All photos by Jeff Conant/Climate Connections.

It doesn’t take an agricultural expert to know that you can’t grow vegetables without water. So it wasn’t surprising that after hundreds of people marching under the banner “Occupy the Farm” took over a University of California (UC) agricultural testing station on the edge of Berkeley, Calif., April 22, UC officials responded by shutting off water to the site. The next day, a late-season storm brought a half-inch of rain to the San Francisco Bay Area, irrigating the thousands of vegetable starts in the ground and lifting the spirits of the urban farming activists who are determined to save the site from development. Score: Occupiers, 1 — UC administrators, 0.

Social change activists in Berkeley, Calif., have always been ahead of the curve. Today, May Day, is the spring reemergence for the Occupy movement as activists around the United States engage in work stoppages, street marches, and various forms of civil disobedience to press their demands for a more equitable economy. The folks with Occupy the Farm got started early. On Earth Day, they marched from Berkeley’s Ohlone Park to a five-acre plot of land in the adjacent bedroom community of Albany. They cut the locks on the gates of the UC-Berkeley and U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) field trial plot, pulled up nearly an acre of thick mustard growing there, and got busy working the soil with a pair of rented rototillers. Then, scores of volunteers planted 150-foot rows of lettuce, beans, cucumbers, and leafy greens. By the end of Earth Day, the Bay Area had a new urban farm.

The occupation of the Gill Tract (named for the family that donated the property to the university decades ago) appears to mark a new stage for the adolescent Occupy movement. The autumn encampments in Manhattan, Oakland, and dozens of other cities around the country were a kind of primal scream against the growing wealth disparities and corporate overreach that have come to characterize America. With their anarchist architecture and consensus decision-making, Occupy’s autonomous spaces gave people a chance to envision a radically different way of organizing society and economy — and in the process shifted the national discourse in a more progressive direction. Now, actions like the Gill Tract takeover, the occupation of foreclosed homes, and the protests outside of bank shareholder meetings are giving new potency and political relevance to the Occupy movement. Occupiers (some of them at least) are beginning to focus on actions that are at once full of political symbolism and fulfill people’s basic human needs for food and shelter. Activists have gone from imagining a new world to actually creating it.

“While those of us who originally organized this aren’t affiliated with the official Occupy movement, we are inspired by the last year of what Occupy has done,” Anya Kamenskaya, one of the Occupy the Farm organizers, told me when I visited the Gill Tract Friday morning. “We are taking that Occupy spirit and taking it to the problems in our community. You could call it Occupy 2.0”

Kamenskaya is a UC-Berkeley alum (class of 2009) who has been involved in sustainable agriculture initiatives such as The Greenhorns and Future Farmers. As we spoke, a convoy of borrowed pickup trucks was dumping load after load of dark black compost next to where a dozen straw bales had just been dropped off. Volunteers were busy painting banners for an upcoming weekend of community farming events. A flock of six laying hens pecked about among the trampled mustard stalks. “The reason we’re here is because it’s farmland, and it’s farmland in an urban area, and it should be used as farmland, especially since there are tens of thousands of people in the Bay Area who are food insecure,” Kamenskaya, wearing a floppy straw hat, said as she directed the delivery of some port-a-potties. “For years students, professors, and neighbors have come up with proposal after proposal for some kind of agro-ecology center to show people how to grow their own food. The university has had listening sessions so they can say they have listened. But they don’t incorporate our ideas into their plans.”

The land seized by Occupy the Farm is the last parcel of Class 1 — the most desirable — agriculture soil left in the East Bay and the final remnant of a 104-acre spread bequeathed to the University of California in the 1920s. For decades this sliver of prime farmland has been used as an agricultural testing station by researchers from the USDA and UC-Berkeley’s College of Natural Resources. But a 2004 UC Master Plan for the area proposes a “commercial redevelopment” for the site.  World War II era buildings on the south end of the property are slated to be turned into housing for UC faculty and graduate students, as well as retail space (including, ironically, a Whole Foods). The land currently used for agricultural trials would be re-zoned for “open space and recreation” and could include the construction of little league fields, a community center, or a childcare facility.

