by Elizabeth Henderson
First a couple of farm food-related events:
“Feeding Tomorrow” – film screening September 23 at 6 pm at The Little, sponsored by the Rochester Food Policy Council. After the one-hour documentary, there will be a panel of local people whose work parallels the inspiring examples in the film. Here is the eventbrite link to purchase tickets – $5, but no one turned away for lack of funds: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/film-screening-feeding-tomorrow-tickets-1994986387990
Tour Mud Creek Farm, a small-scale organically managed vegetable farm in Victor, NY on Tuesday, September 29 at 10:45 am. The Abundance Food Coop, along with NOFA-NY and the Food Policy Council, will be holding a field day to tour Mud Creek Farm to learn about community supported agriculture, and highly diverse vegetable production using organic systems that build soil health and mitigate climate change. Free. Mud Creek’s address is 6880 Cherry St, Victor, NY 14564. The entrance to the farm’s semi-circular one-way driveway is on the north side of the road. You enter on the east end and exit on the west end.
The Rochester Community Food System Plan
If anyone had doubts, there is now irrefutable evidence that the food insecurity in Rochester’s “Crescent” neighborhoods results from decades of disinvestment, systemic racism and poverty. After three years of work by Consultants KK+P, with guidance from the Rochester Food Policy Council, a 25-member Community Advisory Council, public surveys and focus groups, the City released the Rochester Community Food System Plan (CFSP) on August 14, 2026. The CFSP is “designed to serve as a roadmap to creating a more vibrant, equitable, and resilient food system for the City of Rochester.” The first half of the plan is a solid and realistic report on the history and present state of food and agriculture in and around Rochester with excellent maps as illustrations and cameos of important institutions and individuals. The plan itself consists of five goals, ten strategies and 44 individual actions that can be taken by city government and many partners. Without a movement of working class people that builds the power to take on the underlying injustices of poverty and systemic racism, this plan will not eliminate hunger, malnutrition and food apartheid in Rochester. But it builds on the positive programs that we already have and has many good ideas for more that can be done on our local level. Please take the time to look it over and see where you can plug in.
As explained on page 4, “The Plan outlines a coordinated set of strategies and actions that the City of Rochester and its many community partners could pursue to create a more equitable, resilient, and connected food system. Each recommended action includes detailed information with a description and rationale for the recommendation; a potential timeline, partners, and some initial steps to inform implementation; references to related recommendations from relevant, previously completed plans; and any relevant models (with links) from other communities across the country from which to draw inspiration.”
The plan presents recommendations in a helpful way dividing them into short, medium and long term, early, keystone and high impact. It also links goals to Plan 2034, a reminder that Rochester has already made a commitment to this work.
The plan’s first Goal is to focus the City’s attention on food issues and get the administration to appoint someone whose job it will be to coordinate actions around food and then pull together all the relevant players. At present, like many other cities, Rochester does not have a food department, so anything related to food falls through the cracks or gets shuttled around to several departments leading to confusion and very slow responses.
Goal 2 calls for increasing access to healthy affordable food and education about food and gardening. This set of strategies and actions builds on existing programs such as the FoodLink Curbside markets, and also subsidized CSA shares and healthy food boxes with a focus on the neighborhoods suffering the worst food apartheid. An immediate urgent need brought on by the cuts to SNAP funding in the Big Horrible Bill is to make sure everyone who qualifies for SNAP/EBT receives it. Better coordination among the active and caring hunger action and mutual aid groups would help. Equally urgent is making sure that the summer meals program reaches all children, including those who do not participate in congregate programs. As during Covid, mobile delivery vans should be free to give out lunches to youngsters wherever they are. A related effort is to make sure our federal electeds refuse to pass a Farm Bill that fails to restore SNAP funding.
The CFSP calls attention to the most critical food apartheid neighborhoods where full-scale grocery stores are few and far between. The City’s “Healthy Grocery” program that identifies smaller stores that carry some fresh produce has not had much effect. Supportive infrastructure is missing such as a reliable service that would deliver fresh food from area farms.
There is some fine language in the CFSP that cries out for implementation: “Rochester is surrounded by one of the nation’s most productive agricultural regions, yet not enough of this bounty consistently reaches small retailers, corner stores, and community markets in the city. Building stronger supply chain connections can help ensure that fresh, locally grown food is more widely available and affordable, particularly in neighborhoods facing limited healthy food access. Regional assets such as the Rochester Public Market, Genesee Valley Regional Market Authority, Foodlink, and Headwater Food Hub already play important roles in aggregating, distributing, and retailing regional products. Intentionally creating pathways for urban growers to connect with these distribution and retail networks would help ensure that locally grown food produced within the city itself is part of this supply chain. Strengthening coordination among these actors, while supporting infrastructure such as cold storage, last-mile delivery, and purchasing cooperatives, can help level the playing field for small retailers and alternative outlets. This will expand access to fresh produce, support local farmers, and build community food sovereignty.”
