By Linda Lubi
Linda Lubi is a UMN CURA student working with RTC during the 2025-2026 school year
Sustainable farming is often associated with care for the environment. What does my carbon footprint look like? Is my food grown organically or with pesticides? How can I make my neighborhood less polluted? While these are important questions, sustainability is also a social concept. Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education (SARE) explains that social sustainability refers to the social relationships occurring at multiple levels: personal and household, farm or ranch, local community, agrifood network, and society at large.
For urban agriculture, the social aspects of farming are often front and center, in part due to the sheer density of people living, working, or going to school in close proximity to urban farms/gardens. Social benefits include youth education, programming for all ages, food donations, broader access to fresh produce, and neighborhood greening. For Margaret Momanyi, an urban farmer from Brooklyn Park: “Caring for my community through farming means providing fresh, nutritious, locally grown food, and creating opportunities for connection and economic support within our community.”
With Minneapolis Public School District being one of Momanyi’s hyper-local market channels, her harvest contributes to nutritious school lunches. “We also take food to food hubs, to churches, and other places,” Momanyi explained, “and they in turn take them to people who cannot have access to them. It’s justice for everybody.” Through farming, Momanyi serves immigrant communities by growing foods important to them that are otherwise hard to find in Minnesota. Momanyi grows vegetables common in Kenya, such as managu, also known as African nightshade, and chinsaga, or cleome leaf, which is a nutritious bitter green.
In a time when political, economic, and environmental instability are a source of worry for many, caring for one’s community feels more important than ever. When asked about how her perspective on farming had changed since Operation Metro Surge harmed immigrant households and heightened food insecurity in the Twin Cities, Momanyi explains: “It has really deepened my understanding that farming is not only about food production, it is about creating safe communities for others.” Farming is a way to protect people from harm through donation of healthful food, while supporting the local economy when local harvest is purchased.
Farming is also a way to bring people together, foster new friendships, and preserve cultural ties, as Khalid Elhassan affirmed when he founded Sudanese Farming Group (SFG) in New Hope in 2022. Through this initiative, families are invited to plant, weed, water, harvest, tend livestock, and eat together on shared land. Similar to Momanyi, Elhassan explains that his community grows crops from within their own culture, particularly okra, parsley, molokhia (a leafy green), and Sudanese cucumbers. In a webinar with Renewing the Countryside, Elhassan explains, “We try to make farming as a fun and collective experience. Being a transplanted community here in the U.S., there’s a lot of isolation and loneliness… It is important for us to connect with our heritage.”
Elhassan makes sure to engage youth in farming by hosting an agricultural STEM (Science Technology Engineering and Math) program. Since 2024, students between the ages of 18 to 24 have been building a solar electric cart for the SFG farm. Elhassan believes involving youth is another way to help his community and to instill a sense of cultural identity. Expanding on this idea, Elhassan says: “The farming value system is an essential part of our ethnic and cultural identity. Delayed gratification, patience, and long-term planning are all important aspects for success in life. It’s not like Amazon where it can show up at your house the next day… Farming can take months and months of planning. It is very profound in terms of discipline, organization, and thinking skills.”
With its weekly communal meals during summer on the farm, Sudanese Farming Group is creating new meaning in the idea of “community supported agriculture,” which in this case could also be thought of as an agriculture-supported community.
About the author
Linda Lubi (she/her) has a Masters in Urban and Regional Planning from the University of Minnesota. In her studies, she focused on environmental justice and health equity. She worked at Renewing the Countryside as an Urban Agricultural Researcher interviewing urban agriculturists across the Twin Cities to learn their stories.