The Occupiers say getting rid of this final vestige of farmland would be a horrible mistake: “Farmland is for farming,” Occupy the Farm said in an April 26 statement. “We cannot allow the UC to destroy one of the best resources for urban agriculture in the Bay Area.”

In an open letter published Friday, UC officials said that they “have welcomed community workshops to explore future use of this land” and “are open to further discussions with the community about implementation of the Master Plan.” At the same time, university administrators expressed resentment with the Occupiers’ tactics. “We take issue with the protesters’ approach to property rights,” the letter said. “By their logic, they should be able to seize what they want if, in their minds, they have a better idea of how to use it.”

On Monday, Dan Mogulhof, head of UC’s public affairs office, told me that it’s unfair of the Occupiers to think they are the only ones with hopes for the property. “We are big believers in metropolitan agriculture,” Mogulhof said. “A lot of our professors, students, and administrators are involved [in urban farming.] But there are a variety of competing interests here. We can’t be marching to the interest of just one group. We have to be representing the full range of community interest.”

Occupy the Farm organizers counter that many Albany residents and Gill Tract neighbors have expressed their desire for a community farm at the site — but that the university has failed to listen. As far back as 1997, professors, students, neighbors, and a collection of more than 40 nonprofit organizations presented UC with a detailed proposal for an urban agriculture center at the farm. Occupiers also point to the enthusiasm they have received from neighbors during the past week as evidence of community support: Since UC officials shut off water to the site, Occupiers have been irrigating the crops with water donated by nearby residents. And scores of residents, many with children in tow, have visited the encampment.

“We had so many community members come out this weekend,” said organizer Ashoka Finley, another UC-Berkeley alum, who has worked as a garden educator since he graduated in 2010. (Full disclosure: Finley is a student in the organic gardening course I co-teach with another Gill Tract Occupier, Antonio Roman-Alcala, at San Francisco’s Alemany Farm.) “Kids were being led through the farm by their parents. We started a permaculture garden with community input and support. We had face painting. Someone brought some goats, so we had a little petting zoo.”

The Occupiers have enlisted another important ally to help make their case: UC professor Miguel Altieri, a global leader in the science of agro-ecology. Altieri has been running field trials at the Gill Tract since 1981, longer than any other researcher, and so he has one of the strongest claims to the site. “The master plan of the university is obscure,” Altieri told me. “They say it’s going to go from academic to recreational use. That could be baseball fields or whatever. This could be a huge opportunity for the university to play a huge role in urban agriculture, to create a center for urban agriculture that could show how you can reduce transportation, and lower emissions, by producing food in cities.”

In an essay that he submitted to the Daily Cal campus newspaper, Altieri and another professor, Claudia Carr, argue that as a land-grant university, UC has a tripartite mission — to educate students, to undertake research, and to share that research with the public through Cooperative Extension programs. An urban farm that balances undergraduate classes, graduate level research, and food production for the community would fulfill all of those functions.

UC officials appear to be listening. According to Mogulhof, on Friday afternoon, J. Keith Gilless, dean of the college of natural resources, met with Occupiers and told them “the university is more than happy to talk about shared custody for this growing season as long as the agricultural research can continue” and the overnight encampment ends.

If the Occupiers are able to grow food at the Gill Tract this summer — and then use that foothold to achieve their larger aims — it would mark an important win for the Occupy movement. It would, for starters, demonstrate the power of community organizers to make a demand to the powers that be and then see it through to victory. It would demonstrate how to take control of public spaces, not just for symbolic reasons, but for productive purposes. It would demonstrate the time and patience required for real social change (the Gill Tract occupation was six months in the planning). And, perhaps most important, it would demonstrate that communities already possess the resources they need to build a more just and sustainable world.

This last point was made clear to me by veteran activist Gopal Dayaneni as I was leaving the encampment on Friday. “We don’t need corporations and we don’t need gene research to tell us how to farm,” he said. “We’ve been doing it for thousands of years. We just have to remind each other how to do it.”

An endangered species?

Photo: iStockphoto

“Cotton used to be king — it was our No. 1 crop,” Joseph Maron, the operations supervisor for the gin, told a group of visitors on a bright autumn day. “Now it’s all pistachios or almonds. The cotton industry is slowly disappearing.”

