Massachusetts Urban Agriculture Grant Program

The Massachusetts Urban Agriculture Grant Program aims to enhance food security and access to fresh produce in urban areas. It supports commercial projects for the production and marketing of food, focusing on long-term investments in infrastructure and innovative farming techniques. The program prioritizes initiatives that address soil quality, land acquisition, and community engagement, ensuring that urban farming benefits low to moderate-income neighborhoods and fosters local economic development.

What is the Urban Agriculture Program?
The purpose of the MDAR Urban Agriculture Program is to advance Commonwealth goals and objectives, leverage collective resources, and support commercial projects designed to increase the production, processing, and marketing of produce grown and sold in urban centers across the Commonwealth. Expenditures will promote strategies to address food insecurity and to increase access of fresh, local produce in urban neighborhoods with a high concentration of low-moderate income residents.
Urban agriculture encompasses a wide variety of activities related to the growing of plants and the raising of animals for food including but not limited to: production techniques such as land-based outdoor and greenhouse cultivation, rooftop open air and greenhouse production, hydroponics, aquaculture, aquaponics, beekeeping and egg-producing poultry. Each project proposal must represent long-term, capital investments such as infrastructure improvements, building upgrades, purchase of computer software and systems, land procurement, and purchase of farm equipment. Projects will also foster youth development, small business development, and job training directly related to commercial urban farming.
This program does not fund backyard produce or livestock raised for personal consumption.
MDAR’s Urban Agriculture Program seeks proposals that demonstrate strategies for municipalities to increase access to affordable, fresh food for urban residents address the challenges of small scale farming in densely populated centers, and create direct markets in low-moderate income neighborhoods.
Examples of Project Priorities:
Soil Management: Initiatives that address the issues of soil quality in urban environments with particular emphasis on improving soil fertility in blighted areas;Land: Proposals for acquisition of land for food production in urban settings;Equipment: Mobile market vehicles, small farm equipment or hand tools;Green Infrastructure: Demonstrations of greenhouse, hoop house, cold frame and other technologies to help urban farmers scale up the volume, quality and enable year round production or to manage energy and water usage, or allow for more intensive and efficient food production in urban environments;Climate Change Infrastructure: Compost tumblers and water conservation methods such as drip irrigation or rainwater recovery systems.Community Urban Farming Projects: Capital infrastructure to support non-commercial urban food production, via partnership with municipality or non-profit organizations for community benefit and distribution; must have a minimum of 0.5 acres in food production.Innovative Growing Technology: Demonstrate practical/economically viable approaches to urban aquaculture/aquaponics and vertical farming and other innovative growing methods to make available local sourced food and products to low-moderate income communities;Marketing, Distribution, Transportation: Improve the transportation and distribution of locally grown products from farm to customer such as food hubs sourced from local urban farms or other innovative technologies designed to aid/improve cost-effective distribution of food produced on urban farms to urban residents;