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Gardens and farms provide individuals and communities with access to affordable, nutritious, and culturally significant foods. There is a rich body of literature unpacking the connections between Black urban growing and agency, freedom, resistance, and care. However, spirituality remains one aspect of health and wellbeing that has not been studied extensively in relation to agriculture. The main goal of this study was to conduct focus groups with Philly-based growers to understand the self-determined impacts of urban agriculture on health, agency, and wellbeing. The secondary goal of this work was to determine if these impacts differ by race. I apply a collective agency and community resilience theoretical framework to this study. This framework offers a model to understand agriculture as a way for communities to become self-determined, self-reliant, and self-sustained. For this study exploring the impacts of urban agriculture on health, there were three eligibility criteria. Participants had to be at least 18 years old, identify as Black or White, and have grown food in a garden or farm in Philadelphia. I hosted six race-specific focus groups at Bartram's Garden in Southwest Philadelphia. The audio recordings were transcribed, and the full transcripts were coded using open and axial coding methods and a "key concepts" framework. We also employed several methods of triangulation to help ensure the credibility and validity of the findings. Four major themes emerged from the data: growing as a demonstration of agency and power, growing as a facilitator of body-mind wellness, community care and relationship-building, and deepened spiritual connection and interdependence. There were both similarities and differences in the impacts of urban agriculture by race. Across the six focus groups, people talked about concepts related to community care and relationship-building as being major benefits of growing food. In both groups, people also brought up significant issues and barriers around land security. Mentions of spirituality appeared more frequently and more emphatically in the Black focus groups. Black focus groups were more likely to discuss the collective impacts of agriculture, while White participants were more likely to discuss the impacts on themselves as individuals. The findings of this focus group study point to some key domains through which agriculture impacts the health of farmers and growers in Philadelphia.

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RESUMEN

Black and low-income neighborhoods tend to have higher concentrations of fast-food restaurants and low produce supply stores. Limited access to and consumption of nutrient-rich foods is associated with poor health outcomes. Given the realities of food access, many members within the Black communities grow food as a strategy of resistance to food apartheid, and for the healing and self-determination that agriculture offers. In this paper, we unpack the history of Black people, agriculture, and land in the United States. In addition to our brief historical review, we conduct a descriptive epidemiologic study of community food-growing spaces, food access, and neighborhood racial composition in present day Philadelphia. We leverage one of the few existing datasets that systematically documents community food-growing locations throughout a major US city. By applying spatial regression techniques, we use conditional autoregressive models to determine if there are spatial associations between Black neighborhoods, poverty, food access, and urban agriculture in Philadelphia. Fully adjusted spatial models showed significant associations between Black neighborhoods and urban agriculture (RR: 1.28, 95% CI = 1.03, 1.59) and poverty and urban agriculture (RR: 1.27, 95% CI = 1.1, 1.46). The association between low food access and the presence of urban agriculture was generally increased across neighborhoods with a higher proportion of Black residents. These results show that Philadelphia neighborhoods with higher populations of Black people and neighborhoods with lower incomes, on average, tend to have more community gardens and urban farms. While the garden data is non-temporal and non-causal, one possible explanation for these findings, in alignment with what Philadelphia growers have claimed, is that urban agriculture may be a manifestation of collective agency and community resistance in Black and low-income communities, particularly in neighborhoods with low food access.

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