Quickly disappearing may be more like it. This year, California farmers are growing about 550,000 acres of cotton — a decrease from just two years ago, and a sharp decline from a historic peak of 1.5 million acres. Growers expect the number to drop to less than half a million acres in the next few years. The number of cotton gins has also plummeted. There used to be more than 100 gins in the San Joaquin Valley; now there are half that many.

Why are cotton planters facing a state of collapse? For the same reason that soy farmers, tomato growers, and apple orchards are struggling: international competition. It’s simply cheaper to grow cotton in Pakistan, India, or Turkey than it is in California, Arizona, or Texas.

The globalization of agriculture is certainly bad news for growers who have never known anything except cotton. It’s also troubling for the advocates who are spearheading a campaign for organic and low-spray cotton. As they promote a way of clothing ourselves that doesn’t involve stripping the earth naked, backers of sustainable agriculture are finding that the economic imperatives of a global economy are making their work harder than they ever expected.

“The market for domestic organic cotton has completely disappeared, because the price of overseas cotton is half as much,” says Marcia Gibbs, program director of the Sustainable Cotton Project. “If you were a farmer, you’d be a fool to grow organic cotton if you weren’t sure you’d get a living wage for your work. We’re seeing a big increase in people interested in organic cotton, but we’re not seeing people step up to the plate with their pocketbooks.”

How does your cotton grow?

Photo: iStockphoto

It’s In the Jeans

Cotton is one of the most chemical-dependent crops, with conventional growers using a battery of herbicides and pesticides to control weeds and insects. Most cotton fields — at least 70 percent in the U.S. — are also genetically modified, as farmers come to depend more and more on Roundup Ready seed. The reliance on chemical inputs has been blamed for a range of problems, from water contamination to unusually high cancer rates.

In an effort to reduce the environmental impacts of cotton production, the Sustainable Cotton Project tries to enlist farmers in a program to convert to organic. But it has been a tough row to hoe. Nationwide, there are no more than 12 organic-certified cotton growers, according to the Organic Trade Association. In California, there are just two — and that’s double from a year ago.

The effort is greatly complicated by the fact that cotton — a gangly, four-foot shrub whose flower forms the downy fiber manufacturers prize — needs to drop its leaves before it can be mechanically harvested. Otherwise, the green leaves can stain the cotton, and make it wet and susceptible to mildew. The most common way to pick cotton, then, is to first spray a chemical defoliant on it — hardly an organic solution. Organic cotton growers in Turkey and Pakistan often pay people to handpick the bolls, and don’t use defoliants, but that’s not a viable option in the U.S.

“We can’t compete with a grower that has low labor costs,” says Frank Williams, a co-owner of Windfall Farms I in Firebaugh. This year, Williams and his brother-in-law grew 40 acres of organic cotton on their 1,300 acres, and they plan to quadruple that next season. But it’s a gamble for their business. “It’s economics,” Williams says. “All of our acres of cotton, I don’t know that we make hardly anything on it. There are other competing crops that make a lot more money. The only thing that saves us is the government subsidies.”

Since most cotton growers can’t take the risk of experimenting with how to harvest cotton absent chemical defoliants, advocates have set their sights on simply lowering, rather than eliminating, the amount of chemicals used in cultivation. A program run by the Sustainable Cotton Project called BASIC — biological agricultural systems in cotton — encourages farmers to quit GM seeds and adopt more sustainable practices such as composting, cover cropping, and organic pest management. In 2006, some 1,200 acres of cotton are being grown under BASIC guidelines.

Though still in an initial stage, the BASIC program is already turning heads. Sustainable-agriculture advocates have been impressed by pesticide reductions as high as 73 percent. And farmers like BASIC cotton because they have found they can maintain their yields while cutting the amount of money they spend on chemical inputs.

Stanley Silveira is one farmer who has been busy telling his neighbors about the benefits of BASIC cotton. A longtime farmer and professed evangelical Christian, Silveira cheerfully compares his adoption of low-spray techniques to his religious conversion.

