It sounds like a trick question. Guess whose employees are growing a garden? It just couldn’t be, but it is—the workers at the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA)! Agency employees across the country are growing gardens and distributing the harvest to food banks and shelters.
“USDA created the People’s Garden Initiative 3 years ago, and it has since grown into a collaborative effort of over 700 local and national organizations all working together to establish community and school gardens across the country,” says USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack. “The simple act of planting a garden can help unite neighborhoods in a common effort and inspire locally led solutions to challenges facing our country—from hunger to the environment.”
In honor of USDA’s 150th anniversary, this year, agency workers planted a special heirloom tomato seed named after the agency founder—President Abraham Lincoln.
The People’s Garden Initiative was launched by Secretary Vilsack in 2009 as an effort to challenge USDA employees to create gardens at USDA facilities in small-scale rural and urban agriculture projects referred to as “community-based agriculture.” There are now over 1,800 gardens producing 1.3 million pounds of produce.
“We have administrative assistants, we have lawyers, we have compliance specialists, we have accountants. We don’t have anyone who you would look at their title and you’d go, ‘Oh, they have a green thumb,’” Annie Ceccarini, outreach and education coordinator for the People’s Garden Initiative, told FederalNewsRadio. Employees garden before and after work, at lunchtime, and on breaks.
The FederalNewsRadio article explains that USDA volunteer gardeners must be certified through a training program by the agency’s master gardener and devote at least 32 hours per year to the gardens. However, any agency employee may work on harvesting—but not eating! All food produced in the USDA gardens must go to the community.
Maybe USDA workers will want to start farmers’ markets in their parking lots.