18.5 Million Gardens

Something is shifting in American agriculture. As the Treasure Valley grows, what might it mean for our farms, our food—and our children?

If you've lived in the Treasure Valley for any length of time, you've watched it happen.

A field becomes a subdivision. A pasture becomes a shopping center. Another stretch of farmland disappears behind construction fencing.

Growth itself isn't necessarily the problem. Communities change. People need places to live. But every time productive agricultural land disappears, we're making another decision—usually without thinking of it this way—about where our food will come from in the future.

And lately, that question feels especially timely.

Something interesting is happening in American agriculture.

This summer, President Trump signed an executive order directing the federal government to significantly increase investment in regenerative agriculture practices, research and education. The order also directs USDA to maximize funding for and expand the reach of its existing Regenerative Pilot Program. Launched by USDA's Natural Resources Conservation Service in December 2025, the program directs $700 million toward regenerative agriculture, with an emphasis on soil health, water management and whole-farm conservation.

Then, in August, USDA announced Harvest to Hallways, a new initiative intended to strengthen connections between American farmers and schools through additional Farm to School funding, local food purchasing and investments in school kitchens.

We're hearing the language of soil health and regenerative agriculture coming from places we haven't always heard it before. We're also hearing more about local food, direct markets, smaller processors and rebuilding connections between farmers and the people they feed.

But the more important question may be:

What do we actually mean by regeneration?

The renewed federal interest in regenerative agriculture is worth paying attention to, but that doesn't mean every agricultural policy or farming practice now being promoted fits our philosophy at Urban Green Harvest.

For us, regeneration means more than maintaining production while continuing to depend heavily on synthetic fertilizers and chemical weed control. It means building living soil, cycling nutrients through compost and animals, increasing biodiversity, reducing outside inputs and working toward a farm that becomes healthier and more biologically functional over time.

That's an important distinction.

A farm can produce an enormous amount of food and still leave us with questions worth asking.

What is happening to the soil?

What inputs are required to keep producing?

What happens to those inputs after they leave the field?

What is happening to the microorganisms, insects, water and larger ecosystem surrounding that farm?

And ultimately, what kind of food are we producing?

At Urban Green Harvest, we believe healthy food begins with healthy soil. So our interest in the current regenerative-agriculture movement isn't simply that Washington has started using the word regenerative.

What matters is what happens underneath that word—and whether the practices that follow actually regenerate the land producing our food.

What's particularly interesting is that the ideas behind this movement aren't new. Farmers like Joel Salatin have spent decades arguing for biologically integrated farms, healthier soil, decentralized processing and shorter relationships between producers and consumers.

The language may now be appearing in federal agricultural policy, but farmers have been experimenting with these ideas on the ground for years.

Including here in Idaho.

What's Happening Here at Home

When most people picture Idaho agriculture, they probably picture enormous potato fields, dairies, cattle and commodity crops.

Those are certainly part of our agricultural landscape. But look more closely at the Treasure Valley and another agricultural community begins to appear.

According to the most recent Census of Agriculture, Canyon County had 2,311 farms, and nearly 80 percent were under 50 acres. Ada County had 1,142 farms, and 88 percent were under 50 acres.

Not all of those small-acreage operations are producing food for local markets. They include livestock, hay, specialty crops and many other kinds of agriculture. But the numbers reveal something easy to overlook:

Small-acreage agriculture is already a significant part of the Treasure Valley landscape.

And there are farmers here asking many of the same questions now being discussed nationally.

How do we build healthier soil? Keep living roots in the ground? Reduce disturbance? Increase biodiversity? Integrate livestock? Cycle more nutrients through the farm instead of continually bringing fertility in from somewhere else?

Those conversations are happening in actual local farming networks.

University of Idaho Extension works with producers around soil-health principles including minimizing disturbance, keeping soil covered, maintaining living roots, increasing biodiversity and incorporating livestock where appropriate. Treasure Valley Soil Keepers gives local farmers and ranchers a place to learn from one another about soil health and farm management.

Other local groups are tackling a different part of the same problem: how to keep agriculture viable as the Treasure Valley grows.

Taproots Farm Hub is bringing together farmers, landowners and community partners around farmland preservation, access to land, beginning-farmer training and collaboration among smaller direct-market farms.

