Keywords

1 Introduction

Madison, Wisconsin, is a growing city of just over 269,000 people located in Wisconsin’s South Central region, bordering lakes Mendota, Monona, Kegonsa, and Waubesa. The University of Wisconsin-Madison, and the state capital are major draws to the area, providing jobs and serving as cultural epicenters. The education, information technology and agriculture, food, and beverage sectors help drive the local economy. The city boasts a long history of formal planning and policy structures focused on lakefront and park preservation dating back to the 1911 John Nolen plan entitled Madison: A Model City, a plan that city staff still reference to this day (Nolen 1911). In Dane County, just outside of Madison, the Town of Dunn has a voluntary farmland protection program through purchase of development rights, which has been in place since 1997, and has preserved over 3,800 acres of farmland in one of the richest agricultural areas of the state (Town of Dunn (WI) n.d.)

Madison is often cited as a progressive place with a high level of resident participation in civil society and politics. As noted by Bailkey and Caton Campbell (2015), “Wisconsin’s traditional reputation as ‘America’s Dairyland’ endures, and new and long-time Madisonians alike see close connections between their urban lives and the surrounding rural and periurban farmlands. This awareness, coupled with a largely progressive political bent at the grassroots and local government levels, has resulted in a high level of awareness of and participation in the national local-food movement (p. 23).” Madison boasts many food system assets such as the Dane County Farmers Market, the largest producer-only farmers market in the United States; the South Madison Farmers Market, now in its 20th year; and a renovated historic feed mill, now a hub for local food and wellness businesses (Becker 2016; Hubbuch 2019). However, the policy structures that led to such assets tend to be more expert-driven, fostering shallow community commentary rather than true participatory planning.

There are many policy structures with indirect, but important, implications for an individual’s ability to access and participate in the food system. For example, public transportation is sparse in the outer edges of the City of Madison where low-income housing lies. A lack of public transportation drastically affects the ability of low-income individuals to access the resources they need, including food. Another example is minimum wage policies, which impact an individual’s and/or a household’s discretionary income available to purchase food. However, this chapter will not cover many of the intersectional issues that indirectly or directly impact the food system.

With respect to urban agriculture, the City of Madison is a prime example of how protecting land for food production conflicts with the pressures for real estate development in an active development market (Hodgson et al. 2011; Meenar et al. 2017). According to Nan Fey, Madison’s recent interim Director of Planning, Economic and Community Development and former long-time Food Policy Council chair, “The development pressure is a big problem. Madison is a place people want to be. It’s a private real estate system. If the city doesn’t own it, it doesn’t really control it. That’s why we’ve tried to utilize city owned land to set an example. I think ownership of land is the major barrier [to urban agriculture]” (Fey 2020). Since a zoning code rewrite was adopted in 2013, Madison’s zoning code now includes an urban agriculture district as a means to designate land for food production; however, that district designation has yet to be used and is not sufficient to counteract the pressures of real estate development and gentrification (Becker 2016). The zoning code also permits indoor urban farming (Christians 2015). Despite the city’s now-supportive regulatory environment for urban agriculture, immigrants, indigenous people, and people of color continue to lack sufficient and secure land tenure for urban agriculture. The history of Madison is a tale of two cities, with top-down seemingly progressive policies butted up against marginalized communities vying for access to resources of all types, including physical spaces, in the city they call home (Becker 2016). This conflicting narrative reveals itself in urban agriculture practices and policy making.

This chapter analyzes the broad array of urban agriculture work in Madison, focusing on the inequities in such work, and the degree to which codified policies serve as supporting or limiting factors for urban agriculture. The first section of this chapter outlines several key urban agriculture initiatives in Madison, including Troy Gardens, The Gardens Network (of community gardens), and FairShare Community Supported Agriculture Coalition (a network of CSA farms). The second section of this chapter examines food policy structures in Madison and Dane County, highlighting key policies that inhibit or encourage urban agriculture initiatives. The third section of this chapter focuses on the inclusivity of such work, which groups and individuals are driving urban agriculture, whether communities most affected by changes in agriculture are included in the planning stages of such projects, and whether those who hold positions of power in Madison’s food system are representative of the communities most affected by urban agriculture projects. This lens is especially crucial as Dane County, which is home to the city of Madison, has some of the largest racial disparities between Black and non-Hispanic white communities in the country (Wisconsin Council on Children and Families 2013). The fourth section of this chapter addresses the levels of codification of urban agriculture work. This section focuses on whether policies allowing for urban agriculture have legal backing, whether such policies are enforced, and whether such policies expire. It is important to note that while this chapter provides examples from the Madison context, it is not meant to be exhaustive of all of the urban agriculture work accomplished in this region. Madison and Dane County have been at the forefront of the food policy movement since the movement’s inception, and a complete history of that body of work cannot be contained in one chapter.

2 Urban Farming Initiatives

2.1 The Case of Troy Gardens

The history of the land known as Troy Gardens is a classic story of the competition that arises between the government and members of the public when they envision different uses and futures for a parcel of land, setting up a conflict between the types of ends sought by different stakeholders and the differing means they envision for achieving those ends.

Throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s, fifteen acres of state-owned public land in the Northside community of Madison was used as a public commons by area residents. Four acres of the land was devoted to community gardens, while the remainder of the land remained a natural area utilized for walking dogs, watching birds, and appreciating the beautiful landscape (Caton Campbell and Salus 2003). In October 1995, the State of Wisconsin placed the site on the surplus land list with the stated intention to sell it to a private developer for revenue generation (Caton Campbell and Salus 2003). Such reclaiming of public commons for government revenue assumes that common spaces are in need of reform, and devalues a community’s long-term investment (emotional and otherwise) in this valuable resource. Unfortunately, within a neoliberal framework, it is common to privatize public goods, and isolate community power under the guise of economic development, by selling public land to private developers.

