By Janice Suess, ASU sustainable food systems graduate student
Model USDA unfolded over three days in January 2026, bringing together students from a variety of backgrounds. The diversity in the room was immediately apparent as fellow students and staff met one another and began conversations shaped by different academic paths and regional perspectives. According to Model USDA organizers, the event brought together 194 students and 61 faculty and staff from 30 institutions across 27 states, along with participants from Guam, Puerto Rico, the Northern Mariana Islands, and Washington, D.C. Students arrived from a wide range of academic backgrounds, from majors in plant science and biology to nutrition, policy, and environmental studies, and at different stages of their education. What we shared was the chance to step inside a model of the USDA and test what it looks like to navigate federal food and agriculture policy in real time, with all its constraints and competing priorities.
"Growing urban agriculture" was one of six scenarios running simultaneously. While other rooms focused on different policy challenges, our scenario group was tasked with exploring how new farmers could be supported in urban settings without undermining rural agriculture, housing priorities, or already strained federal budgets. Across the room, there was consensus that urban agriculture is important for community resilience. The ultimate challenge was figuring out how those ideas could be translated into a working policy. Students representing both public and private sector roles introduced themselves through the interests and priorities of the organizations they represented. We also heard opening remarks from USDA leadership and our scenario’s Secretary of Agriculture, graduat student Patrice Bettison-Clark, who emphasized that urban and rural agriculture are deeply connected rather than competing systems. At the same time, she stressed that any proposal would need to work within existing budgets and administrative structures to get passed. Discretionary funding at USDA is limited, and any strategy would have to stretch across multiple programs while still meeting the core mandate of feeding the country each day.
Students within the Urban Agriculture and Innovative Production Advisory Committee (UAIPAC) built on that framing, as they were seated in the center of the room with stakeholders surrounding, and my co-journalist and I flanking the room, hungry for a story to unfold. Several stakeholders pointed out that urban agriculture initiatives often fail when land access is unstable, since training and grants cannot succeed if farmers are displaced or forced to move. Others in University leadership roles focused on education and technology driven approaches as ways to work within urban constraints while remaining environmentally and economically viable.
Informal coalitions began to take shape, with students breaking off into smaller conversations to compare priorities and align around shared goals. For example, the students representing the National Black Farmers Association and the Detroit Black Community Food Sovereignty Network gravitated toward one another, recognizing shared concerns around land access, equity, and governance, and began shaping a common vision outside the formal discussion. Representatives with interests in private real estate raised concerns about land competition and neighborhood impacts. In contrast, the HUD representative arrived with a remarkably detailed four-year pilot framework, mapping out phased land stabilization, safeguards for residents, and clear pathways for public use, offering one of the most concrete and implementable plans in the room. Food policy advocates centered questions of equity and distribution, researchers and scientists emphasized environmental risk and the need for data to guide decisions, and nonprofits described challenges around workforce development and longterm implementation. Although these perspectives came from different sectors, they consistently returned to the same pressures around land access and regulation.
An outside presentation by Estève Giraud, Director of Research at the ASU Swette Center for Sustainable Food Systems, gave us some food for thought, as she drew from her experience in Tempe. She described land constraint as a defining challenge of urban agriculture. She traced today’s rural and urban divide back to policy decisions that framed cities primarily as consumers rather than producers, including the 1914 Smith Lever Act. Those remarks carried us into negotiations, and by the end of the first day, UAIPAC proposed a four-year, multi-phase strategy that prioritized coordination over entirely new programs. Rather than isolating urban agriculture within a single agency or funding stream, the plan emphasized shared responsibility across federal and local governments, universities, nonprofits, and private actors. The goal was to lower barriers for new urban farmers while remaining flexible enough to work across very different urban contexts.
Late in the process on our final day, our moderator brought my co-journalist and I onto a Zoom screen to introduce a deliberate wrench into the negotiations, reflecting the reality that, much like real life, even the most carefully built plans are tested by unexpected developments. The “crisis” centered on new PFAS legislation that applies traditional farming regulations to urban agriculture. The change raised concerns about increased entry costs and feasibility for smaller and innovative operations. After a second round of negotiations, UAIPAC returned with an updated proposal that placed emphasis on budget realities, responding directly to various concerns raised by both public and private stakeholders, like vague funding and underused institutional resources. Even with that uncertainty, the student playing the role of Secretary of Agriculture approved the final proposal, underscoring the need to balance ambition with real constraints. I was pleasantly surprised by how cooperatively our scenario functioned, especially after hearing that other scenarios experienced protests and more aggressive tactics to amplify certain voices.
What this scenario ultimately revealed is that support for urban agriculture is widespread but tenuous. The room was not fractured over whether urban agriculture matters, but rather who governs it, how it’s funded and who bears responsibility when tradeoffs arise. If Scenario C offered any lesson, it is that the future of urban agriculture will be shaped not by a single breakthrough, but by how well institutions learn to work together within those constraints. In an ideal world, every promising idea in this space would be fully funded, every program resourced, and every community supported without compromise. I have always said that if I won the lottery, I would not tell anyone, but there would be signs…Short of that dream, progress comes from this modeled coalition building that informs policy and shapes a more sustainable and equitable food system.
This blog is part of a series written by Arizona State University (ASU) graduate students who role-played as journalists in Model USDA 2026, a multi-day simulation hosted by the Swette Center for Sustainable Food Systems at ASU.