Which raises a bigger question:

What if regenerative agriculture isn't only about regenerating soil?

Healthy soil is fundamental. But healthy soil alone doesn't create a resilient food system.

Farmers need land they can afford to farm. They need places to sell what they grow. Livestock producers need processing options. Beginning farmers need a way in. Communities need farmers markets, farm stands, CSAs and direct relationships between growers and families. Schools need ways to purchase food from nearby producers.

And somewhere along the way, people need to retain the knowledge of how to grow, cook and preserve food in the first place.

Regeneration doesn't stop at the edge of the field.

It also includes rebuilding the network around it.

And if you're wondering whether thousands of small farms, gardens and local efforts could ever amount to anything significant, history gives us an interesting answer.

During World War II, Americans planted Victory Gardens in backyards, schoolyards, parks, vacant lots and community spaces.

By 1944, 18.5 million Americans were participating, producing an estimated 40 percent of the nation's fresh vegetables.

Forty percent.

Not from one enormous agricultural operation.

From millions of ordinary people growing relatively small amounts of food in millions of ordinary places.

No single Victory Garden mattered very much to the national food supply.

Their power was collective.

Small doesn't necessarily mean insignificant.

Small multiplied across a community becomes capacity.

Food production doesn't have to be concentrated to matter.

And size isn't the only question.

A small farm isn't regenerative simply because it's small, just as a large farm isn't incapable of changing how it grows food. What matters is what is happening in the soil and on the land.

Are we building soil or depleting it? Increasing biological life or reducing it? Cycling nutrients through natural systems or becoming increasingly dependent on synthetic inputs? Growing food in ways that leave the land healthier for the next generation—or simply asking it to keep producing?

Those questions matter whether we're farming five acres or five thousand.

A resilient food system needs more farms growing food in ways that restore the land beneath them—and more opportunities for that food to reach the communities around them.

What could that look like here?

A Treasure Valley where five-acre farms remain farms because farming five acres can actually pay. Where beginning farmers have ways to access land. Where schools know the farmers around them. Where restaurants can easily purchase from nearby growers. Where farmers share knowledge, equipment and infrastructure when it makes sense.

Where families know where to find an Idaho tomato in August—and what to do with twenty pounds of them when they're abundant.

Where compost becomes fertility instead of garbage.

Where backyard gardens, community gardens, urban farms, market gardens and larger agricultural operations all contribute something different.

And where children grow up knowing that carrots come with dirt attached.

None of that requires the Treasure Valley to feed itself entirely.

That's not the point.

The point is retaining some of the land, infrastructure, relationships and knowledge that allow a community to participate in feeding itself.

Where Our Children Fit Into This

For our Farm School families, there is something familiar about hearing these ideas discussed as a new direction in agriculture.

Soil health. Composting. Local food. Seasonal eating. Cooking. Caring for animals. Knowing the farmer. Understanding where food comes from.

Around here, that's simply part of the day.

Our children collect eggs, harvest vegetables, help prepare meals, compost scraps, care for animals and watch the seasons determine what's available to eat.

They discover that strawberries don't grow in Idaho in January.

They learn that water matters. Weather matters. Insects matter. Soil matters.

Sometimes seeds don't germinate. Sometimes crops fail. And sometimes the zucchini grows so abundantly that we're wondering what on earth we're going to do with all of it.

None of this means our children need to become farmers.

It means they're growing up agriculturally literate.

And as the country begins talking more seriously about regenerative agriculture, local food, Farm to School and resilient regional food systems, that knowledge starts to look less like a charming childhood experience and more like something genuinely important.

Across the country, there's renewed interest in bringing farms into schools.

At Urban Green Harvest, we've been doing something slightly different.

We've been bringing childhood back to the farm.

Our children aren't visiting agriculture for an afternoon. They're participating in it.

They experience the same piece of ground across the seasons. They watch seedlings become food. They see animals grow. They experience abundance and failure. They help turn ingredients into lunch and scraps back into compost.

Over time, agriculture becomes less of a subject to learn about and more of a relationship they understand.

Running Urban Green Harvest has changed the way I think about what a small farm produces too.

Obviously, we grow food.

But look at everything that happens around that food.

