ASHS 2025 Conference

Food systems continue to face disruptions, from supply chain breakdowns to climate change and pandemics. Resilience is the ability of a system to respond and adapt to changing circumstances and withstand disruptions. Resilience capacities of urban and peri-urban agriculture sites are important to ensure nutritional security in cities. This project is part of a four-pronged research project covering a transdisciplinary assessment of urban food systems in and around Kansas City; the other three projects include community health; agricultural productivity; and sustainability. This project aims to develop a survey to assess and evaluate the resilience capacities of urban agriculture sites. A literature search was performed and resulted in development five categories of behavior-based resilience capacities for urban agriculture sites: civic engagement; political engagement; social capital; transformational capacity; and land access. A survey based on these categories and using validated questions was developed to collect proxy measurements of resilience capacities for urban agriculture sites. The survey was developed in collaboration with an advisory board of local food system experts. Data was collected using the survey instrument from urban and peri-urban agriculture sites in the following categories: urban production; peri-urban production; intensive production; community garden; training farm; and high school garden. The survey instrument and a follow-up interview were administered to site operators and a truncated survey was given to site employees, volunteers, and visitors. Survey results will illustrate how urban agriculture sites contribute to the resilience of the food system and the community and allow for the comparison of resilience indicators between types of urban agriculture sites. The data will provide a picture of the contributions to food security by type of urban agriculture in the area around Kansas City. The results of the research could be used to help urban agriculture sites become more resilient, as well as influence planning and policy around urban agriculture when seeking to create more resilient communities.