October 5, 2016

By Jason Jordan, Director of Policy, American Planning Association

The federal farm bill isn’t due to expire until 2018, but efforts to shape that legislation are already heating up on Capitol Hill.

The top Democrat on the Senate Agriculture Committee, Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.), has introduced a new bill to significantly boost urban farming. While the legislation will not become law in the few work weeks remaining in this session of Congress, Stabenow intends for the bill to get conversations started among lawmakers about raising the profile of urban agriculture in the next farm bill.

The legislation — the Urban Agriculture Act (S. 3420) — would both increase resources for urban farmers and add new flexibility to a range of existing U.S. Department of Agriculture programs to better address the needs of urban agriculture…

(For more information and the full blog post, click here.)