Three Years In, New York’s Urban Agriculture Office Has Delivered

By Haley Schusterman

The Mayor’s Office of Urban Agriculture (MOUA) isn’t a household name. Given what it’s quietly accomplished since it was established in 2022, with limited city funding and just two full-time staff, it probably should be.

For decades, urban agriculture operated on the margins of policy attention and public investment, treated as a nice-to-have rather than a serious tool for change. That shifted in 2021, when the City Council passed Local Law 121 and Local Law 123, formally recognizing that urban agriculture deserved a permanent home in government. The legislation created MOUA, housed within the Mayor’s Office of Climate and Environmental Justice, and tasked it with producing a comprehensive urban agriculture report, building an online portal with mapping tools, running education and outreach programs, conducting research to inform future legislation, and advising other city agencies on how to protect and expand urban agriculture. The laws also authorized an independent Urban Agriculture Advisory Board to bring together advocates, academics, and agriculture experts. The former mayoral administration never appointed the board, but MOUA moved forward without it.

Three years in, the office is delivering on its full mandate. It built its own relationships with community leaders and advocates, launched education programs connecting students to working farms, opened pathways for small farmers to sell to city institutions, mapped the city’s urban agriculture landscape, and pushed for procurement reform that could redirect how the city spends its food dollars. The office is working to change how eight million New Yorkers grow, buy, and think about food, using urban agriculture as a lever for climate action, environmental justice, food access, workforce development, and economic resilience.

NYC’s Urban Agriculture Landscape

To understand what MOUA is building, it helps to first understand the landscape it’s tasked with overseeing, growing, and making accessible to more New Yorkers.

Urban agriculture in New York takes many forms: community gardens where neighbors grow vegetables and flowers, urban farms selling produce at farmers markets or donating to food pantries, school gardens, rooftop farms, controlled environment agriculture (CEA), food forests, and backyard plots. Some sites trace their roots to the 1970s, when communities started reclaiming vacant lots during the city’s fiscal crisis. Others have emerged more recently as interest in local food systems has grown. The land stewards who tend to these spaces range from professional farmers to weekend hobbyists tending personal plots to volunteers who show up at community workdays to weed beds they’ll never harvest from.