Grow With Us/High Tunnel Hello on Sunday November 7, hosted by The Newburgh Urban Farm and Food Initiative (NUFFI), invites all residents of the City of Newburgh to come to the Urban Farm to learn more about urban agriculture.

With this event, Newburgh Urban Farm and Food Initiative Executive Director Virginia Kasinki discussed the new high tunnel structure being built on the property. This structure will have the proper means to grow and produce food for the residents of the city year round. The structure itself is a 24 by 72 foot high tunnel Kasinki said. With the winter months fast approaching, Kasinki said that fresh food and produce is not always readily available to city residents. According to Kasinki, 30 percent of city residents depend daily on the produce and food from pantries for their daily intake. She said that this past and previous summers, NUFFI has donated about 30,000 pounds of food to local pantries and other places that needed produce.

Collaborating with the City of Newburgh, NUFFI was able to secure two Department of Housing and Urban Development CARES ACT grants to help in their efforts according to Kasinki.

In creating more outreach for the city, Kasinki first discussed a grant received in October from the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) Urban Agriculture Productivity Program that trains individuals to go out into communities to learn more about food needs and insecurities. Residential areas, bodegas, churches and pantries in the various wards of the city are the places that these trained individuals will learn more about produce and food relaying back to NUFFI, city government and nonprofits as to what they can do to assist. Secondly, NUFFI has also received an agreement from the USDA to work with beginner growers and educate in urban agriculture Kasinki said. “We will reach out to people in this community and throughout the Hudson Valley, lower Hudson Valley that want to learn how to do urban agriculture,” Kasinki said. “We can use this (Urban Farm) as a living laboratory up here to teach them or we can do webinars.”

Thirdly, Kasinki discussed working with the pantries in doing a food audit. These audits will review what types of produce the pantries receive, how the food is stored, who provides the food, which type of residents receive the food, how do the residents store the food. The audit also asks similar questions to the farmers and produce providers.

With the Urban Farm, Kasinki collaborates closely with Ramona Burton, Chairwoman of the Newburgh Urban Farm and Food Initiative. Burton’s investment in this program originates from her father and the skills she learned gardening from him as a child. Both she and Kasinki were born and raised in the City of Newburgh and worked within the Downing Park Planning Committee. For NUFFI, none of the outreach, programming, and continuing support would not be possible without the city’s support. Kasinki and Burton discussed goals for NUFFI is to grow the farm, grow the infrastructure and continue agricultural programming going forward into the next year and following.