Community members who had invested time and resources into developing a long-term, large community garden space and caring for the natural landscape at Troy Gardens were not complacent and fought for their right to the commons, especially when the State consolidated an additional 16 acres of abutting vacant land for sale. In 1996, neighborhood residents and concerned community members enlisted support from the Northside Planning Council, representing 17 Northside neighborhoods and organizations, to fight against the potential development of the valuable commons. The Northside Planning Council joined with the Community Action Coalition of South Central Wisconsin, the Madison Area Community Land Trust, and the Urban Open Space Foundation (a local urban land trust now renamed Rooted), to form the Troy Gardens Coalition (Caton Campbell and Salus 2003).

In 1997, the coalition succeeded at removing the land from the state surplus land list and securing a multiyear lease from the city to focus on redevelopment of the 31-acre parcel. The coalition then encountered one of the most common barriers to urban agriculture: highly restrictive agricultural leases. The community plan was to allocate 26 acres of the parcel for long-term agriculture and conservation. However, in Wisconsin, agricultural leases cannot exceed a 15-year maximum and it is difficult to build permanent infrastructure, such as metal hoop houses and sheds, on land zoned temporarily for agricultural purposes (Rosenberg and Yuen 2012). Agriculture is tied to land; investment in agriculture entails land regeneration, soil health maintenance, and ecosystem management. This investment differs from other types of business investments in that it cannot be disconnected from location. Whereas inventory in a store may be moved depending on regional and local political and economic factors, agriculture is quite difficult to relocate. If leases are not renewed, investment in the land is forgone, posing a significant risk to entering in urban agriculture, particularly for financially under-resourced community groups that depend upon their own ingenuity and physical labor to launch and develop their projects.

The Troy Gardens Coalition proposed an alternative plan, which was accepted by the community and eventually by the city in 1998. The accepted proposal was for a 50-year lease with the option to purchase, dividing the 31-acre site into three main uses with five acres set aside for mixed-income housing, and the remainder dedicated to agriculture and conservation (Denckla Cobb 2011). This proposal zoned the area as a planned unit development allowing both housing development, farmland, and also farm infrastructure such as hoop houses.Footnote 1

Three years after the proposal’s acceptance, the Madison Area Community Land Trust was able to use HUD Community Development Block Grant and Economic Development Initiative funds to purchase the land, including the entire land area, under HUD subsidy eligibility standards (Rosenberg and Yuen 2012). The Madison Area Community Land Trust (MACLT) in turn leased 26 acres of the parcel to the Friends of Troy Gardens (renamed Community GroundWorks), which then placed the land under a conservation easement held by Urban Open Space Foundation (now Rooted) (Caton Campbell and Salus 2003). The 26 acres of open space now include a five-acre urban farm, community gardens, a youth garden, a cob oven, prairie restoration areas, and other nature trails. The remaining 15 acres were held by MACLT for affordable housing development. Champions in the community, such as UW-Madison urban planning professor and community food systems planning pioneer Jerry Kaufman and Madison Area Community Land Trust founder Sol Levin, and champions at the government level, such as State Senator Fred Risser and then-US Representative (now US Senator) Tammy Baldwin, ferried the approval of the plans for Troy Gardens, prioritizing urban agriculture and affordable housing in their policy initiatives. For example, then-Rep. Tammy Baldwin secured a $750,000 earmark for the Madison Area Community Land Trust to develop affordable housing units on Troy Gardens. Ginny Hughes, Rooted’s Deputy Director, described the process of pioneering Troy Gardens, saying “It’s all about people coming together with a common vision and diverse perspective, and I think we’ve really been able to show that a multi-use, multi-functioning site can be really successful and a way to connect people with each other, themselves [and the] outdoors” (Hughes 2020).

Troy Farm was first tilled in 2001. Community GroundWorks (now Rooted) partnered with the Community Action Coalition to share tools and infrastructure necessary to start the farm. The farm manager was tasked with deciding what to grow on the land, planting a diversified mix of vegetables while excluding such crops as sweet corn and melons, which would take up too much space. Produce grown at Troy Farm is distributed through several channels. Produce is sold to over 200 CSA members,Footnote 2 direct to consumers at weekly farm stands, and at a nearby shopping center parking lot. A limited amount of produce is sold wholesale to Madison grocery stores and food co-ops. In 2006, Troy Farm filled a niche market in Madison for sprouts, which has grown over the years to represent just under half the sales of produce from Troy Farm. The sprouts are sold direct to consumers at the farm stands, and wholesale to grocery stores and food co-ops.

Prior to 2020, Troy Farm hosted 14–15 interns and an additional 10–12 volunteers with worker shares annually. In 2020, RootedFootnote 3 adjusted its model to provide interns with a stipend to increase equity and compete with better wages offered by non-agricultural jobs. With the stipend offered, the number of interns able to be accommodated decreased from 14–15 to three interns for the 9-week session and three interns for the 28-week session. While several farm staff live at the adjacent Troy Gardens housing community, interns typically come to Troy Gardens from outside of the area. In addition to those volunteering and interning at the farm, Rooted offers youth development programming at Troy Farm and the Troy Kids’ Garden. Over 1,000 youth interact with the gardens in any given season. Many youth who come to Troy Gardens are from neighborhoods on the Northside, which is one of the more diverse areas in Madison.

