On Boden St. in Los Angeles sits a swath of green nestled underneath power lines where squash plants and rainbow chard vying for space among trellises of vines and bunches of chamomile.
“It’s amazing what happens when you plant things,” Nisha Bansal said while she watched butterflies flit across the South L.A. community garden.
The Good Earth Community Garden is just one example of a space that can provide food and job security for a community, Bansal said.
“South L.A. as a whole is a food desert,” said Rev. Eddie Anderson, a senior pastor at McCarty Church in West Adams. “That means that there are only 10 grocery stores in the entire area, that fresh produce is a premium and we don’t have a lot of it. There’s more liquor stores per square mile and fast food restaurants than there are grocery stores.”
Anderson is the co-founder of Partnership for Growth LA, a nonprofit, community organization formed by McCarty Church and the Jewish Center for Justice.
The partnership is tackling three major issues: education and reading loss; lack of workplace development; and lack of fresh food in their communities. To help address the third problem, the partnership is working to create more community gardens in South and West L.A. The Freedom Farms program was established.
The Freedom Farms program, launched in July, is “inspired by a long history of Black-owned farming co-ops,” according to a press release from the Partnership. The program began as a three year pilot, with the goal of establishing five new urban farming spaces and expanding upon 10 established farms in the first year, Bansal said.
The goal in three years is to create or build upon existing farms until there are at least 37 serving the area. The Good Earth Community Garden is one of the established spaces that Freedom Farms is working on.
Access to fresh produce in South and West L.A. has long been an issue for residents. The CDC found in a 2020 study of three neighborhoods in South Los Angeles that over 55% of food retail stores in that area did not sell any fresh fruits or vegetables. The study also found that there was only one food pantry and no farmers markets in those neighborhoods.
“We say food is life and that garden is community,” said Anderson. Another aspect of the Freedom Farms program is the hiring of formerly incarcerated people, seniors and youth by the partnership to work together on the farm as an educational endeavor.
“The healing power of gardening is what it boils down to,” Brendan Wilson, master gardener, said as he walked the rough dirt path of the Good Earth Community Garden. He says the formerly incarcerated workers are “reentering” life through gardening. “It’s hiring people who would not be able to get this experience.”
Right now, Bansal said, Freedom Farms is using money from a $7 million grant it received from the state of California in July to build itself up. They have a lot of ideas: plots of land to grow on and community gardens and farms to join. The end goal is not just to grow food, but to provide a “model of economic development,” said Bansal.
Anderson agreed. He said that merchandising the produce they grow and getting it into farmers markets, grocery stores and restaurants the plan for the future.
“Freedom Farms really is an idea that we can have fresh organic food in our community farm to table, but the farm is South L.A., the farm is churches, synagogues, it’s schools, it’s parking lots, underpasses, community gardens and that those farms then will feed into a network of farmers markets, grocery stores and restaurants,” said Anderson.
At the Good Earth Community Garden, 28 plots are shared by the community members that surround the land. The squares of soil overflow with pumpkins and tomatillos, corn and peppers. It’s the start of a sustainable urban farming vision Freedom Farms is hoping to spread throughout L.A., Bansal said. In the meantime, she and Wilson believe that the importance of the farms is not just the food they produce - it’s the “space for community.”
“When our hands are in the soil, how do we build community? How do we organize our neighborhoods?” Anderson said. “We make meaning out of place, and the sacredness of food and soil.”