A new urban agriculture guide to evaluate benefits
Posted: August 5, 2015
Categories: Community Gardens / Food in the News / GoodFoodBites / Research
A new indicator guide that tracks activities associated with urban agriculture and measures the health, social, economic and ecological benefits of said activities was recently released in the United States. The indicator guide was created by Five Borough Farm, a project that works to highlight the benefits of urban agriculture.
According to Five Borough Farm, this indicator guide is the first tool of its kind in the country. Their metrics framework measures various activities across multiple farms and gardens in New York City to measure the health, social, economic, and ecological benefits of urban agriculture. The matrix highlights which activities (such as raising livestock, food justice education, or farmers markets) corresponds to which potential outcome of the four listed above. Five Borough Farm also created a set of user-friendly tools to be used by farmers and gardeners everywhere to track and evaluate the impacts of urban agriculture.
Click the image to view or download a PDF of the matrix, and check out this interactive set-up of their indicator guide that tells you what is being measured.