Now, some twenty-five years after the community first organized to save their land, Troy Gardens is an expression of the multifunctional ends urban agriculture can so often produce, encompassing permanently affordable housing, a variety of forms of food production, and outdoor educational and community gathering spaces. In 2020, Rooted held a strategic planning process grounded in racial equity and inclusion. As the organization creates greater space and opportunity for deep community engagement and shaping of future work, the urban agriculture means-ends framework will also change to be more reflective of community members’ interests and needs.

2.2 FairShare CSA Coalition

FairShare CSA Coalition is a 25-year-old organization that supports farmers and consumers through its community supported agriculture (CSA) programs, with the end goal of “a future where CSA is the backbone of a strong local food system and where all families have access to locally-produced, organic food from small family farms” (Fairshare CSA Coalition n.d.). As a means to that end, FairShare endorses 45-55 farms every year; in 2020, FairShare endorsed 44 CSA farms serving Wisconsin, Minnesota, Illinois, and Iowa, which provided over 13,000 shares to more than 27,000 individuals and families. To be endorsed, a CSA farm must be certified organic or in transition to organic certification. Currently 10 such endorsed farms are located in Dane County, including Rooted’s Troy Farm. In addition, some CSA programs get resources from FairShare and interact with the coalition’s network of farmers, but are not endorsed.

Though the CSA model helps consumers share with farmers on an annual basis the economic risk of farming, the model is inherently inequitable for low- and moderate-income households. The model relies upon up-front membership payments in cash or by credit card in amounts that limited-income households simply may not have available, creating a significant financial barrier to participation. Even spreading membership payments across the growing season may not make membership possible for these households.

To address this inequity, FairShare developed its Partner Shares Program for Dane County residents. The program pays half the cost of a market-rate CSA share (up to $300) for limited-income families, so that they can purchase a CSA share from a FairShare member farm. SNAP recipients can pay with EBT dollars for the remaining portion of the Partner Shares CSA. FairShare provides a centralized administrative hub for accepting EBT so that if individual farms are not EBT-certified, residents can still purchase a CSA share from them with EBT dollars. Sheena Tesch, Rooted’s Director of Urban Agriculture, says of the FairShare CSA program, “It is so hard for each farm to be an EBT vendor, but FairShare is an EBT vendor so they can process that for any farm. It’s really special. Whenever I talk to other CSA farmers from other areas they’re like, ‘that’s insane and awesome’” (Tesch 2020).

Dane County government funds a position at FairShare through the local extension office to provide agricultural advice and agricultural resources for small scale farmers in the network. There seems to be a sense of camaraderie among smallholder farmers. Claire Strader, who holds that agricultural advisor position, says “One of the strongest pieces of ag in the Madison area is the camaraderie and networking among small scale organic producers in the region. There’s a huge willingness to share with other growers, including things from how I handle this pest to what my relationship is like with my life partner who is a farmer in my business. It is amazing and makes this entire community stronger” (Strader 2020).

The FairShare CSA Coalition also paves the way for new farmers to come up in the industry. The University of Wisconsin-Madison launched an Organic Farm Manager Registered Apprenticeship program in 2018. The program is a 2-year apprenticeship program in which applicants are placed at farms in the FairShare CSA network.Footnote 4 A lack of prior experience was identified by key stakeholders as one reason why youth are not hired on farms. One key stakeholder noted, “Farms are not interested in hiring apprentices that don’t have farming experiences so before they accept them as an apprentice, they need to know they have a rudimentary grasp on the systems of diversified organic agriculture.” During the 2018 and 2019 farm season, no apprentices were from the City of Madison, though the apprentices are channeled into the Madison food system through partnerships with local farms. As Rooted revamps its Troy Farm internship program, they intend for their program to be a feeder into the University of Wisconsin-Madison Organic Farm Manager Registered Apprenticeship program.

3 Community Garden Initiatives

According to Steve Ventura, emeritus professor of environmental studies and soil science at University of Wisconsin-Madison, “The most important component [of urban agriculture] is to help people understand where their food comes from. There’s something magical about a child pulling a carrot out of the ground and having some understanding that food doesn’t come from the supermarket. It’s important in the sense of community” (Ventura 2020). This quote embodies the longstanding importance of Madison’s community gardens, some of which date to the 1960s but which skyrocketed in prevalence in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

As far back as 1995, funding for community gardens was included in the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Consolidated Plan for Madison. The dedication of Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) funds for community gardens in HUD-designated low-income eligibility areas remains uncommon in other localities. In 2004, the City formally expressed its support of community gardens by contracting with the Community Action Coalition of South Central Wisconsin (CAC) at $100,000 annually to manage the network of community gardens in Madison. CAC instituted a sliding scale for plot fees based on a combination of poverty levels and HUD income classifications in the area surrounding each garden. Fees are managed by the gardens themselves and revenue is used for group programming, utility bills, infrastructure, and the like. A challenge is that this sliding plot fee scale creates inequities with respect to paying water and utility rates. Since low-income gardens charge lower plot fees and collect less revenue than gardens with more affluent gardener populations, the burden of water fees is much higher for those gardens, and they lack significant funds for programming and infrastructure.Footnote 5

