American Farmland Trust’s Julia Freedgood on Planning Sustainable Food Systems for All People

Julia Freedgood: Most people talk about the food system as if it were a single thing. But really, in my experience, we have numerous intersecting food systems that [are] kind of nested together like Matryoshka dolls. They run the gamut from emergency food systems to huge global supply chains with community, local, urban, rural, regional, domestic—all these other food systems nested in between. And to me, each is important, and each has a role to play.

Meghan Stromberg: Let's talk about food, specifically access to a variety of healthy, affordable foods. It's a foundational element of strong, happy and thriving communities. They can't be built and sustained without it. Interest in food systems planning has grown in recent years. There's even a division of the American Planning Association dedicated to it, the Food Systems Division. But how much time do you spend thinking about sustainable and resilient food systems? My guest on People Behind the Plans thinks about it a lot, and she's even written a book about it.

Welcome to this episode of People Behind the Plans. I'm your host, Meghan Stromberg, editor-in-chief at the American Planning Association. My guest is Julia Freedgood. She's the author of Planning Sustainable and Resilient Food Systems, published by Routledge this year. Julia also serves as a senior fellow and senior program advisor at the American Farmland Trust. She's trained as a planner and is a longtime member of the American Planning Association.

In this episode, Julia reminds us that while urban agriculture has its place, land use planning and protection in rural areas is essential to producing the food that we need. She'll share how planners can shift their mindset toward comprehensive food systems planning, and she'll offer guidance on working with rural communities to address food challenges. We'll also talk about a maybe counterintuitive threat to food systems planning that comes in the form of renewable energy systems.

Hi Julia, thanks for joining us on People Behind the Plans.

Julia: Thanks, Meghan. It's great to be here.

Meghan: And I heard that this is your first time on a podcast?

Julia: This is absolutely my first time. I have listened to many, many podcasts, but it's the first time I've ever been on one myself.

Meghan: Well, you're going to do great, and I can't wait to start talking about the book.

Julia: Thank you.

Meghan: So, your new book is called, Planning Sustainable and Resilient Food Systems. There's kind of a lot to break down in that title. And we'll get to the idea of sustainable and resilient a little bit later. But I noticed that ‘food systems’ is plural. I wonder if a lot of people think about it as one thing, as one big food system. Is that the right way to think about how and where our food comes from?

Julia: I think that's a great question, Meghan. And I think you're right that most people talk about the food system as if it were a single thing. But really, in my experience, we have numerous intersecting food systems that are kind of nested together like Matryoshka dolls. They run the gamut from emergency food systems to huge global supply chains with community, local, urban, rural, regional, domestic, all these other food systems nested in between. And to me, each is important and each has a role to play. But when we conflate them into one sort of monolithic system, it makes it really hard to change anything, especially on the ground in communities where so many of the most important food systems decisions get made. So it's important to disentangle them and to be intentional about the appropriate level of planning and policy engagement for each type of system.

Meghan: One thing that's gotten a lot of interest in recent years is urban agriculture. During and after the COVID-19 pandemic, a lot of people were thinking of urban agriculture as a way to have immediate sort of geographic access to where your food comes from. But it's more than that, isn't it?

Julia: So, I think it's really important not to pit one system against another. And if we're going to create the sustainable, resilient, equitable food systems, we need to address food insecurity and broadly to mitigate and adapt to climate change. We really have to work together. And part of that is bridging the urban/rural divide. So, while a lot of the food we eat is produced in metro counties or urban influence counties, especially perishable foods like fruits and vegetables, a lot more is produced in rural areas, especially staple commodities like wheat and rice and oats, meat, that kind of thing.

And so, when I was working on the book—and it was during COVID and I was following the press and observing, you know, kind of a breakdown in the brittleness of our increasingly consolidated kind of global domestic systems—I was really reassured by what was happening here in my own community in western Massachusetts. And later, following research that has showed how more diversified, customer-focused local regional food systems could pivot quickly to fill gaps. And these more regionalized systems, which encompass urban ag but are not primarily urban ag, were quick to react, to adapt to leverage networks. So, I think if we can look broadly and think about what's coming from rural America, what's coming from urban America, and how we bring the two together, we're going to be in much better shape if we want to be able to deal with, you know, sudden disruptions and the kinds of things that come with climate change or global unrest or all of the other sort of forces that are affecting our food systems and driving up food prices these days.

Meghan: What's the role of planners in helping to create this sustainable and resilient set of systems?

