West Sacramento, CA (MPG) - West Sacramento is located in one of the most productive farming regions in the world. So it’s natural that West Sacramento is leading the charge to bring urban farming to the city and its populace. Ironically, one of the issues that has faced West Sacramento is a food desert within the city limits. A food desert is an area where affordable and nutritious food is difficult to obtain without a car.

Partnering with Code for America, West Sacramento is aiming to change that. Code for America is a nonprofit that pairs members of the tech industry with local city governments to develop innovative solutions to difficult problems—in this case, solving the food desert issue. On a one-year fellowship with the City of West Sacramento, Grant Smith, Natasha Fountain, and Imanol Aranzadi set out to research West Sacramento’s food systems to find a way to make food easily available to the public.

The solution they pioneered was web applications called Acres and Farm Stand. The Acres app aims to make urban farming land more available by creating a platform for land owners to lease their land to would-be farmers. The farmers also have an easier time by having access to information about available plots. This allows farmers to make informed decisions easily and find the right land for their crops. From the food desert perspective, this will increase the amount of locally available healthy food.

On the other end of the spectrum is the Farm Stand app. Farm Stand is for consumers rather than producers. It is a separate web application that allows local urban farmers to sell their produce. This produce is local—and thus fresh as possible—and also cheaper than in grocery stores. What this translates to is increased accessibility to healthy, affordable food in West Sacramento.

These web applications are still undergoing their final testing, but will be fully operational and available to the public by the end of 2015. But it doesn’t stop there. Aside from continuing to invigorate local urban farming, “We want to create something to be scaled to other communities, that will be simple for a Winters or a Galt to create a new way of civic technology,” said Mayor Cabaldon to the Sacramento Bee in February when the project was in its infancy. West Sacramento is creating the template by which the rest of the region will implement urban farming in the future.

Sources: City of West Sacramento, Code for America, Sacramento Bee