Families come to the farm. Children learn to harvest. Scraps become compost. Compost becomes soil. Food travels feet instead of thousands of miles. Someone learns how to preserve pumpkin, make yogurt, grow tomatoes or recognize when something is ready to harvest—and that knowledge leaves the farm with them.

The harvest isn't only what leaves in a CSA basket. Knowledge is part of the harvest too.

A resilient local food system doesn't only need farmers.

It needs people who understand farming.

People who understand seasonality. People who can cook. Gardeners. People who know how to preserve food when it's abundant. People who recognize healthy soil. People who understand why keeping agricultural land matters.

And another generation that doesn't see food simply as something that appears on a grocery-store shelf.

Agricultural literacy isn't an old-fashioned skill. It is a form of resilience.

What Will We Still Be Growing Here?

We don't know exactly where this new national interest in regenerative agriculture will lead.

A presidential executive order doesn't regenerate soil. A government grant doesn't automatically create a thriving small farm. And putting the word regenerative on an agricultural program doesn't necessarily make the agriculture underneath it regenerative.

What happens next matters.

Will these programs genuinely help farmers build healthier soil?

Will they encourage agricultural systems that rely less heavily on synthetic inputs?

Will they strengthen small and independent farms?

Will they help shorten the distance between producers and consumers?

Will they make local food systems more resilient?

Those are questions worth following.

But for our Farm School families, there's something else worth recognizing:

You're already part of this.

When your child spends a day at Farm School, your family is helping keep a working piece of urban agriculture alive in Boise.

When you participate in our CSA or shop the farm stand, you're creating a direct relationship between a local farm and the people it feeds.

When your child comes home understanding compost, talking about what they harvested, knowing how eggs are collected or recognizing what's growing in the garden, agricultural knowledge has traveled beyond our farm.

That's how local food systems grow.

Not through one enormous solution.

Through relationships.

Farmers and families. Soil and food. Children and land. Knowledge passed from one person to another.

Twenty years from now, the Treasure Valley will almost certainly have more houses, more roads, more stores and more people.

The more interesting question is what else will still be here.

Will there still be small farms tucked between our neighborhoods?

Will there be productive soil worth farming?

Will beginning farmers be able to afford a few acres?

Will families still know people who grow their food?

Will our children understand what it takes to produce it?

Will we still have the knowledge and infrastructure necessary to produce some meaningful portion of what we eat close to home?

Those aren't decisions someone else will make someday.

We're making them now.

And our children are growing up in the middle of that story.

The Treasure Valley doesn't need to choose between growth and agriculture. But as our community changes, there is one question I think is worth continuing to ask:

What do we want to make sure is still here when our children are grown?

Start Close to Home

You don't have to become a farmer to participate in a stronger local food system.

Grow something. Learn what's in season. Preserve something when it's abundant. Meet a farmer. Buy something directly from the person who grew it. Let your children participate in producing some of their food.

And if you're already part of Urban Green Harvest, you're already part of this story.

Learn more about Urban Green Harvest, eat with the seasons through our CSA, explore Farm School, or come visit the farm and see what's growing right here in West Boise.

Explore Joel Salatin and Polyface Farm through Food, Inc., FRESH, Polyfaces and The Lunatic Farmer. Read Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma or Salatin's Folks, This Ain't Normal and You Can Farm.

Learn about Treasure Valley agriculture. Follow the farmers and organizations working on soil health, regenerative agriculture and farmland preservation. Visit local farms and farmers markets. Read the policies for yourself. Listen to people who agree with one another—and people who don't.

Read widely. Ask questions. Follow the food. Decide what you think.

Sources:

USDA — 2022 Census of Agriculture: USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service, including county-level data for Ada and Canyon Counties, Idaho.

USDA NRCS — Regenerative Pilot Program: $700 million initiative supporting regenerative agriculture, soil health, water management and whole-farm conservation.

USDA — Harvest to Hallways: August 24, 2026 announcement expanding Farm to School grants, local food procurement opportunities and investments in school kitchen infrastructure.

The White House — Executive Order 14414:Advancing Regenerative Agriculture and Strengthening American Farm Resilience, June 25, 2026.

USDA National Agricultural Library — Victory Gardens:More and Better Victory Gardens Needed in 1945, U.S. War Food Administration, documenting 18.5 million Victory Gardens in 1944.