Julia: I'm probably biased just because I'm a planner by nature and by training, but I think planners are supposed to look at systems, right? We're supposed to think about how different elements intersect with each other. The relationship between transportation and housing and environment and hazard mitigation and all of these things that are all embedded in our food systems. And so, I think planners have sort of a particular propensity, ability to look at the system in a holistic way, and then to think about how you engage in communities to figure out—again, thinking about these nested systems—how to strengthen what they're producing, what they're consuming, how they're distributing the food, all of that. I think planners have a really important role to play as long as they don't get stuck just planning, right? So, they need to plan, but they also need to work with the communities or states where they're engaged in planning to make sure that there's action that comes out of the plans.

Meghan: Julia, I'm wondering if there are any particular challenges or differences, things that planners should be aware of when they're going into new communities and doing this kind of work, if they're used to a different environment than a rural community.

Julia: Yeah, I think that's really important. Rural areas—in my experience, anyway—tend to be a little skeptical about planning about government intervention. People work together, they help their neighbors, but they don't really look to government for answers. And where most cities have planning departments—some rural counties do, but often they have volunteer boards and planning commissions, and a lot of the land use decisions get made at the municipal level, the township level. And so, when a planner with an urban background comes into rural and they want to kind of bring their toolbox from urban, there can be a real clash. They're used to working with zoning things that are really different in rural.

For example, most recently, in a rural county in Wayne County, Ohio, when I started to work with them, I was told, ‘Never use the Z word. You'll be shot.’ I was like, ‘OK, hands up. I won't use the Z word, I promise.’ After four years and a lot of engagement and raising issues and discussion amongst very diverse people who all have a real stake in the food system now, and a lot because of the threat of utility solar scale development/ utility solar. People are saying to me, ‘What's your opinion about zoning?’ And I pretty much say, ‘Well, don't shoot me, but it can work for you if you take a broad view and you use it to solve your problems. But do planning first, please, do your planning first.’

I think it's really important for them to find people who are embedded in the community to help lead a community engagement process, not to kind of stand apart with the gatekeepers and the official people, but to actually go into the community and listen to the wisdom of the room, to engage with the farming community, to engage with the processors, to engage with people in communities where they don't have access to high-quality fresh produce—all of that to really get everybody at the table. And then the other thing that I think is really important in rural—I actually think it's important in any planning, but especially in rural—where so many people go into rural communities and define them by what they lack rather than what assets they have. What are your assets? What do you have to work with? You have a lot to grow a healthy and sustainable food system. Why are you exporting everything and not keeping anything in your community? Why are you importing all of your food when you can grow so much here? Having those conversations and taking an asset-based approach I think is really, really important, especially in rural communities and especially in lower-wealth communities.

Meghan: We think about pressures on farmland coming from certainly residential development or other kinds of development. But can you tell us a little bit about what's happening with large-scale solar production? We all want to be pro-renewable energy, right? But it's a little bit more complicated than that, isn't it?

Julia: You're absolutely right that planners are well aware that low-density, sprawling residential development remains an insidious threat in rural communities to farmland. But there's increasing competition for land from things like warehouses, renewable energy and especially utility solar installations. The Department of Energy predicts its solar deployment could grow four times its current rate through, I think, 2050, and 90% of that is going to occur on rural lands. They could work harmoniously. We have to look at where there's potentially disturbed lands instead of putting solar on our best-quality farmland. And planners, you know, they're good at mapping, they're good at research, they're good at all the things that could help make those decisions. But if we don't have good planning and local policy interventions, most of the solar development is going to happen on farmland because it's cheaper, it's flat, it has good solar exposure, it's easy to develop.

I think there's a really good example from California's San Joaquin Valley, and that's one of the world's most productive ag regions. It's vital to our food supply. They have high solar isolation, a temperate climate, and they're under a lot of pressure to achieve the state's very aggressive renewable energy goals. With input from the Governor's Office of Planning and Research, they put together a team of planners and conservationists who did a stakeholder-led process to identify least-conflict lands for solar development, and they used really sophisticated mapping, but did a lot of engagement. And at the end, they were able to identify, I think it was, 470,000 acres. So, a lot of acres that were appropriate for solar, but only about 5% of the land based in the region. And so, in that way, they were able to get both goals right. They could have renewable energy, and they could continue to have sustainable food production. American Farmland Trust has been working on smart solar principles to help guide solar so that we can protect farmland. We can protect the viability of local agriculture, but we also can accelerate renewable energy because we need both.

Meghan: I love that example. And as technology changes so quickly­—you mentioned sophisticated mapping and various other tools—the possibility for planners and other stakeholders and decision makers to truly understand and be able to weigh the tradeoffs, that's in our hands right now.

Julia: Absolutely. You bring people together, you use good tools, you get people talking, and you come to decisions that everybody can live with. And, you know, as scary as some of the things that are happening in the world can be, I really am optimistic that if we bring people together in these kinds of ways, we can solve our problems at the community level, at the state level, and not only relying on federal policy, but really from the ground up, engaging with farmers and ranchers, engaging with people in communities and getting the change done. So, that's my hope for the future. That's my hope for the book.

