Food and the City: Urban Agriculture and the New Food Revolution Read Online Free PDF Page B

desserts. The city's Unified School District now has five hundred school gardens at varying levels of production. There are seventy community gardens in Los Angeles County, giving food-growing access to 3,900 families. And in 2010, the city put together a high-powered Food Policy Task Force that conducted an inventory and assessment of the city's foodshed and produced a 108-page document in support of a municipal and regional food policy.
    A L ITTLE H ISTORY
    Los Angeles County was, until the 1950s, the largest agricultural county in the United States. It produced citrus, walnuts, strawberries, tomatoes, dairy, and meat in significant quantities, along with a wide array of other agricultural products. 3 As its cities grew in the postwar boom, urbanizationstampeded through the state. Farming was expected to make way for development. Urban growth—residential communities, schools, retail centers, roadways, commercial zones, industrial areas—seemed to have a presumptive de facto right of way. Food production, farmers, and farmland simply were expected to move out of the way of “progress.”
    Two notable exceptions to this rule became causes célèbres in the urban-agriculture sphere: Michael Ableman's successful fight to save Fairview Gardens Farms in the Goleta Valley near Santa Barbara throughout the 1990s, and a group of Latino campesinos and campesinas now known as the South Central Farmers, who lost their struggle to continue growing avocado and banana trees, beans, chayote squash, corn, yams, and sugarcane right in the middle of an industrial park and gang-ridden area of South Los Angeles in 2006.
    Fairview Gardens Farm
    Michael Ableman was an accidental urban farmer. As an aspiring photographer and an enthusiastic back-to-the-lander, he started working at an agrarian commune managing a hundred acres of pear and apple trees in Ojai, California, at the age of eighteen. From there, he continued north along California's Pacific coast to manage an avocado and citrus sapling nursery near Santa Barbara. Still in his early twenties, Ableman arrived at Fairview Gardens, one hundred miles north of Los Angeles and ten miles from Santa Barbara, in 1981, to work and lend his organic expertise, primarily grafting orange trees. The farm manager who hired Ableman soon announced that he was taking a leave of absence and asked Ableman to “farm-sit.” The manager never returned, and Ableman's two-decade journey on Fairview Gardens farm began.
    Fairview Gardens was originally homesteaded in 1895, with topsoil thirty feet deep. By the 1950s, it was part of the patchwork that made up the agricultural quilt of orchards and farmland in the Goleta Valley.
    As Ableman writes of his arrival at Fairview Farms in On GoodLand: The Autobiography of an Urban Farm , the Goleta Valley was already in a state of agricultural to post-agricultural transition. The Chapman family that owned Fairview Gardens no longer wanted to farm the land and were quite happy to let Ableman run wild with his ideas of what the twelve-and-a-half-acre farm could be. His tinkering and ambition led him to diversify the farm from a few orchards to a wide variety of fruits and vegetables, including peaches, avocados, citrus, artichokes, asparagus, beans, broccoli, lettuce, melons, tomatoes, carrots, and the like. As most commercial farms in Southern California were growing single-crop fields for supermarkets far away, Ableman writes that he was turning Fairview Gardens farm into a “kind of supermarket in itself, diverse and ever changing like an agricultural botanic garden.” 4
    As Ableman's agricultural botanic garden developed, detached homes with swimming pools, sidewalks with streetlamps, lawns, cul-de-sacs, and other signposts of suburbia crept ever closer. The maw of generic residential and commercial development outflanked the farm on all sides by the early 1990s, and the newly arrived citified neighbors weren't happy with the tractors, the on-farm store, the