Faced with a White House that doesn’t care much for big-city farming, a federal advisory panel committed to urban agriculture appears to be going out with a bang.
“We have been met with nothing but roadblocks,” said Kaben Smallwood, the panel’s chair and president and CEO of Symbiotic Aquaponic, a McAlester, Oklahoma, company that combines fish farming and growing plants in water.
The Advisory Committee on Urban Agriculture and Innovative Production — established by the 2018 farm bill and convened during the Biden administration — met three times in September. That alone was an accomplishment, a result of pressuring the Trump administration to meet the legal requirement of three meetings per year, Smallwood said.
In what’s looking like a parting gesture, the committee defied the Trump administration by calling for urban agriculture grants frozen by the Agriculture Department to be released immediately and for the program — proposed for elimination under the administration’s budget request — to be made permanent.