Meghan: You've written quite a bit about this concept called polycrisis, and that's this confluence of related global risks that have a compounding impact. Then the polycrisis also comes up in APA's 2024 Trend Report for Planners. Can you talk a little bit about this concept and how it impacts planning for sustainable and resilient food systems?

Julia: Yeah, it's a new word that I learned when I was working on the book. And I really took it as a wakeup call. The problems we're facing here in the U.S. are actually worldwide issues, and our food systems are very much affected by what's happening in the world, whether that's climate change and environmental challenges or social unrest or an exodus of many people from their countries, which I think will get worse with climate change. So, if we think about how much we could do in the 20th century, kind of coming out of the Great Depression and trying to ensure that we had an abundant and affordable and reliable food supply. And then we say, well, productivity is still really important, but we need to be sustainable. We need to be resilient. We need to be evenhanded and fair. We can't leave large swaths of the population behind. Then I think we take polycrisis as a wakeup call and say, ‘OK, what do we need to do now for the 21st century?’

I was excited at the APA Conference to hear the word come up, to hear that the Trend Report points out that climate change and its relationship to these other challenges, like food insecurity and resource scarcity and the migrant crisis and so on, are on planners minds. So, then what can we do to kind of bring about the 21st century transformation that's as sweeping as what we saw over the past 50 years?

I'm optimistic. I mean, I'm terrified, too, but I'm also optimistic that we can solve our problems here on Earth. I think we can look to regenerative agriculture, to better land use policies in rural America, to building diversified supply chains and breaking up some of that consolidation and concentration. That's, I think, a little bit holding us hostage at the supermarket these days to developing from the local level up, evenhanded policies that spread the wealth. I think that we can take a look at where we are and make a difference right now by strengthening the myriad of food systems we already have, and looking for ways to make them more sustainable, to look at how to build in enough resiliency or redundancy to achieve resilience. I really think that we can do it. I kind of look at polycrisis and say, ‘OK, everybody, let's go. Let's solve it. Let's do it. We can do it, so let's get started.’ I don't know, I'm old, but I'm still optimistic. What can I say?

Meghan: I love your optimism, and I love your passion for this topic. And I suspect there's lots of things that you're passionate about. When you were in planning school, is this where you saw yourself working in farmland and agriculture policy and practice?

Julia: That's a good question. That was a long, long time ago in a century far, far away. I actually think that is where it all began to come together. I was working on a soft money project at Tufts University, which was called Sustaining Agriculture Near Cities. So, you can see that interest in bridging the urban rural divide was already there many, many years ago. One of the great benefits of working for Tufts was that they provided financial support. I was able to get my master's in Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning, and my boss was really supportive about it. And one day, we had a meeting with my boss, this brilliant guy named Willie Lackritz, a guy named Hugh Joseph, who was then a Ph.D. student, and Gus Schumacher, who's gone on to be extremely famous, but who at the time was the Massachusetts Commissioner of Agriculture. And we were brainstorming the same intersection, really, that the book is about. How do you improve local farm viability? At the time, most of our farmers here in New England were selling wholesale, but there was a huge market available to them to start looking at more retail strategies—how to keep farmland in farming and also how to help low-income residents gain access to fresh local food.

We did a lot of work around farmers markets, and we came up with the idea to offer farmers market coupons to Wick recipients and senior citizens. We piloted this back in 1986, and we literally were using paper coupons and were counting paper coupons then. By the early 90s, it became a national program. And now there are all these spinoff programs and many, many programs that are making that connection between building rural prosperity, supporting local farms and farmers, improving community food security, all of those things, bringing those ideas together. And to me, that was it, right? That's what we can do. We can do this in our own communities. We can work with the resources we have to make this happen. It means really looking at this intersecting web and how do we strengthen them all together so that we can get the environmental outcomes, the health outcomes, the community economic development outcomes, the farm viability outcomes that we really want.

Meghan: And like you said before, planners are great system thinkers.

Julia: Exactly. And it's always a pleasure to work with planners because then I quickly pivot to policy makers. And then you get very specific and jurisdictional, and you have legal minds. I'm much more at home with planners who are more visionary and looking for goals.

Meghan: Well, Julia, it has been such a pleasure talking with you today.

Julia: Well, it's been really fun. I really appreciate your interest, Meghan, and APA’s growing interest in this area. It's a really exciting time, and it's really nice to see that work that I started early in my career is kind of blossoming into something that is a path for professional development. It's really cool.

Meghan: Julia Freedgood is the author of the book Planning Sustainable and Resilient Food Systems, and is a senior fellow with the American Farmland Trust.

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