Philadelphia wrote 87 actions for urban agriculture in 2023. The 2026 recommendation is to do them.

A hose runs through a chain link fence in Kensington because that plot never got a proper water line. Two neighborhoods over, a family has worked the same quarter acre for eleven years without ever holding a lease on it. We spend our days with people like them, the roughly 450 growers keeping close to 130 acres of Philadelphia in food, and in June 2026 we watched the city’s own task force stand up at a City Hall press conference and say, in effect, that Philadelphia does not need a new plan for any of this. It needs to run the one it already has. That is a strange thing for a coalition built to push for more to hear as good news, and we want to walk through exactly why it is.

Eighty Seven Actions, Written Down

In April 2023, Philadelphia Parks and Recreation released Growing from the Root, the city’s first urban agriculture plan covering every neighborhood. It was not written by a consultant parachuted in for six months. Philadelphia Parks and Recreation worked with Soil Generation, a coalition of Black and Brown growers, and the planning firm Interface Studio, and the process pulled in more than 600 residents and growers over several years, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer’s reporting on the plan. The result is a ten year framework organized around six goals covering land, production, preparation and distribution, consumption, food waste reduction, and the people doing the work, as Farm Philly lays out on its own project page. Underneath those six goals sit 87 specific recommended actions, according to Lancaster Farming’s coverage of the plan’s release, each one aimed at a city agency, a nonprofit, or some combination of the two. The plan states its own values plainly: transparency, racial and economic justice, and inclusion, the same three words we try to hold ourselves to when we talk to growers about what the city owes them.

We think that number matters more than it sounds like it should. A vague commitment to “supporting urban agriculture” is easy to nod along with and just as easy to forget. Eighty seven numbered actions are not. They can be checked off, or they can sit untouched, and either way there is a record. That is the entire point of writing a plan this specific. It gives everyone, including us, something to hold up next to what actually happened and ask what changed.

The Land Question Underneath the Plan

Here is why we do not treat any of this as an abstract planning exercise. Philadelphia currently has approximately 450 active agricultural spaces spread across nearly 130 acres, according to Philadelphia Parks and Recreation, a mix of individual gardens, community gardens, school gardens, community farms, and market farms. Most of that food is grown by neighbors with no formal backing, on land they often do not own and cannot count on keeping. A 2024 analysis found that about 75 percent of the 140 community garden farms Philadelphia lost since 2008 never held legal title to their land in the first place, and roughly one in three of the growing spaces still active sit in neighborhoods planners have flagged for the highest intensity of new construction, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer.

That is the plain version of what “growing space in every neighborhood,” the plan’s first goal, is actually up against. A garden that took a decade to build can disappear in a season once a developer buys the lot underneath it. Growing from the Root was written specifically to close that gap through land access reforms, Land Bank priorities, and secure tenure programs, all counted among the 87 actions. None of that protection exists for a grower until an action gets funded, staffed, and finished. A goal on paper does not stop a bulldozer.

What the Task Force Actually Recommended

Three years after Growing from the Root came out, a different body took a hard look at food access across the whole city. Philadelphia City Council’s Food and Nutrition Security Task Force spent 17 months on research, public hearings, working group meetings, and testimony from residents with direct experience of food insecurity, and released its final recommendations in June 2026, according to Philadelphia City Council’s Food and Nutrition Security Task Force. The task force had two people leading it, Mark Edwards of The Food Trust and George Matysik of Share Food Program, and it brought in dozens of organizations, healthcare providers, educators, urban agriculture leaders, and city agencies over the course of its work.

Among its recommendations were food access strategies led by the community in every Council district, real investment in food infrastructure, procurement reform so public institutions buy more food from local and regional growers, expanded nutrition education, and a coordinated Food as Medicine strategy connecting health care to what people actually eat. But the recommendation that stopped us was simpler than any of those, and it was aimed squarely at Growing from the Root. Implement the plan. Not revise it. Not commission a follow up study. Run the 87 actions Philadelphia already agreed to three years earlier.

We read that as a quiet kind of indictment. Seventeen months of hearings, testimony, and coordination across dozens of institutions produced a headline finding that the city’s food access problem does not need a new blueprint. It needs someone to actually work the one sitting in a drawer at Parks and Recreation.

Why We’re Asking for Owners, Budgets and Dates

Our job at Feed Philly Coalition has never been to write plans. Philadelphia has plenty of smart, carefully researched plans, and Growing from the Root is one of the better ones we have seen. Our job is to ask the plain, almost boring question nobody in a press conference wants to answer out loud. Which of the 87 actions have an owner. Which ones have money attached to them in an actual budget line. Which ones have a date on a calendar that somebody can be held to.

That is not a rhetorical flourish. It is the difference between a plan and a policy. A plan is a document that describes what should happen. A policy is what a government is actually doing, funding, and reporting on. Growing from the Root has been a plan for three years. Whether it becomes a policy depends entirely on whether the city publishes something as unglamorous as an implementation report, tracking every one of the 87 actions against the goal it was supposed to serve, in public, on a schedule.

We know how this usually goes when nobody asks. A plan gets celebrated at its launch, referenced in a few grant applications, and then quietly stops being anyone’s job to check on. We do not think that is what the task force members meant when they said implement the plan, and we do not think it is what the growers tending those 450 plots on borrowed land deserve after being consulted for years to help write it in the first place.

What We’re Asking the City to Do Next

We are not asking Philadelphia to invent anything new. Every tool the city needs already exists inside the 87 actions: land access programs, funding streams, staffing commitments, all of it written down in specific, checkable language back in 2023. What we are asking for is an owner named for each action, a public budget line attached to it, and a date the city is willing to be held to. Start with action one. Publish who is responsible for it, what it costs, and when Philadelphians can expect to see it done. Then do the same for the other 86.

Three years is long enough to wait for a document to become real. The growers holding this city’s food system together on 130 acres of borrowed and uncertain land have already done their part. It is Philadelphia’s turn to do the accounting.

Sources and references

• Growing from the Root, the city’s own planning document
• Philadelphia Parks and Recreation, Philadelphia’s first-ever urban agriculture plan
• Lancaster Farming’s coverage of the plan’s release
• the Philadelphia Inquirer’s reporting on the plan
• Farm Philly
• Philadelphia City Council’s Food and Nutrition Security Task Force
• The Food Trust
• Share Food Program
• the Philadelphia Inquirer, community gardens under threat