“God created everything,” Silveira, a round fellow with a crown of silver hair, says. “There is a wisdom in the natural world, and hopefully we can be wise stewards of the way God planned it. We don’t want to upset the balance. If we can get the same yields, and the same quality with less inputs, and it’s better for the environment — that just makes sense.”

But even if farmers can perfect ecologically sustainable methods for growing their cotton, they still face the challenge of developing economically sustainable ways for growing their sales. The biggest hurdles for maintaining a healthy cotton industry are business-oriented, not biological.

Boll Evils

To stick with organic and low-spray cotton, farmers say they need a commitment from apparel companies to make steady, yearly purchases of sustainable harvests. But the apparel industry is loath to make concrete promises to buy domestic cotton when organic cotton from, say, India sells for less.

The reluctance of companies to commit to U.S. organic cotton was on display during a recent tour of California fields sponsored by the Sustainable Cotton Project. With two buses packed full of fashion industry executives from popular brands such as Levi Strauss and Prana, the tour was intended as a way to show off the potential of sustainable cotton. But while all the apparel executives seemed genuinely interested in using more organic cotton in their clothes, none was prepared to make a public promise to buy more American-grown fiber. The economics simply don’t add up.

“We’re concerned about the impacts of chemicals, and the health of everyone along the supply chain,” says Erica Bloomenthal, an executive with upscale clothier Eileen Fisher, which sells a line of organic cotton T-shirts. “But we’re in a global economy, and we can’t ignore that. The apparel business is a global business. We’re a design-driven company. We have to like what we see, and if we find a beautiful piece of Italian fabric, that’s what we’ll use.”

Offshore, you betcha.

Photo: state.gov

The challenge of supporting U.S. farmers is compounded by the fact that the domestic apparel industry has been, for all intents and purposes, dismantled. Most U.S. sewing operations were outsourced to Asia and Latin America long ago. And in the past decade, textile mills — which used to form the economic backbone of many southern states — have been offshored as well. Which means if a fashion company wants to buy American-grown organic cotton, it would likely have to send the fiber across the Pacific to be milled, woven into fabric, and sewn, and then ship it back across the ocean for sale in stores — not exactly the most sustainable scheme, given the petroleum involved alone.

Essentially, then, the way to get relief to cotton farmers would be to rebuild the U.S. clothing industry by reassembling a domestic supply chain of growers, mills, and sewing shops.

“A reliable supply chain is the biggest challenge in sourcing,” says Roian Atwood, director of community relations and organic programs at the trendy clothing-maker American Apparel. His company sells a line of organic T-shirts — made with cotton sourced from Turkey. “I think what we need is someone who wants to creatively invest in U.S. manufacturing. This is about the longevity of our economy, about realizing that manufacturing has to be part of the equation, that it can’t all be a service economy.”

So maybe supporting domestic, sustainable cotton production is less an issue of economics than a test of values. Do U.S. consumers value domestically grown, processed, and manufactured clothing? Is it important that the fiber keeping us warm is made closer to home? Or are we content with having all the clothes we wear be grown and sewn overseas?

“When I started my own company, I wanted to do it the most sustainable way that I could,” said Tierra Del Forte, founder of a boutique jeans brand called Del Forte Denim, as she stood next to a field of cotton ready to be harvested. “People are now getting much more interested in where their food comes from. That’s what I want to do with my business, to get people to think that their clothes come from somewhere, and that there are people involved every step of the way.”

Better living without chemicals?

Photos: iStockphoto

But when it came to how Ortiz was treated by her employers, little was different. Her pay remained meager: $500 a week at peak berry-picking season, but as little as $200 a week during much of the year, leaving her and her farmworker husband with little money to buy fruits and vegetables for their five children. The supervisors at her farm, Reiter Berry, were often “aggressive” and capricious. Rules were arbitrary; workers were sometimes closely monitored, but sometimes allowed to work independently. They were, said Ortiz, assigned to “better or worse rows” — all depending on the whims of the supervisors.

When organizers from the United Farm Workers encouraged the Reiter employees to form a union, the company allegedly responded with intimidation and harassment.