By 2010, there were over 65 gardens in Madison managed by the CAC, which provided hands-on support with tilling soil, organizing plots, and managing volunteers. Early in 2011, the Madison Common Council adopted a sustainability master plan that includes a goal of committing 4% of the city’s land area to urban agriculture, of which community gardens would be a significant component (Eanes and Ventura 2015). In 2014, CAC went through a restructuring process and decided to hand off stewardship of community gardens, and focus instead on pantry gardens and delivering food to low-income individuals. The Gardens Network was then formed as a collaboration of UW-Madison Extension Dane County, the City of Madison, and Rooted, which has the primary coordination and management role for the network. Extension Dane County serves as an educational partner providing trainings at various community gardens and routine translation of garden materials. The City of Madison is the landowner of many community gardens which are leased to Rooted, contributes funding to staff the Gardens Network, dedicates operational funds, and lends support to community gardens from the Parks Department, Streets Department, Public Health offices, Community Development Division, and the Mayor’s Office. Rooted employs the staff member for the Gardens Network and provides organizational support for garden organizers. Community garden organizers have significant autonomy over most decisions pertaining to individual community garden locations, with Rooted stepping in to support gardens in transition, gardens that need specific technical assistance, and to address common issues that affect many community gardens. For example, language barriers pose an issue across community gardens as many gardeners speak Spanish, Hmong, or Lao, with limited English proficiency. The Gardens Network also manages the finances of two gardens. Currently there are 67 community gardens in the Gardens Network across 47 acres in Madison and Dane County. In spring 2020, the City made the decision to no longer fund community gardens with CDBG funds, ending the practice of including community gardens in its HUD 5-year plan, and instead moved the Gardens Network under the umbrella of the Community Development Division.

There exist several community gardens in Madison outside of the Gardens Network, including Madison Food Pantry Gardens, that grow food for CAC to distribute. In the 2019 season, these pantry gardens grew 12,000 pounds of produce for distribution. Troy Gardens also hosts a community garden with over 300 plots. Many of the gardeners there are Hmong, and a wide diversity of cultures and languages is represented across the gardeners. In 2020, a new community capacity-building and engagement management structure was initiated for the community gardens at Troy Gardens and other community gardens. The new program pays community leaders a stipend to assume a coordinating role at those pilot locations, while Rooted staff are readily available to answer questions and provide support as the garden leaders build their capacity. Stipends explicitly acknowledge the extra time and effort garden leaders put into their work.Footnote 6

4 Local Government Policy and Planning Landscape

4.1 Dane County Food Council

The Dane County Food Council (DCFC), the first food council in the state of Wisconsin, was formed in 2005 as a partnership of the City of Madison, Dane County, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison (Dane County Food Council n.d.). Each of the three partners contributed $5,000 to hire an urban planning master’s student to staff the council. Carrie Edgar, Director of Extension Dane County, noted that, “Most people didn’t know what a food policy council was at that point, and Jerry [Kaufman] was a key player in informing people about why it mattered and why it was important” (Edgar 2020). The DCFC omits policy from its name for several key reasons. First, in Wisconsin, county committees are excluded from bringing policy proposals directly to county government, though they can advocate for policy and legislation. Second, founders of the DCFC noted the importance of excluding the word “policy” to allow the committee to focus on tasks that did not include policy, such as incubation programs. DCFC’s work focuses predominantly on rural areas outside of Madison, prioritizing the needs of Dane County growers whose primary markets for sales are in Madison. DCFC meetings are publicly noticed and accessible, though general public attendance is almost nonexistent because the group meets in the evening at the County Extension offices on the far Eastside of Madison which are only readily accessible by car.

After the first year of the DCFC, the University and the City decided not to continue as partners. However, County Board Supervisor Kyle Richmond championed the DCFC and the County decided to continue with the initiative. From 2006-2010, the Council continued as an unfunded County committee comprised entirely of citizen members. During this period, the key initiative of the DCFC was to bring attention to buying and promoting local food.

A few years later, Supervisor Richmond proposed an ordinance amendment to adjust the composition of the DCFC. Now, nine individuals serve on the Council including two County Board Supervisors and seven community members (currently including one of the authors of this chapter) representing various sectors of the food system. The County Executive appoints the County Board Supervisors to the DCFC, and the County Board Chair appoints citizen members based on staff recommendations from a pool of applicants. Each council member holds their term for three years and terms are staggered to provide continuity and healthy turnover rates. The decision to include County Board Supervisors formally on the council brought more credibility and public attention to DCFC’s work. In 2010 an employee of UW-Madison Extension Dane County volunteered to staff the council. Then, in 2019, the County funded a part-time food systems educator, Jess Guffey Calkins, who staffs the food council; the position was made full-time in 2020. Following a restructuring process, subcommittees were formed that function as work groups to complete tasks between monthly committee meetings.

One landmark project of the DCFC is the Partners in Equity (PIE) Grant, which provides seed funds for projects focused on strengthening the Dane County food system. For example, the Northside Planning Council received a PIE Grant to launch Healthy Food for All, a project that recovers thousands of pounds of food from large businesses, as well as caterers and farms, and repackages it for distribution to food pantries each week. Troy Farm donates roughly 10,000 pounds of food to Healthy Food for All over the course of each growing season.

Another key DCFC-enacted policy has to do with local procurement for County institutions such as the Dane County Jail, County Nursing Home, and the Park District. The policy encourages county agencies to procure local food by allowing them to reject the lowest bid for food in favor of Wisconsin-produced food, if that food is no more than 10% more expensive than the lowest bid.

Some DCFC initiatives have been less successful. For example, the Council has placed a lot of emphasis on organic certification. However, a significant barrier to certification is the cost. To reduce the financial barrier to entry, the Wisconsin Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection fronted 75% of the initial cost of organic certification and DCFC stepped up to fund the other 25%. Even so, there were administrative barriers related to documentation and the long timeline of the application process that the DCFC’s policy did not address, and so not many farms took advantage of this opportunity.