A few Rochester schools have gardens and nutrition programs, but most do not. There are enough open spaces on school grounds or near most schools to make it possible for every school to have a garden. What is missing is solid support to encourage and train teachers. The CFSP calls for increased education, but it will take a concerted effort on the part of parents, teachers, and civic gardeners backed up by some funding to move from only a few school gardens to a coordinated program that trains all youth in nutrition and how to grow food, funnels those who get excited into training programs with stipends like the current Taproot programs, and then enables the most committed to access further training crowned by public support to help them access the land and other resources necessary to start a farm.
Goal 3 is dear to my heart. It calls for increasing community gardening by building on the network that already exists. Although it took two years of meetings after a crisis when the city bull dozed the Flower City Noire garden, the Urban Agriculture Working Group has made some headway in persuading the city to improve their system for free garden permits that allow for the use of city-owned plots. However, the city still insists that all permits are temporary and can be cancelled if a development opportunity arises. Missing is an agreement by the city to continue reserving some of its plots for development while designating others for permanent use as gardens or greenspace. There is still hope that the final Zoning language will make clear that development is best pursued along transit lines. With over 2000 plots owned by the city, you might think that a few hundred, with a few in each quadrant, could be reserved for gardens.
While sceptics are quick to point out that community gardens cannot feed the city, during World War II, “Victory Gardens” grew enough produce to replace the commercial food production that went to feed the troops. We can do this! With climate disaster and a just-in-time corporate-dominated food system that crumbles when a crisis hits, it behooves us here in Rochester to take our gardens and local farms more seriously. The City’s Recreation and Human Services department already has a good program staffed by people who actually know how to grow things with gardens and training at rec centers and annual deliveries of plants and other supplies to community gardens. There is a solid base to start from.
Goal 4 aims at strengthening the connections between the city and the highly fertile and productive farms in the Finger Lakes counties starting with more investments in the Public Market as the food development center for the city. Although it scores as one of the outstanding markets in the whole country, the Rochester Public Market suffers from persistent understaffing and improvements move slowly. Hopefully the CFSP will bring it the attention it deserves. More support for Headwater Foods so that it can move into the city and expand is another promising set of actions.
The plan also points to institutional purchasing of NY grown foods as a way improve local diets. The Good Food Bill, an important piece of legislation that would allow public institutions like schools to pay up to 10% more to “values-based” NY farm suppliers, sits on Governor Hochul’s desk awaiting signature. It is taking a major statewide campaign to get her to sign (another story for another time). Sadly, the Rochester School District has not taken advantage of the existing state and federal programs that increase funding for schools that buy from farms. RCSD is leaving a lot of money on the table that could improve school lunches. Since I did not grow up in Rochester nor did my son, I have left it to others on the Food Policy Council committee who had this experience to try to address this extremely frustrating and intransigent situation.
In the plan’s reporting on the existing Rochester food system, there is solid data on the 10% of city jobs that are food-related. One small portion of those jobs are the small food enterprises that attract people with the chance to run their own businesses and produce something creative. Action 4B-1 rightly rates support for these entrepreneurs as a possible “early win,” and adding incentives to the rfps for city-provided grants to developers to include space for gardens and food businesses should be a measure the city development department could take on immediately. 4B 2, 3 and 4 have good proposals for a series of ways the city can support food enterprises.
The CFSP also documents the low wages and poor working conditions of the hundreds of food-related jobs in retail, fast foods, and groceries and even includes data about the small percentage that are unionized and pay better, but fails to include actions, such as union drives and contracts, that might transform them into living wage jobs. Sweet as it is, enabling a home jam artist to parlay her skills into a small business will not reduce poverty and hunger. 4C 4 links training programs to food enterprises, but does not include training as a union organizer among the skills most needed.
No one can argue with Goal 5: “Celebrate the diverse human, cultural, and natural assets of Rochester and the Finger Lakes region by leveraging the power of food to build connection and strengthen community.” The authors of the plan have combed the country for lots of good suggestions for how to do this. There is one action that I hope the Food Policy Council will take up soon – to hold an annual or biannual food summit to gather everyone involved in implementing the plan to assess progress and make further plans together.
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As someone who spends so much of my time and energy on food – growing it, harvesting it, cooking and eating it, teaching others how to grow it, organizing around it, writing about it – my hope is that the CFSP will attract more attention to the shockingly unjust state of food in our city and inspire some action for change.