“This is the most clear example of a life or death situation for us, because he who controls the food, controls the population.” These words come from Urban Farmer Diane Hoye, who has been involved in urban agriculture for the last 15 years. Urban farming is a unique experience, weaving together sustainable food access, cultural relevance, community care, and the building of local food systems into a rich tapestry for community resilience in often overlooked spaces. As I sat down to speak with Diane, affectionately known in the community as Mama Diane, we discussed her work, the why behind her passion, and what it would mean for her operation and the community she serves should an equitable farm bill not be passed.
Meet the Farmer
Diane is the owner and manager of Ohana Gardens, an urban farming operation located in Highland Park, Michigan. Since 2010, the farm has stood as a place of healing, food sovereignty, and education within the community. Her farm covers roughly eight city lots and produces fresh produce, herbs, and microgreens. The farm revenue supports her, her family, and seven other part-time to full-time employees. In addition to her own plots, Diane grows food collectively with the Grow More Produce Collective, a collaboration of 12 urban farms in the area. They aggregate produce to supply the Detroit People’s Food Co-Op, the Michigan Department of Education, and several farmers markets and farm-based distribution programs in the Detroit Metro area.
Diane’s favorite part about her role is watching plants go from seed to harvest each season. “It never loses its wonder—it’s hypnotizing,” Diane says. She began this work because she was tired of watching her community fish through poor quality produce at the grocery store. “I wanted to advocate for high quality, good produce. Real food with nutritional value.” She noted that the stores around her were selling food that was rotting on the shelves, while other communities, just minutes away, were receiving high quality goods. She had the courage to ask “Why?” Then she set out to improve the food for her community, and has never looked back.
During the year, Diane stays busy with everything from ground preparation and seed planting, to harvesting and business management. Even when it becomes too cold to grow food, she maintains her records, clients for the year, and visions for the growth and development of her operation. She also teaches others how to grow food and keep up skills that will help them long term. “These are real survival needs. Everyone eats. That’s what we have in common,” she says. “A person who can grow their own food is a powerful person.”
For her, being a Michigan farmer means to embrace humanity’s most essential, ancient, and complex role, and she views the cultivation of this unique relationship with nature as one of the best skills a person could have. Growing food is not a simple task. It takes heart, dedication, and a true understanding of nature to pull off a successful operation. She notes that even if it means getting up at 3:00 a.m., she is steadfast in her dedication to producing high quality food, no matter what, because farming, quite literally, “means life.”
The Farm Bill
As farm bill negotiations drag on, urban farmers in every community are working hard to keep their neighbors fed among great uncertainty and undervaluing coming from the federal level. As a quick refresh, roughly every five years, the United States Congress renews a major piece of legislation that’s commonly called “the farm bill,” but that’s not its official name. The most recent version of the bill, “The Agriculture Improvement Act of 2018,” officially expired on September 30, 2025. This package of critical legislation determines the United States policy on agriculture, food assistance, conservation, and rural development. It also determines funding and rules for farmers, nutrition programs, and environmental stewardship across the country.
Even though drafts of the bill were presented in 2023 and 2024, a new bill has not been voted into law, leaving many programs stuck in the mire of uncertainty. A stop-gap measure was presented in November of 2025 to extend support for some programs in the bill for another year. But this short-term solution did not support every program included in the original legislation, and largely excluded vulnerable populations. No matter the type of farming, our producers do not have time to waste while the security of their livelihoods is up for debate.
What are Urban Farmers Asking For?
Much like many farmers across the country, urban farming priorities include strengthening the farm safety net, securing food and nutrition assistance, protecting conservation programs through the Farm Service Agency (FSA), and the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS), supporting Fair Trade Agreements, developing a permanent disaster relief program for farmers, and ensuring consistent funding for historically underrepresented farmers. “We have no say in the money coming down. They say who gets what. The money is there, but it doesn’t come to us.” As a dedicated urban farmer, Diane is able to speak to the policy priorities her farming community is advocating for as the next farm bill is developed.