4.2 Madison Food Policy Council

In 2012, then-Madison Mayor Paul Soglin was inspired by the National Conference of Mayors food interest group to create the Madison Food Policy Council (MFPC). Carrie Edgar says, “The mayor was interested in food access issues and the disparities that existed in the county, and that we are known for our foodie culture but still had people without enough to eat. He also was interested in starting a public market in the city” (Edgar 2020). In the first five years following its formation, the MFPC prioritized addressing food access disparities as its primary end/goal, conducting citywide assessments to identify and map food access improvement areas where the council intended to concentrate its program and project grant funding.

The MFPC is an official city committee with membership defined by the Madison General Ordinance, and until 2021 was staffed by a Food Policy Director whose position was located in the Mayor’s Office administratively. Of the 23 seats on the Council, three seats are designated for City Alders. One member of the Dane County Food Council is appointed jointly to the MFPC to enhance partnerships between the two councils. Other seats are designated for individuals with expertise in a particular niche of the food system, such as community gardens or school food. The remaining 14 slots are open to Madison residents with an interest in the food system. Appointments are staggered between one and three years to provide a healthy rate of turnover. The Food Policy Director makes recommendations for new appointees to the mayor, who then appoints members to officially serve on the Council. Mark Woulf, Former Director of Food & Alcohol Policy, City of Madison, states, “[The Madison Food Policy Council] is quite large and the point of doing that was to pull from all parts of the food system, elected officials, and turn it into a body that would work outside of monthly meetings, be a little nimble and start to support some of the work already going on. We knew we weren’t starting from scratch” (Woulf 2020).

One foundational piece of the MFPC is its reliance on work groups to conduct the work underlying food policy making. At its inception, the MFPC analyzed gaps in the current food system, surveyed council members on community priorities, and then developed an initial set of seven work groups. Each work group was tasked with prioritizing and addressing one food system gap. For example, the Council’s Healthy Retail Access Program emphasized supporting entrepreneurs of color and organizations led by people of color that were working in the neighborhoods identified as food access improvement areas. The MFPC also developed a set of work groups that tackled other aspects of the food system and environmental sustainability ranging from pollinator protection to food waste reduction.

As a work group completes its charge, it is disbanded and new work groups emerge as new priorities are identified. Work groups are expected to make progress on their tasks in between monthly meetings, using the public monthly meeting space for reporting back to the Council as a whole. All food policy council members are encouraged to serve on at least one work group. Interested individuals who are not current MFPC members may also serve on work groups as ad hoc members. In addition, many former food policy council members contribute to work groups on an ad hoc or advisory basis. There have been nine work groups since the inception of the MFPC, four of which have completed their charges. A Madison Food Policy Council Prospective Member Guide lays out the expectations for food policy council members and work groups members. Mark Woulf, now Business Services Manager of the City of Boulder, Colorado, was the first city employee to staff the food policy council, with the title of Food and Alcohol Policy Director. George Reistad assumed the position of Food Policy Director in 2016 upon Woulf’s departure. The Food Policy Director’s position remained under the Mayor’s Office until late 2021, when the position was moved to the Economic Development Division and retitled. MFPC staffing duties are now shared between that position and a food systems specialist from the staff at Public Health of Madison and Dane County.

All MFPC meetings and work groups meetings are publicly noticed and publicly accessible. When there are no timely announcements at monthly MFPC meetings, staff members arrange presentations on various food system topics, which often attract a public presence. Other than these community presentations, there typically is not a large public presence at most MFPC meetings. One possible barrier is that monthly meetings are located in the early evening in a central downtown location – a time and location that are not accessible to all, especially folks with child care responsibilities and/or transportation barriers.

Over time, MFPC work groups developed landmark policies, initiatives, and projects to strengthen the city’s food system. For example, the Edible Landscape work group created an interactive city map showing which parcels of land are owned by the city. Using this map, residents are now able to identify city-owned lots and rights-of-way near their homes and apply for permits to plant edible food in those locations. City staff also created a Food Access Improvement Map, showing census tracts with low access to food outlets and where household incomes are low, and designating these areas as focal points for improvement. The City uses this map to shape food system-related project and program funding, and encourages project development in those areas.

Two important MFPC programs provide financial resources for smaller community groups and food retail entrepreneurs, focusing on people of color and targeting areas of the City where healthy food access is limited. The SEED Grant program offers grants annually of between $2,000 and $10,000 to community organizations working to strengthen the Madison food system through innovative start-up projects. The Healthy Retail Access Program provides larger grant amounts to small retailers and entrepreneurs located in city-designated healthy food access priority areas.

Applicants prepare proposals that receive initial concept review from the City’s Food Policy Director before being advanced to the respective grant committees. In a collaborative approach that supports community members’ efforts and breaks down the barrier of technical grant-writing expertise, applicants revise their applications – sometimes multiple times – in response to work group questions. Proposals then advance to the full MFPC for a final decision only when they are likely to be approved for funding. As former Food and Alcohol Policy Director Mark Woulf describes, these grants are “an investment with community not upon community” (Woulf 2020). Grantees have purchased coolers to stock fresh fruits and vegetables in their stores and mercados, purchased vans to make food deliveries to customers, and, in one instance, a female entrepreneur of color received funding to support the development of a small grocery store in a South Madison neighborhood that had lost its large grocery retailer. In that case, neighborhood residents were able to walk to shop at the smaller store, where before they had had to cross a large state highway to reach the big box store.

