BARRINGTON, R.I. — Farming season might be winding down for the year, but the legislative season is just starting.

The Rhode Island Food Policy Council (RIFPC), a nonpartisan nonprofit dedicated to improving the state’s food systems, announced its legislative priorities for 2025 on Friday, inviting lawmakers to visit and learn about food, farming, and composting at the Barrington Farm School. The farm, however, nestled between single-family homes and a fire station just off Middle Highway, doesn’t look like a typical farm found in a rural area.

As lawmakers sipped coffee and schmoozed with food experts and farmers, their conversation was at times almost drowned out by the typical sounds of suburbia during the day: trucks backing up and contractors putting trees through a wood chipper.

“All the food we eat comes from the farms, or the water,” said Margaret DeVos, executive director of the Providence-based Southside Community Land Trust and a RIFPC council member. “Not to be dramatic, but without the farms, humanity dies.”

The Nov. 15 event showed lawmakers what urban farms like the Barrington Farm School can do for Rhode Island. The farm school is the last farm in Barrington. The original 10-acre parcel was purchased at the end of the 19th century by Italian immigrants, providing produce, meats, and dairy products to local residents. Back then, it was just one of many farms; Barrington in particular had been known for its farmland as far back as the days of Plymouth Colony.

While over the course of the 20th century the farm stayed owned by the same family, farmland around it began to vanish. It’s a familiar tale for much of Rhode Island, as thousands of acres of farmland across the state has been swallowed up by single-family housing, strip malls, and other post-war development.

The farm school started when Tim Faulkner, a former ecoRI News reporter, and other Barrington residents became interested in purchasing the farm as a nonprofit and preserving it to teach Rhode Islanders about the vanishing practice of farming. In remarks on Friday, Faulkner described the farm school as “a living classroom without walls.”

“This is the last farm in Barrington,” said Sen. Jennifer Boylan, D-Barrington. “We have to teach our children to tend the soil and grow delicious things from the earth.”

The Barrington Farm School focuses on organic farming, with an emphasis on collecting food scrap from local schools, businesses, and residents. So far this year, the farm has generated about 54,000 pounds of compost for use on its agricultural fields, and it’s still not enough for the farm.

All of RIFPC’s legislative priorities next year center around bolstering local farming and curbing the amount of food waste that hits the landfill every year. It is seeking to bolster state resources for local composting efforts, revise the tax credits for urban and small farmers, provide free lunch and breakfast for all school students, better support the purchasing of local food, and implementing a tax credit for food donations.

RIFPC representatives said they have realistic expectations for incremental progress this year, however. Since COVID, state officials have been flush with cash to spend on any number of projects and issues, but the pandemic-era federal money is almost gone. State budget officials project the state will have a $398 million deficit next fiscal year, which will mean steep cuts in existing programs and department budgets.

Recent years have seen modest improvements and gains for farms and food in Rhode Island. The Green Bond, approved by voters earlier this month, included millions for the Agricultural Land Preservation Commission (ALPC), the state program that preserves farmland. Last session, lawmakers included money in the budget to enable students who pay for reduced-price lunches to receive their school meals for free.

But despite those successes, farmland in Rhode Island is still under pressure. Thanks to the state’s tiny size, there just isn’t enough farmland left after decades of development, and movement for housing and renewable energy installations provide additional incentive for farmers to sell off farmland to become something else entirely. The state has some 1,054 individual farms, with many of the fastest growing becoming those in dense or urban areas, like the Barrington Farm School.

Much of RIFPC’s proposed policies are based around the least-wasteful vision for food, but they also tackle food insecurity and hunger. A 2023 report from the Rhode Island Community Food Bank estimates one-third of all Rhode Island households cannot afford adequate food. Communities of color are the greatest risk of food insecurity, with 48% of Black households and 51% of Latino households describing themselves as food insecure. The food bank attributes the rise in hunger to inflation and emergency food benefits from the federal government getting cut.

“We need farms here in Rhode Island if we want healthier food to eat,” DeVos said.