Diane notes that there are several programs they have been able to participate in, from SNAP acceptance to conservation programs, but that largely, her community does not receive adequate funding from the federal level. This is in some ways due to the fact that urban agriculture isn’t taken seriously when compared to the large-scale rural farming industry. We can spend countless hours diving into speculation regarding why this is, from urban farming being written off as DEI initiative, to decision makers relegating these efforts down to “hobby gardening” because of its typical small-scale nature. Ultimately, it comes down to the same reason small-scale rural farms don’t receive substantial support. The value of this work is not understood or respected at the federal level, and it shows up in the willingness to quickly cut funding for small-scale operations and urban agriculture to trim down budget packages.
“Small farms make an enormous difference,” Diane says, while speaking to the impact of the work being done through investments of time and resources into urban agriculture. Large scale farming operations play a big role in sustaining the economy by producing and distributing food outside of the community. Often, these farms support the movement of food to other states and countries, helping to maintain the national food supply and international trade. While this work is critical and still deserving of support and funding from the federal level, we still have to support those who keep the local food system running. Small-scale operations in rural communities and urban agricultural operations do just that. Taking care of those at home is also a critical component to national security and should not be taken lightly or written off as a hobby.
As the next farm bill is developed, urban farmers are advocating for improvements to be made to the farm safety net, so they can also receive crop insurance and farm protection loans, just like their rural counterparts. Urban farmers are also pushing for sustainable access to food assistance programs to help feed seniors, children, and other vulnerable populations with high quality food, while paying farmers adequately for the labor. “We have to make this a viable option for young farmers,” Diane stated when expressing the need for more federal supplements to be made available to small-scale operations in the next farm bill. For many urban communities, having access to high quality food is a challenge. Due to the diligent work of urban farmers operating on shoestring budgets, it’s becoming more common to see a neighborhood farm that patrons can walk to and pick up freshly harvested food.
The dense population of urban spaces allows for urban farmers to distribute food quickly to those who need it, while bringing communities together to build real power. “Having an entire neighborhood growing food together produces a massive amount of food,” says Diane.
She notes that when her neighbors saw that she was growing food, they started to join in with their own home gardens. Between 1910 and 1970, roughly six million African Americans migrated from the south to uptown cities like Detroit to build a better life and escape racial injustice during the Great Migration. In doing so, they brought with them skills they could rebuild their lives with, and farming was another way for these southern transplants to do that. With the percent of Black-owned farms across the country decreasing from 15% to less than 2% since the 1920s, culturally relevant urban farming has served as a way to bring back this dying skill while sustaining neighborhoods with attention to cultural relevance.
Planning for The Future
For Diane, farming has become a cultural, technological, and social revolution in the community she serves. It is important to her to continue her work so that future generations can develop relationships with the earth and steward land for community resilience and well being. Within the next five years, Diane plans to continue her work educating the community and the youth about sustainable agriculture. Meanwhile she will expand her operation to sell her produce in more grocery stores and expand on-farm distribution. She also plans to create more value-added products, such as dehydrated and freeze-dried foods, tinctures, and more.
Even though urban farmers don’t make a lot of money, “somebody has to get in there and grow food,” Diane says. “It is of the utmost importance. If we can’t farm because the law decides we can’t, our people will quite literally die.”
The future of Diane’s operation, and those like it, depends on urban agriculture being valued as a viable resource at the federal level. That support must be shown through consistent and equitable funding allotted to urban farms in the next farm bill. Diane and her community of urban farmers are committed to making sure urban farming is respected at the federal level. She notes that so far, her community has done a lot with just a little bit of funding. “We have always had to struggle and we will continue to do so unless they finally start to include us. This inequality is killing us.”
Even as uncertainty covers small-scale farmers like a dark storm cloud, Diane still believes that the future of agriculture as a whole is bright. Her powerful words still ring in my mind. “I know the future of this work will be bright because I am going to do everything I can to make that happen.”
The work to bring about an equitable farm bill is urgent, and we need support in getting it done for every single one of our farmers and for our Michigan economy. Congress needs to fund a bill that ensures that all farmers have access to programs that can sustain their lives and the food system across the country. Please share this story and visit our Groundwork Farm Bill Advocacy page to learn more about ways you can support this work. To read more about what an equitable farm bill could mean for Michigan farmers, please read all about it in the previous installments of this series. 
Amanda Brezzell is Groundwork’s Policy & Engagement Specialist
amanda.brezzell@groundworkcenter.org