“There was an atmosphere of fear. People were afraid they would be laid off,” Ortiz said in a recent interview. (Elena Ortiz is not her real name; fearful of losing her job, she spoke only on condition of anonymity.) “I wish they would treat us better. What can the people do? Nothing.”

Garland Reiter, one of the co-owners of the company, took objection to Ortiz’s comments. “I think we’re a leader in the industry, living by honesty, openness, and respect,” he said.

Nevertheless, it appears that worker abuse in the organic industry is widespread.

“There’s a common conventional wisdom by a lot of consumers, especially at the higher-end stores, that just because it’s organic the workers are treated better,” said UFW spokesperson Mark Grossman. “And that’s simply not true.”

That disconnect between reality and public perception is of increasing concern to farmworker advocates, food activists, and some farmers, who worry that as the organic sector replicates the abusive conditions of conventional agriculture, it is sacrificing the founding values of the sustainable-food movement. The desire to return organic to its roots is driving a slew of initiatives to develop labor standards for organic farms. If successful, the new standards would establish the organic sector as the kind of fully sustainable industry — both socially responsible and environmentally sound — that could be a model for the entire economy.

Green and red and unfair all
over.

Where Have All the Hippies Gone?

When you go to the supermarket and buy produce or packaged goods that carry the organic label, you can feel confident that the food was grown under rigorous environmental standards. The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s organic seal, which debuted in 2002, is a guarantee that your fruits and vegetables were cultivated without petroleum-based fertilizers or (with rare exceptions) synthetic chemicals, and that they aren’t genetically modified. The organic label, however, goes only so far. While the seal covers a range of environmental practices, it says nothing about labor conditions.

Although comprehensive studies of conditions on organic farms are hard to find, complaints like Ortiz’s are not uncommon. For example, Willamette River Organics, one of Oregon’s largest organic operations, has been hit with several lawsuits charging violations of minimum-wage laws. A Human Rights Watch report on the exploitation of adolescent workers said the atmosphere at Arizona’s organic Pavich Farms was “hostile, suspicious,” with laborers apparently not permitted to speak to inspectors. Threemile Canyon, a large organic dairy and potato farm in Oregon, faces accusations of sexual discrimination in its hiring practices.

Workers get no consolation in the form of higher wages or better benefits, either. According to a report published last year by researchers at UC-Davis, a majority of 188 California organic farms surveyed do not pay a living wage or provide medical or retirement plans. In fact, most organic workers earn the same as those in conventional fields — less (adjusted for inflation) than they were making in the 1970s, when the famous UFW boycotts occurred. “The exploitative conditions that farmworkers face in the U.S. are abysmal — it’s a human-rights crisis,” said Richard Mandelbaum, policy analyst at the Farmworker Support Committee. “In terms of wages and labor rights, there’s really no difference between organic and conventional.”

If that doesn’t seem to fit the organic movement’s hippie and homesteader origins, the incursion of big business may be partly to blame. Reiter Affiliated Companies, where Ortiz works, is a perfect example of how the movement has shifted. With thousands of employees, Reiter is the biggest supplier to Driscoll Berry, one of the country’s largest distributors of strawberries, raspberries, and blueberries. Driscoll sells both conventionally grown and organic berries — an indicator of organic’s growing popularity, but also a sign of how some companies see organic more as a market niche than as a broad business philosophy.

That niche is now a $14 billion industry in the U.S. Giant food-processing corporations, seeing opportunities for expansion, have become major players in the organic industry. For example, General Mills owns the organic brands Cascadian Farm and Muir Glen. Kellogg owns Sunrise Organic. Even agribusiness giant ConAgra is in on the act, recently introducing organic versions of its Orville Redenbacher popcorn and Hunt’s tomato sauce brands.

And while organic’s profitability would suggest that there is plenty of money to pay workers better — for those so inclined — much of the profits go to retailers and wholesalers higher up the food chain. Raising workers’ wages is also complicated by the fact that organic labor costs are disproportionately high, since such operations often depend on hand weeding in place of chemical herbicides.

