The Blind Spot Between the Soil and the Spreadsheet
What funders miss when they evaluate community agriculture with the wrong lens
In February in Minneapolis, the ground is frozen solid. Nothing grows outside. The farmers markets are closed. The garden beds are buried under snow. But in North Minneapolis, inside a passive solar greenhouse run by Appetite for Change, greens are still coming up. The structure was designed by a University of Minnesota architect in collaboration with the City of Minneapolis, built to grow food through the winter using nothing but sunlight for heat. No fossil fuels. No hydroponics. Plants in the soil, even when it is ten below outside.
AFC farms across multiple plots in North Minneapolis. They grow nearly 8,000 pounds of produce a year using regenerative practices: low-till, no synthetic pesticides, no herbicides, no synthetic fertilizers. Fifty varieties of vegetables, flowers, herbs, and medicinal plants. Youth staff the farm stands. The produce flows to food banks, cooking workshops, meal box programs, local restaurants, and directly into the hands of Northside families.
North Minneapolis is a designated Green Zone, the city’s formal acknowledgment that this neighborhood carries cumulative environmental pollution alongside deep social and economic vulnerability. Most of it also qualifies as a food desert by USDA standards. AFC works at the intersection of both of those realities, and their own definition of food justice names it explicitly: “the right to grow, sell, access, and eat food that is fresh, nutritious, culturally-relevant, and grown with integrity for the wellbeing of the land, workers, and animals.”
The wellbeing of the land. That phrase is doing real work. It says that AFC understands what it is doing as environmental work, not just food work.
But look at their impact page. Here is what AFC tracks and reports publicly: 7,800 pounds of food grown. 3,120 meal boxes delivered. 18 community cooking workshops. 3,552 youth training hours. Over $135,000 paid to youth interns. These are meaningful numbers. They reflect real investment in a real community.
Here is what is absent: soil carbon levels on those regenerative plots. Pollinator activity across fifty plant varieties. Stormwater absorption on formerly vacant lots. The thermal performance of that passive solar greenhouse. Biodiversity data. Any environmental metric at all.
This is not a criticism of AFC. They are reporting what gets asked for, what gets funded, and what fits the templates they are given. The gap is not in their work. The gap is in how we evaluate it.
The Nexus Nobody Measures
This pattern is not unique to AFC. It is how most community agriculture gets evaluated, and it reflects a structural problem in how we organize knowledge about food and environment.
Most evaluation frameworks treat food programs as food programs and environmental programs as environmental programs. The logic models are separate. The funding streams are separate. The reporting requirements are separate. A community farm that grows culturally relevant food while also sequestering carbon, filtering stormwater, creating pollinator habitat, and remediating degraded urban soil will be evaluated on one of those things. Maybe two if the funder is unusually flexible. The rest falls into a blind spot that nobody owns.
Researchers call this the agriculture-environment nexus, the place where food production and ecological health are not just related but inseparable. In agroecology, this is foundational. You cannot talk about soil health without talking about food quality. You cannot talk about biodiversity without talking about pest management. You cannot separate water from what grows in it and beside it. The system is the point.
But evaluation, as practiced by most funders and most of us who do this work, is not built for systems. It is built for funding streams. An agricultural funder measures agricultural outputs. An environmental funder measures environmental outcomes. A public health funder measures health indicators. Each one sees the slice it pays for. Nobody owns the nexus, so nobody funds the nexus, so nobody evaluates the nexus. This is true, but it is not the whole story.
The scale of this problem is not small. The Environmental Working Group found that $31 billion was spent on U.S. farm conservation programs between 2017 and 2024. The nation is still plagued by contaminated drinking water. Agricultural greenhouse gas emissions are still rising. We are spending enormous amounts of money on agricultural conservation and still not seeing the environmental outcomes we need, in part because the evaluation infrastructure cannot hold both sides of the equation at once.
Meanwhile, community programs like AFC are producing integrated outcomes on the ground every day. They just cannot prove it in the language that funders recognize, because that language was never designed to hold the whole.
What Actually Happens on the Ground
AFC is not an outlier. Across Minneapolis and the Twin Cities, community agriculture projects are producing environmental outcomes that go uncounted.
Youth Farm runs five farms in North Minneapolis and five more in St. Paul. Their young farmers produce over 8,000 plant starts each year and distribute them to community gardens across the Twin Cities. That is seed distribution infrastructure. It is also biodiversity infrastructure. Nobody counts it as either.
Project Sweetie Pie has been working in North Minneapolis since 2011, explicitly connecting food, climate, economics, and environment. Their founder, Michael Chaney, sits on the Northside Green Zone Task Force. The organization’s four pillars are ecology, arts and culture, historical preservation, and food and urban farming. They operate across all four at once because that is how the neighborhood works. The reporting templates do not have a column for “all four at once.”
Little Earth Urban Farm grows food on land in the East Phillips neighborhood that was once part of what residents call the Arsenic Triangle. In the 1930s, arsenic was dumped into the soil. Over the past decade, the city extracted over 18 inches of contaminated earth. The farm now uses raised beds to grow vegetables and the four sacred medicines: cedar, tobacco, sweetgrass, and sage. They run a Veggie Rx program that follows 25 families managing Type 2 diabetes. On the same piece of land, in the same raised beds, they are doing soil remediation, cultural reclamation, food sovereignty, and chronic disease intervention. A funder would need four separate grant applications to capture what is happening in one garden.