Perhaps the greatest MFPC policy success arose from the recent efforts of the Comprehensive Plan Work Group.Footnote 7 Prior to 2018, Madison’s comprehensive plan had but cursory mention of the food system. While the City’s planning staff worked through an 18-month participatory planning process, the MFPC’s Comprehensive Plan Work Group sought out best practices for food systems planning from around the United States. Work group members, along with then-Food Policy Director Reistad, made recommendations for specific plan language, which was provided to staff for possible inclusion in the plan. The work group reviewed the resulting comprehensive plan elements as they were developed, requesting revisions to strengthen the plan’s language around the food system. As the comprehensive plan moved through the approval process, the work group’s members advocated for desired plan language in front of 17 boards, commissions, and committees with jurisdiction over the various plan chapters. In the end, the Comprehensive Plan Work Group succeeded at integrating food systems goals, objectives, strategies, and actions into every section of the comprehensive plan, including a call for a regional food systems planning process in the plan chapter on intergovernmental coordination.

5 COVID-19 Response

As in all communities across the country, COVID-19 necessitated rapid responses in Madison to overcome school closings, restaurant shutdowns, broken supply chains, and an increased need for community food. Food system actors in Madison stepped up admirably to this task. Some stakeholders noted that COVID-19 increased the perceived importance of local food. Says Claire Strader, who has a position with Dane County Extension and FairShare CSA Coalition, “The Madison consumer is pretty well informed about local food and has fairly good access to local food. A strength is an educated consumer base that is ready to think about local food and accessing it, and that has become stronger since COVID. The safety of food is a consideration that people have and they feel local food is safer and it feels more accessible and tangible than a farm in California where you don’t have the same connection” (Strader 2020).

Some local growers were able to increase production to meet increased demand. For example, Rooted was able to pivot from education to production in light of COVID-19. At its Northside location, the organization expanded Troy Farm’s production by 50%, sold all of its market-rate CSA memberships in record time, and conducted a rapid response fundraising campaign to fully subsidize an additional 85 CSA memberships for food insecure families. FairShare CSA Coalition provided matching funds for the 85 shares. Troy Farm produce also made its way into the Northside Planning Council’s FEED To Go meals, prepared at their incubator kitchens.

In addition to the no-cost CSA shares offered by Rooted, the FairShare CSA Coalition partnered with Second Harvest food bank to distribute CSA boxes to food pantries. Madison has a high density of CSA options, which have thrived during COVID-19.

At Badger Rock Neighborhood Center, its South Madison location, Rooted tripled the number of community garden beds, brought its second hoop house (constructed during the 2019 growing season) into full production, conducted container garden giveaways, and plugged into the emergency food aggregation and distribution system for Southsiders. And, the Neighborhood Center became a grab-and-go breakfast and lunch site in the Madison Metropolitan School District’s food distribution program for the remainder of the school year and over the summer.

Rooted also shifted its educational programming to meet the demands of the COVID-19 pandemic. With face-to-face summer programming for children and families an impossibility, Rooted staff took their gardening and cooking lessons to a Facebook live video format, posting recipes and ingredients in advance so that people could participate in real time or at a later date. Staff also shared the youth farm and kids’ garden harvest with community centers, delivering kits of ingredients and recipes to youth groups that normally would have participated in on site field trips.

However, other market channels suffered from the pandemic. Growers and processors which typically distributed to restaurants faced significant food waste, highlighting the lack of infrastructure for aggregation in Madison. As Carrie Edgar, Dane County Extension, recounts, “One thing positive that [may] come out of the COVID experience is we really need to invest in food infrastructure like aggregation, food storage, [and] distribution... Much of the milk raised in Dane County was going to one processor to make it into mozzarella for pizzerias. They didn’t need as much milk with pizzerias closed, so [the processors] asked all their producers to dump 20% of [their] milk. We didn’t have a way to collect that milk and bottle it. We asked if they could make it into cheese. The food pantries didn’t want it because it would come in 15 pound bags and we can’t distribute 15 pounds of mozzarella. So it’s like how do we store food? Who is on the ground aggregating?” (Edgar 2020).

Emergency food system organizations in Madison seemed to react with resiliency to the system shocks caused by COVID-19. As Catie Badsing of the CAC shared, “There's an awareness of the issues here, a strong willingness for people to help in the food system, and we have a really decentralized food system here. In a lot of states, pantries are run by one or two food banks. And that is efficient, but can lead to some weaknesses seen in this pandemic. We’ve had increased food pantry usage here, but not the lines you see in Texas. We have a really decentralized system and a hyperlocal focus for feeding agencies by territory or social group or age. There’s a lot of agencies doing different things that they can drill down to what their slice of the community needs, which is less efficient but leads to a lot of resiliency” (Badsing 2020).

For example, REAP Food Group (Research, Education, Action and Policy on Food Group) put together 200 market boxes to be distributed weekly by promotoras (community health workers) from Roots4Change to families and individuals who were undocumented or were working in essential positions. Rooted’s Badger Rock Neighborhood Center became a mini food hub for the program, where produce, meat, eggs, bread, and tortillas purchased by REAP from local farmers were aggregated, sorted, and boxed for distribution by Roots4Change.

The County also bolstered the local food bank, providing $3 million to purchase food from local farms.Footnote 8 While the increased donations to food banks were critical in this unprecedented time, storage of food and transportation remain key issues.

Hopefully, COVID-19 will spur Madison to address its public infrastructure deficiencies in aggregation and storage of food. Carrie Edgar shares a positive takeaway on the ramifications of COVID-19 on strengthening the local food system: “Agencies are sharing, especially larger pantries are making connections and sharing things in a way that’s never happened before. So I think it’s awful that it had to happen this way, but the pandemic is making good connections and really folks are working together in new ways” (Edgar 2020).