Ultimately, paying workers more depends on paying farmers more, which appears unlikely in a country that has gotten used to cheap food. “People look down on farmers,” said Tim Vos, one of the co-owners of California’s Blue Heron Farm, which pays its 10 field workers about $12 an hour. “If you want to pay people well, you need high prices. What would it take to offer benefits? We would have to almost double our prices.”

People who feed people.

Plea for the Tillerman

Another obstacle toward improving conditions is that, simply put, the treatment of farm laborers doesn’t rate high on most people’s list of concerns. At least, that’s the conclusion of a recent consumer study conducted by researcher Phil Howard at UC-Santa Cruz. The survey found that workers’ rights ranked fifth on a list of food-related issues that interested respondents — right behind the treatment of animals.

Farmer Jim Cochran put it bluntly: “Everybody cares about how the bugs are treated, but nobody cares about how the workers are treated.”

Cochran knows what he’s talking about. In 1987, his operation, Swanton Berry Farm, became the first organically certified strawberry grower in California. Eleven years later, Swanton became the first organic farm to sign a contract with the UFW. Today Swanton Berry remains the only organic farm in the country to have a collective bargaining agreement with the farmworkers’ union. “I like the union label, because it means that the workers are saying, ‘It’s OK,’” Cochran said.

The 30 workers at Swanton Berry — who earn between $9 and $11 an hour — have a medical plan, a pension plan, holiday pay, and subsidized housing in a pair of well-kept bunkhouses with a view of the Pacific. If they need a loan to cover emergency expenses, workers can get an advance on their paychecks. Once workers have put in 500 hours on the farm, they can begin buying stock in the company.

While Cochran’s commitment to social justice is laudable, being a union farm makes his costs 15 percent higher than those of other organic growers. Because union certification seems unrealistic for the small and medium-sized farms that still make up the bulk of organic growers, a range of organizations is working on proposals to create some kind of “fair made” label to encourage farmers to adopt better labor policies.

At least half a dozen projects are in the works. The Rural Advancement Foundation International and the Farmworker Support Committee have enlisted five farms in a pilot project demonstrating best labor practices. Growers in Canada have started a “fair deal” label. The organic soap maker Dr. Bronner’s is implementing fair-trade standards to “improve the livelihoods of farmers and workers,” while some dairy farmers have come together under the Wisconsin Fair Trade cheese initiative.

The slew of different programs demonstrates an energetic grassroots commitment to improving worker treatment. But there is a danger that having too many separate standards will be confusing to consumers and cumbersome for growers. So the various interests have come together in an ad-hoc coalition — the Domestic Fair Trade Working Group — to develop a single set of labor standards, a single monitoring process for farms, and one seal that consumers can trust to mean workers were treated right. The draft principles include a living wage for farmworkers, fair prices for farmers, transparent business practices, and family farm ownership.

Coming Soon-ish to a Supermarket Near You

Of course, another alternative would be to try to amend the existing USDA organic seal to include labor standards. But with advocates already busy fighting back efforts by the major food processors to loosen the organic rules, creating an independent label appears the best way to go.

“The government can’t lead on this,” said Cecil Wright, director of local operations at Organic Valley, a cooperative of more than 800 family-owned dairies, ranches, and farms. “We need to have the people who know what they’re doing, who are entrepreneurial, to lead. We believe that at some point in the future we’ll need a standard that goes above and beyond the USDA label.”

When will that point be? Participants in the coalition agree it will be at least three years before shoppers can expect to see an independent label that certifies decent working conditions. In the meantime, advocates point out that there are a number of steps farmers can take to make their employees feel more valued. A recent report [PDF] by the California Institute for Rural Studies looked at best labor practices on 12 organic farms and identified several low-cost ways for cash-strapped farmers to improve workplace conditions. When interviewed, farmworkers said a slower pace of work, year-round employment, free food from the farm, flexible schedules, and plain old “respectful treatment” would make them feel like their work was important.

The stakes are high when it comes to the successful creation of a “fair labor” organic seal, and the importance of the struggle goes beyond the tight-knit sustainable-food community. If organic farmers can find a way to produce food without exploiting either the environment or their workers, advocates say, they can set an example for other industries to follow.