Indigenous food sovereignty frameworks have a name for what these programs are doing. Researchers at Johns Hopkins studying American Indian and Alaska Native food systems have argued that evaluations “with humans conceptualized as the center ignore the contributions of the health of land, waterways, plants, and animals to a thriving food system of which humans are only a part.” When we evaluate food access without evaluating the land that produces it, the water that feeds it, and the ecological relationships that sustain it, we are not simplifying. We are severing.
Why the Blind Spot Persists
The easy answer is funder silos. Agricultural funders measure agricultural outputs. Environmental funders measure environmental outcomes. Public health funders measure health indicators. Each one sees the slice it pays for. Nobody owns the nexus, so nobody funds the nexus, so nobody evaluates the nexus. This is true, but it is not the whole story.
The deeper problem is that evaluation motive shapes methodology. This is something I come back to often in my work because it keeps being true in every sector I touch. If the motive for evaluation is accountability to a single funding stream, the evaluation will be designed to see only what that stream pays for. Not because anyone is being dishonest, but because the questions we ask determine what we find, and the questions come from whoever is writing the check.
A funder investing in food access will ask about food access. A funder investing in youth development will ask about youth development. The evaluator builds a logic model that traces the funder’s investment to the funder’s desired outcomes, and that logic model becomes the official story of what the program does. Everything outside the model becomes anecdotal. It might show up in a narrative section. It will not show up in the data.
The tools to do this differently exist, at least in theory. The First Nations Development Institute created a Food Sovereignty Assessment Tool designed to tell “the food story of a community” across food, environment, culture, economy, and health as interconnected domains. Researchers have proposed agroecological resilience indices that hold ecological and social and economic dimensions together. But a study of urban agriculture sustainability indicators found that of 69 indicators identified, 65% were not feasible to implement in practice. The frameworks are there. They do not fit quarterly reports.
And then there is the current political moment. USDA has frozen or defunded climate-related agricultural research. The Natural Resources Conservation Service has lost roughly a quarter of its staff since January 2025. The administration has censored terms like “climate” and “greenhouse gas emissions” from research proposals. The federal infrastructure for measuring environmental outcomes in agriculture, already inadequate, is being actively dismantled. Community programs will keep doing the work. The gap between what they do and what anyone can officially measure is getting wider.
I should say plainly that I am part of this problem. I have written logic models that reduced living systems to outputs and outcomes because that is what the RFP asked for. I have built evaluation frameworks that captured one dimension of a program’s work and called it a theory of change. Every evaluator I know has done some version of the same thing. The structures make it easy to do and hard to do otherwise.
What We Could See Instead
The cost of the blind spot is not abstract. It is financial. Programs that produce the most integrated outcomes get evaluated on the narrowest metrics, which means they get funded on the narrowest metrics. AFC could make a simultaneous case for climate resilience, public health, food access, youth development, and ecological restoration. But no single funder is set up to hear that case. So the organization picks the lane that matches the grant, reports on that lane, and the rest becomes invisible. Invisible work does not attract investment. The cycle reinforces itself.
This matters beyond any single organization. If nobody measures the environmental value of community agriculture, then community agriculture will never be funded as environmental work. The climate dollars will keep going to programs that look like environmental programs. The food dollars will keep going to programs that look like food programs. And the places where those two streams meet, the raised beds and regenerative plots and passive solar greenhouses and pollinator corridors that are doing both at once, will keep falling through the gap.
I do not have a prescription for this. But I have some observations about what would need to change.
First, evaluation frameworks that can hold multiple outcomes simultaneously without collapsing them into a single metric. This is harder than it sounds. The instinct in evaluation is always to aggregate, to find the one number that tells the story. But the nexus resists aggregation. Soil health and youth wages and cultural continuity and stormwater absorption are not commensurable. They do not reduce to a common unit. An evaluation framework that honors the nexus has to be comfortable holding outcomes side by side rather than stacking them.
Second, starting from what communities are already tracking rather than from what the funder wants to know. AFC knows what fifty varieties of plants are doing on their plots. The grandmothers at Little Earth know what the sacred medicines need. Youth Farm’s young people know which plant starts are going where. That knowledge is evaluation data. It is just not formatted as evaluation data. The question is whether we can build systems that recognize it as such.
Third, and this connects to work I have been doing for a while now, the evaluator’s own presence matters. The evaluator who visits a program for an afternoon and counts workshop participants is doing different work than the evaluator who sits with a community garden long enough to notice the monarchs on the milkweed and the stormwater pooling differently on the regenerative plot than on the vacant lot next door. What we see depends on how long we stay and what we are willing to notice. Presence is not a metric. But it is the precondition for every metric that matters.
I’ve spent more than a decade of my career measuring agricultural development programs. One thing I’ve learned is that the soil does not care about our reporting frameworks. It does what it does. Regenerative plots sequester carbon whether or not anyone measures it. Pollinators visit fifty varieties of plants whether or not anyone counts the visits. Stormwater absorbs into a garden bed instead of running off a vacant lot whether or not anyone models the difference. The work is happening. It has always been happening.
Communities do what they do, too. AFC will keep farming North Minneapolis. Youth Farm will keep distributing plant starts across the Twin Cities. Little Earth will keep growing sacred medicines on remediated soil. The people doing this work are not waiting for evaluation to catch up. They do not have that luxury.
But those of us who call ourselves evaluators have a choice about what we are willing to see. We can keep measuring half the story and calling it rigor. Or we can learn to ask better questions, stay longer, and let the soil tell us what it already knows.
I am still learning how to do the second thing. If you are too, I am glad you are here.
Anthralytic is a social impact and evaluation studio helping mission-driven teams amplify their impact.
