How did this start?

It all started when…

Urban Agriculture Cooperative began as a farmers' market program arm of the non-profit Planting Seeds of Hope in 2014 lead by Alexandra Payne and the team at SWAG Project Farm. PSH was creating community gardens to help clean up and restore vacant, blighted lots and grow food, and only in the infancy of distributing food to the community at pop-up stands and giveaways. Co-founders Jamie and Emilio met and formed an friendship around improving the soils, productivity and safety of the farming happening around our City.

After organizing and building relationships with several other growers and local businesses, UAC was spun-off as an official non-profit entity to offer all around support for small urban growers and their programs, help raise resources for collective action, etc.; and a specific, narrower focus emerged on developing farmer’s market solutions and food distribution and supply chain from grower to consumer.

By 2018 UAC had ties with several farmers, city governments, local consumers and offered the first truly 'aggregated' cooperative markets featuring produce from SWAG Garden and a handful of other growers all under one umbrella, with staffing trained to sell, and accept WIC, SNAP and other benefit programs.

Although the staff and the distribution approach has been adapted, reinvented and certainly grown in scale since the early days, the core values of UAC of being a service provider to both small farmers and urban consumers has remained the same today. We are as excited as ever to participate in the exchange of healthy, sustainably grown goods from caring growers to grateful consumers on either end of the local supply chain.