“For me, the big issue is in terms of progressive movement-building,” said Ronnie Cummins, director of the Organic Consumers Association. “It’s time to dovetail the health, sustainability, and justice movements. The potential is incredible. But it’s going to take some real, hard organizing.”

Situated among the warehouses, railroad tracks, and truck depots of industrial Los Angeles, South Central Farm is something of an oasis, and it’s become a vital food source for 350 low-income, mostly Latino families. Over the last few weeks, the threat of development has earned these 14 acres — which comprise the nation’s largest urban garden — national and international attention.

Daryl Hannah, up a tree.

Photo: Mark Sullivan/WireImage.

In late May, after the first of two efforts by the Trust for Public Land to purchase the parcel from its owner failed, the farm’s fate became a cause célèbre in a city well known for celebrity causes. Community organizers and Hollywood celebs began a last-ditch effort to raise awareness and secure permanent protection for the land. Joan Baez, Julia “Butterfly” Hill, and Daryl Hannah clambered into a tree, Ben Harper and Laura Dern rallied support, and the media slavered. Nightly vigils and interfaith prayer services grew by the day, with one event during Memorial Day weekend drawing hundreds of people. The protests continued into June; Hill, who has also undertaken a water-only fast to draw further attention to the cause, has proclaimed that she won’t descend from her perch until the farm is protected.

Supporters may have come one step closer to that goal yesterday, as TPL began a second attempt to intervene, drafting a formal offer to buy the land with support from the Annenberg Foundation. While the South Central farmers and their unlikely support squad wait to see how the latest development plays out, they say the controversy has raised vital questions about the future of our urban spaces, and what a livable city looks like.

“There’s a bigger thing we’re trying to get at,” said Tezozomoc, one of the lead organizers at the garden, as activists swirled about him recently. “It’s the concept of the commons. Livable cities require commons. Our principal stand is about making our cities more livable.”

The Plot Thickens

On a recent Sunday, the farm’s maze of 20-by-30-foot plots, separated by well-worn paths and five-foot-high chain-link fences, was bustling with families tending their gardens. Nearly every patch was bursting with crops: corn and squash, Mesoamerican greens like tlapanche and papalo, garlic, lettuces, the occasional strawberry row. None was complete without a thick stand of nopal cactus. Some featured small shade patios or hammocks.

The generous size of the plots means that families have enough space to actually meet much of their need for food. This isn’t hobby gardening.

Maria and Aurelio Gonzalez spend at least half their time at their garden, caring for a dense crop of onions, cabbage, corn, and guava and papaya trees. Their space includes a sturdy-looking outdoor kitchen complete with a small gas stove, neatly ordered cabinets, a sofa, and a few chairs. From their cozy sitting area, one can glimpse the office towers of downtown through a thick stand of sugar cane.

“We are happy here,” Maria said that day, as she cut flowers to place at the Virgin Mary shrine that graces the couple’s patio. “We spend as much time as we can here. The air is pure, not like at home. The work is therapy — for your health, for your soul.”

Will they pave paradise and put
up a … warehouse?

Photo: Mark Sullivan/WireImage.

When asked why it is important to save the farm from the bulldozers that will raze the place unless a solution is found, Maria placed a hand over her face and started to cry.

The story behind the current controversy is a long one, a nearly 20-year dispute that has been in and out of court, then back again.

The property, about a 15-minute drive from downtown L.A., is owned by Brentwood developer Ralph Horowitz. In the late 1980s, the city used eminent domain to take it over for a planned waste incinerator. Horowitz’s investment company, which owned 80 percent of the property at the time, received $4.7 million after filing a lawsuit. Neighbors organized to stop the incinerator, but the site then became an illegal dump full of unwanted furniture and appliances.

In 1992, in a fit of attentiveness toward blighted and riot-burned South Central, city officials gave the L.A. Regional Food Bank a temporary lease to turn the land into a community garden. The site was cleared of debris, fences were installed, and a water system put in. In August 2003, after years of wrangling and lawsuits by Horowitz — who had retained the right of first refusal on the land — the city council voted in a closed session to sell the property back to him for $5.5 million. The next month, the South Central farmers received their first eviction notice, and they’ve been fighting to save their plots ever since.

