The Promise of Urban Agriculture

The American Community Garden Association roughly estimates the number of community gardens nationally at 18,000. Add to that number the many small-scale farms that line the edges of most urban centers in the United States, and you have an indicator of what makes digging in the dirt so important to us. Urban farms and gardens connect us to each other, teach us, feed and nurture us, beautify our lives — and even improve our behavior. If buildings are the bones of a city, then gardens are its soul.

Katherine Brown knows firsthand the power of a community garden. Four years ago she was a university professor living in a transitional neighborhood in Omaha, a neighborhood that weathered no fewer than six drive-by shootings in one month.