Milwaukee’s Urban Farming: How a Rust Belt City cultivated a grassroots idea into a national model

Milwaukee’s reputation as a manufacturing powerhouse once defined its economic and cultural identity. But as industry collapsed and neighborhoods suffered decades of disinvestment, residents began turning to the land in vacant lots, schoolyards, and rooftops as a means of survival and resistance.

Urban farming in Milwaukee neighborhoods, spaces informally known as Agrihoods, didn’t arrive as a trend. It was born out of necessity, rooted in community self-sufficiency, and shaped by the city’s unique racial, economic, and environmental struggles.

GARDENS IN POST-INDUSTRIAL SOIL

Urban agriculture in Milwaukee has its earliest civic precedents in wartime “Victory Gardens,” but its modern legacy began to take shape in the late 1960s and early 1970s. As jobs left the central city and redlinin