After losing a lawsuit and appeals charging that the sale to Horowitz violated municipal code, the farmers started working with the Trust for Public Land. By late last month, TPL had raised some $6 million to preserve the farm. But Horowitz was asking $16.35 million, and turned TPL away.

Why the big jump? Since the first seizure in the ’80s, city, state, and federal agencies have spent more than $2 billion to develop a highly integrated rail and trucking network from the ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles into central L.A. The land is now worth a whole lot more as space for a warehouse than as a community garden — in terms of dollars, anyway.

“We’re having a collision of two different worldviews,” Tezozomoc said. “One is about a symbiotic relationship with the nature that sustains us. The other is a utilitarian world view that thinks only about how we can use nature … With peak oil and energy problems, we’re going to need local solutions like this.”

Where There’s a Way, There’s a Will

For his part, Horowitz remains unmoved by the gardeners’ plight. “They’ve had the use of it going on 14 years,” he told Los Angeles City Beat reporter Dean Kuipers in a story published early this year. “Even welfare recipients are asked, after so many years, to start to fend for yourself and stop asking your fellow taxpayers to carry you.”

Meanwhile, the Los Angeles establishment is split on the issue. In a March editorial, the Los Angeles Times wrote that Horowitz “has every right to kick out the people who have been squatting there for more than a decade.” Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa sought a middle ground as the battle heated up in late May, calling on Horowitz to sell the property to TPL for the original $5.5 million. “The mayor wants these farmers to have a place to grow their food,” Darryl Ryan, a spokesperson for Villaraigosa, told Grist. “We want to make sure that the farmers have their land, because they have already done so much for the community.”

Villaraigosa’s response notwithstanding, the entire controversy seems to uncover misplaced priorities within City Hall. After all, if the city was once prepared to exercise eminent domain to build an incinerator, why not do the same to protect the farm? Surely, growing food is as much in the public interest as burning trash.

“If [the city] wanted to do it, they could,” says Dan Stormer, a pro bono attorney representing the farmers. “They’ve had plenty of opportunities to take it over. They just need the will.” (When asked to comment on whether the eminent-domain card could be played, Ryan said, “I don’t know the answer to that question.”)

The South Central saga can be read as a parable of how society habitually places the interests of private property owners above the needs of impoverished communities. But to observers both near and far, South Central Farm is a living model of something more positive: how to cultivate community from the grassroots. It’s proof of how city dwellers, working together, can build a more sustainable world, starting with something as seemingly simple as the food they eat.

“This farm represents a huge vision — where our cities actually become communities, and those communities are places where we dance and grow and pray and sing and connect together,” says Hill. “And that’s a vision worth replicating.”

The South Central farmers boast that they are a perfect example of self-sufficiency and direct democracy. Decisions are made collectively at regular meetings, with each plot holder receiving an equal vote. Every plot pays $13 a month to cover water costs and port-o-potties. All of the improvements have been paid for out of pocket, and the city hasn’t spent a dime. Kuipers reports, however, that Horowitz pays a monthly mortgage of $30,000.

The gardeners and the activists supporting them say that preserving the farm is essential — not only for the health of L.A.’s most neglected communities, but also to set a precedent for other cities. If the country’s second-largest city permits the scrapping of the country’s biggest urban garden, they say, it will derail the efforts of activists working for green space elsewhere. The fate of the South Central Farm, its protectors say, is an important test of whether the country is committed to fostering more sustainable and self-sufficient cities.

It’s also a test of how the future might look. Sam Sanchez, a 23-year-old aspiring attorney, has tended a plot on the farm for less than a year, but says it has already changed how he thinks about food and the environment. “When people know where their food comes from, they respect it more,” he said. “Kids who come to this farm have never seen food that’s not in plastic. When people come to my plot, I show them my potato plants, and they’re surprised, because they’ve never seen a potato plant before.”

Like many others who have become passionate about this urban oasis, Sanchez believes the only way to protect it is to keep fighting. “We have to send a message to our politicians that they have to stop looking at green space as unused land until it’s a shopping corridor,” he says. “If this thing goes, it’s going to set a precedent around the nation. Because every city has a ghetto where people don’t know what a potato plant looks like.”