Climate-Resilient Urban Farms
Kevin Mackey on Building Circular Food Networks for a Sustainable Future
Kevin Mackey is the founder and CEO of the Urban Farming Initiative, a social enterprise launched during the pandemic in 2020 with the goal of transforming underutilized spaces into thriving gardens, farms, and food hubs. Drawing from his diverse entrepreneurial background—including food ventures, tech startups, and nonprofit leadership—Mackey now leads a model that intertwines community empowerment, sustainability, and circular economy principles across neighborhoods in Cincinnati and beyond.
The Precision Urban Agriculture Initiative team at Ohio Aerospace Initiative wholly affiliated with Parallax Advanced Research, interviewed Mackey as part of this series to highlight innovative perspectives that can inform and strengthen our initiative, especially where technology, sustainability, and public policy intersect.
A Personal Journey to Purpose
Mackey doesn’t come from a traditional agricultural background. A finance graduate who began his career during the 2008 recession, Mackey gravitated toward entrepreneurship. After launching several ventures, including a food business called Halcyon Salsa, he became immersed in the inefficiencies of the local food supply chain. This hands-on experience, combined with his observation of vacant commercial and industrial properties during COVID-19, sparked the creation of Urban Farming Initiative.
Mackey defines it simply:
"It’s a hyperlocal, circular supply chain that can coordinate access and balance supply and demand across a network of growers, processors, distributors, and consumers."
For him, it’s not about cities becoming 100% self-sufficient, but about coordinating what is possible locally—and leveraging community assets that often go untapped.
The circular food network he envisions includes growing, harvesting, processing, distributing, consuming (through retail or direct consumption), and recycling waste back into the system. This model not only reduces environmental impact but also creates a resilient system capable of withstanding shocks.
Many Midwestern cities, he notes, have vacant or blighted properties that are ripe for transformation. Instead of letting those spaces languish, Mackey's team turns them into productive gardens and community gathering spaces. In Walnut Hills, Cincinnati, his organization now manages eight gardens serving over 9,000 households. These gardens produce food for donation to pantries, kitchens, and restaurants—and also collect food scraps to produce compost, closing the loop in a truly circular fashion.
Building Climate Resilience with Controlled Environment Agriculture
"Everything’s getting hotter," Mackey says.
He notes how extreme heat and drought are increasing, creating water scarcity challenges for traditional gardens. Controlled Environment Agriculture (CEA) offers a way forward. His team utilizes container farming—shipping containers retrofitted with hydroponic systems—to enable reliable, year-round production regardless of weather conditions.
Mackey sees a future where every school, hospital, airport, and stadium has a container farm. With partners like 80 Acres Farms and innovations such as Atmosphere H2O (which captures and purifies humidity into water), these systems are beginning to address food and water scarcity simultaneously.
"On a hot day, we can get up to 750 liters of drinking water from a single unit," he explains.
Beyond growing food, Urban Farming Initiative treats each garden as a multi-functional hub—a park, a kitchen, a compost site, and a place for community connection. The team collects compost from local restaurants; processes produce on site and encourages consumption through events and on-site distribution.
Technology plays a critical role. While container farming methods are established, Mackey emphasizes the importance of integrating data and analytics to match production with actual demand.
"Growing for the sake of growing creates waste," he cautions.
Instead, aligning production with institutional contracts and community needs ensures a functional and sustainable system.
One of Mackey’s most compelling ideas is "Institutions Buy Local."
"We’ve been told to shop local as consumers. But why aren’t schools, hospitals, and universities doing the same?" he asks.
His vision is to pool $10 million in salad spectrum contracts (lettuce, carrots, onions, etc.) from Cincinnati’s institutions, enabling neighborhood-level farms to serve those contracts, creating jobs and economic vitality. This model was recently validated when the City of Cincinnati awarded a group or partners including Mackey’s team an $850,000 impact grant to reduce food insecurity across 10 neighborhoods. His group, in collaboration with partners like La Soupe and the SAFE Network, will use a hub-based strategy to embed urban farming and circular food networks directly into communities.
Urban Farming as a Decarbonization Strategy
Transportation is a major source of emissions in our food supply chain, especially when products are shipped across thousands of miles. Localized urban farming, Mackey argues, significantly cuts those emissions. Through collaborations with groups like Green Umbrella, his team is helping track and quantify the emissions reductions and resource savings achieved by local food systems. He also believes AI and data co-pilots will soon optimize urban farming logistics and distribution, replacing the inefficiencies he personally experienced while running Halcyon Salsa.
Looking toward 2050, Mackey envisions cities adorned with edible architecture—rooftop gardens and vertical growing systems embedded into buildings. But he also cautions against unchecked growth. Early container farm adopters failed because they lacked buyers. The lesson? Production must be demand-driven, not tech-driven.
As for his message to policymakers and investors, Mackey keeps it simple and direct:
"Be open to new business models," Mackey advises.
Traditional venture capital expectations don’t always apply to food systems. Sustainable models may combine real estate, food sales, and technology with modest returns—but their community value and resilience potential are profound.
Urban farming, when thoughtfully executed, is more than food production. It is economic development, climate action, and social equity rolled into one.
As Kevin Mackey puts it: "It’s not just about growing food—it’s about growing futures."
Acknowledgement: The Precision Urban Agriculture initiative led by the Ohio Aerospace Institute wholly affiliated with Parallax Advanced Research received financial assistance via the 6ONANB24D146 award from the U.S. Department of Commerce, National Institute of Standards and Technology.
This work was performed under the following financial assistance award 60NANB24D146 from U.S. Department of Commerce, National Institute of Standards and Technology.
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About Parallax Advanced Research & the Ohio Aerospace Institute
Parallax Advanced Research is a 501(c)(3) private nonprofit research institute that tackles global challenges through strategic partnerships with government, industry, and academia. It accelerates innovation, addresses critical global issues, and develops groundbreaking ideas with its partners. In 2023, Parallax and the Ohio Aerospace Institute formed a collaborative affiliation to drive innovation and technological advancements across Ohio and the nation. The Ohio Aerospace Institute plays a pivotal role in advancing aerospace through collaboration, education, and workforce development. More information can be found at parallaxresearch.org and oai.org.