Edible San Francisco: The Bay Area's Smartest Food Magazine

Thirteen-year-old Byron Smith gazes dubiously at the dirt-covered crimson vegetable in the hand of Jason Mark, manager of Alemany Farm.
“You going to eat that?” asks Smith.

“After I wash it, sure,” replies Mark, leading Smith and three other teenagers up some steps to a spigot. He rinses off the light coating of soil, then pulls a utility knife from its pouch on his belt to carve off pieces for the kids. They make faces, but pop the red chunks into their mouths without hesitation.

“Tastes like a regular carrot,” shrugs Smith.

Two weeks earlier, Smith would not have made that comparison. A resident of the nearby 165-unit public housing development, he says he didn’t eat many vegetables before he started as one of Alemany Farm’s youth workers. Under Mark’s supervision, they’ve been planting and weeding vegetable beds, learning to turn compost, and carefully harvesting the myriad fruits and vegetables that this productive urban farm grows. Through a grant, they’re paid $50 a week for six hours of work.

Smith, for one, insists he’s not showing up just for the cash. “It’s not much. Something is better than nothing, yeah, but it’s really not about that,” he says. “It’s about making my community better.”

While the delivery feels a little rehearsed, the statement rings true. Alemany Farm really is in the process of making a difference—for the second time. Will this incarnation thrive long enough to produce self-sustaining seeds? 

Take a SLUG

The four neatly planted acres that now comprise Alemany Farm haven’t always looked like this. It’s a homely piece of earth: steep on the west where it slopes down from Bernal Heights, swampy on the east where it butts hard up against four-lane Alemany Boulevard and Highway 280 just beyond. The high-decibel buzzing of traffic is a constant, unwelcome soundtrack to working on the farm, but people say you get used to it.

The land’s fortunes have risen and fallen with each foster parent. Up until 1994, it was a dump. Contractors disposed of dirt and concrete there; people pitched their old refrigerators, car batteries, and household garbage.

“It was a real mess,” says Ed Dierauf, one of the board members of the San Francisco League of Urban Gardeners who was involved in the farm’s first life.

The revolutionary nonprofit known as SLUG began planting gardens in abandoned and vacant lots around San Francisco in the 1980s. By the early ’90s, says Dierauf, SLUG was looking for public land on which to start an urban farm. The four acres were owned by the Recreation and Parks Department, owner of St. Mary’s Park above the farm, and by the city’s Housing Authority, which controls a small slice adjoining the residences. “Two or three acres were flat, which was all we needed; on the hills we knew we could plant fruit trees,” he explains.

Dierauf and the other SLUG volunteers cleared out the debris, planted 100 trees, and began tilling the soil. Eventually known as St. Mary’s Urban Youth Farm, the project grew like gangbusters, fertilized by hefty grants from the Mayor’s Office of Community Development, the Neighborhood Beautification Fund, the Education Foundation of America, the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, and others.

During the late ’90s, SLUG dug a giant pond to streamline the site’s drainage and provide wetlands habitat for birds, then built an impressive windmill intended to pump stored water up the hill to irrigate the land using gravity. At its peak, Dierauf says, St. Mary’s had more than 80 teenagers and adults, most drawn from troubled neighborhoods all over the city, working the land as paid interns and employees. The abundant produce went to surrounding residents.

And then SLUG imploded. The problems started in 2000, when it apparently missed a deadline for a major grant. With the bursting of the dot-com bubble, the city spigot slowed to a trickle. In 2003 the nonprofit’s budget was a projected $1.2 million, down from its high of $3.5 million. It laid off 85 employees and briefly shut its doors, then reopened them again. But then it was KO’d for good—by proof that the organization spent thousands of taxpayer dollars paying its workers to vote and campaign for Gavin Newsom during the mayoral race. Newsom denied knowing of the efforts, but SLUG decided not to fight the charges. It was banned from receiving municipal funds.

In September of 2004, the Chronicle reported that with no city contracts, SLUG was out of funds and was $100,000 in debt. Unable to hire workers, it was abandoning its gardens, “leaving them to the community members who till them.”