This Smart and Connected Communities planning grant aims to build a collaborative ecosystem among urban growers/producers and create bridges from these farmers to underserved low-income neighborhoods in Kansas City. This planning project will focus on identifying the needs and challenges of stakeholders from both urban growers and food desert communities who have limited access to healthy and affordable food. In addition to the involvement of these key stakeholder groups, the project involves multiple disciplines from the geosciences, computer sciences, social sciences, and the transportation and food engineering sciences. This multi-disciplinary, stakeholder driven approach seeks to better understand the problems and issues of grower and underserved communities in order to develop science-based solutions to address problems associated with food insecurity issues in urban environments. The project aligns directly with NSF’s mission by employing multi-disciplinary science and engineering to address food security issues to address the welfare and health of vulnerable, food insecure urban populations. This project will have significant broader societal impacts beyond the Kansas City metro area as it aims to create a transferable model for other urban communities across the United States. New findings and technical solutions will be widely disseminated to the broader stakeholder communities.

The project has at its foundation the development of a secure social/informational platform serving both urban growers (food producers) and residents in food deserts (consumers), integrating them into a urban community through data cultivation and dynamic integration of data on transportation, food processing, and food insecure neighborhoods. The transformative platform will be built on a form of multi-disciplinary data layering and processing consisting of: (1) an Internet of Things (IoT) Sensing Network Layer that builds a smart farm sensing system for cost-effective food production via automated real-time data collection and dissemination, (2) Socioeconomic Layer that assesses socioeconomic benefits to urban growers and low-income residents, (3) Transportation Layer that explores fledgling transportation solutions such as delivery sharing, micro-transportation, and drones, and (4) Food and Nutrition Layer that builds knowledge platforms for urban farmers about food processing and preservation techniques to improve the shelf life and safety of fresh products to better meet the nutritional needs of vulnerable populations. A significant planning effort will be made for community engagement through neighborhood seminars, field training, focus group meetings, and survey development through partnerships with the University of Missouri Extension, Cultivate KC, and Antioch Urban Growers.