from CES personnel and minority urban farmers. Mitigating these critical barriers faced by CUA farms in Florida will increase quality of life for CUA farmers and increase the sustainability and profitability of their farms. This program can also improve quality of life for community members by increasing the availability of sustainably grown food within urban areas.

Our prior research identified two key needs to support the profitability and sustainability of CUA farms. First, CUA farmers are seeking a network for strategic information sharing, peer-to-peer support, and mentoring. One farmer stated “If I could have heard someone like myself speak 10 years ago, that would have been helpful.... versus trying to invent things myself” (Campbell, et al., 2023). Second, CUA farmers frequently have problems with laws and policies that do not apply to rural farms, such as municipal land-use policies, ordinances, zoning laws, and code enforcement. CES and existing education programs for small farms or emerging enterprises lack the information, tools, and resources to help CUA farmers identify and understand which policies apply to their operations and what they need to do to comply with these policies. Given these key needs, we propose to develop a program which meets the following two objectives:

Objective 1: Identify stakeholder-driven best-practices for communication, coordination, and peer-to-peer learning between CES personnel, CUA mentor-farmers, and existing and aspiring CUA farmers.

CUA farmers and CES who educate them have struggled to establish and maintain the connections required to facilitate education, training, information, and resource sharing. While CUA farmers are seeking professional networks and methods for information sharing, our research found that previous efforts led by both CES and by CUA farmers failed to gain traction and, hence, have lacked long-term sustainability. Previous efforts were unsuccessful because the needs and perspectives of CUA farmers as a group were not taken into account in the attempted planning and development of these professional networks. We will conduct listening sessions of CES and CUA farmers to identify stakeholder-driven best practices for providing education and sharing information and resources among CES and CUA farmers to foster long-term sustainability. This objective will achieve the following outcomes:

• This project will create a set of stakeholder-driven best-practices to be used to develop local networks for CUA farmers that will be disseminated as a part of the training materials in objective 2.
• The project will strengthen the relationship between UF, FAMU, and CUA farmers to increase knowledge exchange and capacity to collaborate on CUA programming by training at least 50 CES and CUA mentor-farmers by June 2026.
• The long-term impact of the GUARD program will be increased dissemination and utilization of evidence-based information among CUA farmers and CES supporting the long-term sustainability and profitability of CUA farms in Florida.

Objective 2: Develop a “train-the-trainer" CUA educational program to increase the knowledge and capacity of CES and mentor farmers to help CUA farmers comply with local policies and regulations.

This training program will provide tools and resources to foster peer-to-peer learning and skill-building among CES personnel, CUA mentor-farmers, and CUA farmers, including those that are minority owned and operated. This objective will achieve the following outcomes:

• 90% of program participants will increase knowledge, attitudes, and skills related to addressing local policies and regulations that govern their CUA operations.
• 80% of program participants will increase knowledge and self-efficacy at how to work with local government to amend regulations to be more supportive for the long-term sustainability of CUA.
• 50% of Extension agents or CUA mentor-farmers will have offered or intend to offer a CUA training or mentorship to existing or aspiring CUA farmers within 6 months of attending a training.

Meeting these objectives within the proposed project timeline will ultimately enhance the capacity of CUA farms in Florida—whether they are established or emerging farms or farms that are minority-owned and operated—to be economically, environmentally, and socially sustainable.

By adopting a train-the-trainer model, in which farmers educate and mentor other farmers, our program will increase the reach, effectiveness, and impact of the program.  Training CES and CUA mentor farmers on how to understand and comply with municipal regulatory policies will ensure that CUA farmers have knowledgeable, trusted, and locally accessible mentors. Beyond the immediate impact of increasing the knowledge, skills, and self-efficacy of Extension professionals and mentor-farmers, our train-the-trainer approach will facilitate increased communication, coordination, and peer-to-peer learning between CUA farmers of varying types of operations and levels of experience. We intend for this emerging network of advisors, mentors, and newly established or aspiring urban farmers will be better able to (1) find and interpret the local policies that govern CUA in their areas; (2) comply with existing policies and successfully submit required permits; and (3) when appropriate, work with their local government to amend local regulations to be more supportive for the development and long-term sustainability of CUA in their county or municipality.