Both the Madison Food Policy Council and Dane County Food Council readjusted their work groups in light of COVID-19. Prior to May 6, 2020, the work groups of the Madison Food Policy Council included: (1) community engagement, (2) food waste and recovery, (3) healthy retail access, (4) healthy marketing and procurement, (5) pollinator protection and integrated pest management policy review task force, (6) SEED grants, and (7) urban agriculture. In light of COVID-19, both the Madison Food Policy Council and Dane County Food Council adopted the following joint work groups to address imminent needs exacerbated by the pandemic: (1) food relief, (2) pandemic food access, (3) food recovery and resilience, and (4) regional agriculture and food sovereignty.

By pivoting to current community needs, following the lead of boots-on-the-ground leaders, and developing new collaborations around immediate food needs, the Madison community responded to the pandemic within a framework of resiliency and collaboration.

6 Inclusivity

Equitable and inclusive urban agricultural frameworks work to redistribute power within the food system and make way for historically marginalized groups to realize food sovereignty. To be equitable, organizations should aim to be inclusive at all levels of an initiative from inception, to leadership, and impact. In a recent white paper, the Equitable Food Oriented Development (EFOD) Collaborative (2019) identifies indicators of EFOD starting with equity-and-justice-first as the primary indicator, but including place-based, market-oriented, community-developed, and community-owned indicators as hallmarks of equitable and inclusive food system development. Inclusivity is critical for any functioning food system to be a just food system. Racial and socioeconomic status diversity must permeate food policy council membership, board membership, training programs, land ownership opportunities, and organization staffing in order for a food system to be truly equitable. While many Madison and Dane County organizations in the public sector and the nonprofit sector have taken steps to increase racial equity, diversity, and inclusion, substantial work remains to reach equity and justice. Ultimately, community members need to play leadership roles in food systems planning and policy development for the resulting plans and policies to have any long-term relevance (Raja and Diao 2016, p. 24).

Rooted asserts a “commit[ment] to enabling people to grow and thrive in healthy, equitable, and sustainable neighborhoods” (vision), through “collaborations in food, land, and learning” (mission) (Rooted n.d.). However, diversity has not always been a strength of the organization. According to Martin Bailkey, a founding board member of Community GroundWorks (now Rooted) and Rooted staff member, “Troy Gardens was initially seen as a white person’s project and people of color weren’t invited to participate. As a result when things were more or less set in place, the folks concerned about diversity looked around and saw that there wasn’t as much diversity as they would like” (Bailkey 2020). As a newly merged organization, there is an increased emphasis on racial equity, diversity, and inclusion at Rooted. The organization has chosen to begin its strategic planning process by articulating a racial equity, diversity, and inclusion vision and plan, which will become the foundation for the more traditional strategic planning process pertaining to programs and projects.

Similarly to Rooted, the Dane County Food Council began with mainly white middle-class members. As Carrie Edgar recounted, “when I came it was an all white middle-class council and none of them were engaged in farming or worked in the food system, but were passionate and people who would describe themselves as activists. There's been some movement away from that to have farmers and food entrepreneurs represented, so someone with a sense of food retail, food waste streams, and looking at racial and ethnic diversity” (Edgar 2020).

When organizations begin as white-led and middle class-led, imbued norms and work culture stem from the comfort of white middle-class folks. Even if the organization works to expand its leadership at a later date, work cultures can be very difficult to change. Moreover, with white middle-class leadership and direction, it can be hard for other communities, such as Madison’s Hmong community for example, to feel accurately represented and included in urban agriculture policy.

As public participation in planning processes so often reveals, there exist tensions between MFPC’s desire to build community capacity through an inclusive and representative membership, and the formality demanded of participation in city decision-making processes. MFPC struggles with finding council membership that is fully representative of Madison’s demographics. The Council’s Community Engagement work group enlisted the help of the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future to address, from a racial equity lens, how the council could be more inclusive. One finding, which mirrors the findings of the Task Force on Government Structure, is that there is a tradeoff between the professionalization of the committee and inclusivity. As then-Madison Food Policy Director George Reistad observed, “This is highly professional work. Not just some random person off the street with no experience could jump in and do it. You have to have an interest in this field of work and that’s limited, and then also have time and capacity to put into city structure work, and then you have to be able to then serve on a regular basis to do that. A lot of folks in our group, they have a lot of leeway with their paying job to do work for the council because their supervisor supports the food policy council so people can take hours a week to focus on this because it's seen as a part of their job...23% of the African American population in Madison has a college degree and everyone on the food policy council has a college degree, it’s kind of a [tacit] requirement. If that becomes an unspoken requirement, you’ve eliminated 77% of people in this demographic group from being able to serve...I don’t want to say people of more diverse backgrounds can’t meet the rigidity of the food policy council, but it has been a challenge.” (Reistad 2020).

Reistad and others note that there are assets to having a highly professionalized committee. For example, professionals bring expertise from their field, an understanding of highly technical policy language, flexibility in work hours, ability to attend evening meetings downtown, fundraising connections, and other resources that lead to the effective accomplishment of work products in a timely manner. However, limiting council membership to individuals who are comfortable working in a highly professional environment oftentimes limits racial and socioeconomic status diversity. It also discounts experiential knowledge and other forms of expertise held by community members.

One option laid out by several stakeholders is for the MFPC to maintain the professional framework of the council, expand the diversity of work groups that have less stringent attendance requirements, and provide opportunities for community feedback and input that the council members will take into account through the community engagement work group. However, this process still centers the leadership of white middle-class decision makers and assumes that they will listen intently and work from community feedback – a lofty assumption. The council uses a Racial Equity and Social Justice Analysis (RESJI) Tool developed by City staff as a tool to analyze the impacts of proposed policies. However, the RESJI tool does not pose questions about the structural impediments to fostering diverse representation, which is the question of inclusion tied most closely to the council.

Nan Fey, former chair of the Madison Food Policy Council, aptly sums up the perceived tradeoff of inclusivity in Madison: “If you're going to make food policy for a community, you need to be confident you are hearing from the folks to whom it’s going to make a really big difference. I think that’s the most frustrating thing for me as a leader of the group, we’ve wanted more voices at the table and it’s so hard to get them there. And it’s not their fault. It’s the fault of our cumbersome procedures” (Fey 2020).

7 Codification

Codification is crucial to ensure the longevity of initiatives. A lack of codified urban agriculture policies can lead to the erosion of prior gains. For example, urban agriculture permitted as a temporary land use is vulnerable to shocks such as rising land values, developer interests, and changing political priorities. Initiatives that are not codified should be valued and often represent important antecedents to codification. However, whenever possible, initiatives should be codified so they can lay the groundwork and justification for future policy work. And, once urban agriculture initiatives and policies are codified, the strength of local government commitment can be expressed through budget allocations that support urban agriculture.

Working with community and conservation land trusts, as in the case of Troy Gardens, can be an effective way to ensure equity and codification of urban agricultural investments (Caton Campbell and Salus 2003). Troy Gardens is protected by two separate land trusts. The Madison Area Community Land Trust (MACLT) owns both the five-acre parcel of land containing 30 units of low-density, owner occupied, mixed-income housing, and the adjacent 26 acres of agricultural land and natural areas, which is leased to Rooted for their urban agriculture work. Rooted, an urban land trust, holds a conservation easement on the 26 acres it leases from MACLT, providing a second layer of protection for urban agricultural uses. Agreements such as these represent highly codified strategies that ensure hard-won equitable uses of space are not short-term gains.

The structure of food councils can also enhance or detract from codification. The Dane County Food Council is staffed by the UW-Madison Extension Dane County, while the Madison Food Policy Council is now staffed by Public Health of Madison & Dane County. The MFPC intentionally added alders to its membership to ensure that the body would survive politically past the tenure of the founding mayor. Having political support on the food policy council is an asset. According to Mark Woulf, one strength of having political representation is that “you don’t have to lobby to get attention since [the food policy council] already has attention from city council members and they can be the champions with other city councilmembers.” Arguably, this attention from elected representatives allowed the Comprehensive Plan work group to wield greater influence at the board, commission, and committee levels with respect to the inclusion of food systems goals, objectives, and strategies, as the comprehensive plan made its way through the approval process during the summer of 2018.

Nan Fey noted that, “When we did our first comprehensive plan, I knew how important it was to get stuff in the plan you could point to and say you said you were going to do this, how are you going to do it...If you can point to an ordinance, there's enforcement. If it’s best practices, we can watchdog it.” MFPC’s Comprehensive Plan Work Group succeeded in centering food in the 2018 Comprehensive Plan (City of Madison 2018). The word “food” is mentioned 104 times in the 112-page document, excluding appendices. Strategies, concepts, and definitions codified in the 2018 Comprehensive Plan include adding agricultural land as a valued land use, including “access to healthy food” as a “basic life-sustaining strateg[y]”, acknowledging the regional food system as a resource and opportunity in the local economy, adding food as an explicit contributor to creating community spaces and events, establishing the development of guidelines for growing food in the city as an action item, and adding an action item encouraging the City to work with Dane County to develop a regional food systems plan. Such permeation of food across the chapters of the comprehensive plan enables Madison’s Common Council to prioritize the MFPC’s work while still maintaining the priorities of the driving document. It also sets the policy stage for future community food systems planning work in Madison and, potentially, Dane County.

8 Conclusion

Madison and Dane County, Wisconsin, exemplify how urban agriculture can be a kind of ethics-in-action. Throughout this chapter, we have shown how individuals and organizations interact with regulatory processes in frameworks to achieve both organizational and more broadly social and community goals. We showed how earlier efforts in urban agriculture became a framework upon which new efforts were built, new jobs, like food policy director, were created, and new organizations emerged, took root, and are now bearing fruit. The City and County’s long history of steady local government regulatory progress supporting urban agriculture began in the mid-1960s with community gardens, and has extended to the City’s recently adopted comprehensive plan in 2018. At times, regulatory change was stimulated by urban agriculture innovation taking place in the nonprofit sector, such as the Troy Gardens project. That community- and nonprofit-sector-led project not only resulted in a novel application of the community land trust model to a 31-acre, mixed-use housing and urban agriculture development inside Madison’s municipal boundaries, but eventually prompted the definition and inclusion of an urban agriculture district during the City’s 2013 zoning code revision.

Madison and Dane County have demonstrated a history of strong intergovernmental cooperation in the development and overlapping membership of their respective food councils and work groups, the shared management partnership (with a nonprofit organization) of The Gardens Network, and their food councils’ response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Jointly adopting the same work groups and together tackling everything from immediate responses to emergency food needs to longer term work on healthy food access and planning for regional agriculture and food sovereignty, the City and County have exhibited their mutual dedication to weathering the COVID-19 crisis, and creating a more resilient community and regional food system in the future.

As is the case in many cities and regions, however, food systems policy and practice in Madison and Dane County, from the government to the nonprofit sector, has been dominated by white majority culture (however well-meaning folks might be) for decades. The spring and summer of 2020 brought the dual pandemics of COVID-19 and structural racism – and the racial disparities associated with them – into sharp relief across the United States. Food systems planning must be grounded in equitable and inclusive processes, and the communities with which and for whom we plan must be in a shared leadership role. The creation of the MFPC/DCFC joint Regional Agriculture and Food Sovereignty Work Group signals local government’s acknowledgment that racial equity and inclusion must be put at the forefront of the City and County’s food system planning efforts. What remains to be seen is how the process will unfold.