The Fallow Period

Under the care of no one in particular, the four acres soon reverted to their previously feral state. Without water, some of the fruit trees died. Blackberry bushes reached their thorny tentacles into the vegetable beds. Grass grew through cracks in the concrete mini-amphitheater. Once again, the neighborhood’s unwanted junk got thrown down the hill or over the fence.

Back in 2003, Antonio Roman-Alcalá was living up the hill with his mother, and would walk the dog among the ruins of St. Mary’s farm and pick fruit. “I didn’t notice it until it was abandoned,” he says. Once he got into the peak oil and permaculture movements, the weed-choked, orphaned piece of property started calling out to him.

Roman-Alcalá and his friends Justin Valone and Becky Sutton just started clearing the land with their own tools, and replanting the crops. For about two years the trio and a growing number of helpers, including Mark and Dierauf, volunteered their labor and bought seeds and starts out of their own pockets or with donations. “We learned by doing,” says Roman-Alcalá. He eventually attended a gardening and composting program through Garden for the Environment, the former educational arm of SLUG that successfully separated itself and survived as its own nonprofit.

The group, later dubbed the “guerilla gardeners,” contacted the Recreation and Parks Department to discuss the future of the farm. They got permission to use city water for the crops, and then started the long, slow process of working with the Alemany residents to determine what sort of involvement would suit them. “Basically, we found that adults didn’t want to have anything to do with a farm that didn’t belong to them unless there was a paying job in it for them,” says Roman-Alcalá.

The guerilla gardeners needed some grants.

A Farm is Reborn

This year, they successfully applied for funding from the Department of the Environment’s food security program, which is about getting food to low-income residents, and from the Department of Children, Youth, and Families to mentor local youth. In June, an individual donor gave the farm $10,000 that allowed it to get the youth-worker program started until the other funding came through. Alemany Farm is now officially a project of the newly formed, nonprofit Alemany Resident Management Corporation. Three adult men from the local community work as paid mentors. Mark now gets a part-time salary as farm manager, training the youth workers and overseeing most of the volunteer workdays. A journalist, organic farming veteran, and community activist, he is the author of two environmental books, including the forthcoming Building the Green Economy, and edits the environmental quarterly Earth Island Journal.

The farm is thriving. Ripening in this long-neglected dirt are dry-farmed tomatoes, two kinds of green beans, onions, broccoli, chard, six types of squash (“way too much squash,” groans Mark), zucchini, three kinds of cucumbers, collards, chard, kale, strawberries, spinach, red and orange carrots, beets, basil, and sweet peppers. Trees bearing pears, plums, apples, loquats, avocados, and olives have survived. Up on the hillside, bees dart in and out of boxes.

Alemany Farm has a fourfold mission, explains Roman-Alcalá. The first goal is economic and environmental justice—creating “green” jobs. The second is increasing food security for the community. Next is environmental education, starting with Alemany, then reaching the whole city through, say, school field trips. 

The last and perhaps most important goal is the social justice and empowerment of the farm’s three audiences: the teen workers, the volunteers, and the residents. “We want people to see that they have the potential to affect things positively,” says Roman-Alcalá. “I myself have so little faith in the political system that it’s easy to get depressed. Growing your own food can be a big step for people who feel they have very little power over their own lives.”

Every weekend , Alemany Farm has volunteer workdays in which anyone can come and hoe beds, weed, prune, build compost boxes, and harvest. On a recent Sunday, about 20 volunteers have shown up despite cloudy skies and a light drizzle. Roman-Alcalá is ripping out invasive blackberry bushes. Dierauf is pushing a wheel-barrowful of mulch. Despite maintaining a large garden in his back yard plus a community garden plot in the Richmond, the 78-year-old still comes faithfully for the volunteer workdays.

“I like to come down and put my oar in,” he jokes. “But they’re doing a great job here of growing food.” The long-timer thinks that a tipping point has been reached with the local-food movement, and he’s glad. “I think people need to find out how to grow their own food, even if it’s just a planter box out the window. They need to know just how hard it is to grow, particularly if you’re trying to do it organically. Today for example, two of us handpicked all the worms off the green cabbages.”

Jessie Woletz and Ellen Goodenow sit on the ground, topping and trimming glossy red onions. For Woletz, a Haight resident who works for an environmental non-profit, volunteering at Alemany Farm is a chance “to get hands-on with what I care about.” She’s been coming twice a month for the past two years: “Any less than that and I go into withdrawal. It’s my dose of nature.”

Noe Valley resident Goodenow, who writes educational books, comes more sporadically. “I like to come in the summer because there’s so much good stuff to eat. The best thing about volunteering here is it’s not very hard,” she chuckles guiltily. “You do work, but it’s relaxing. And then you eat!” Volunteers get to take home produce in exchange for their labor.

The youth workers are also allowed to harvest whatever and as much as they want at the end of their shift. Some teens also snag a few fruits or vegetables for relatives or neighbors. “So far, the boys just go for the fruit, while the girls are a little more adventurous,” reports Mark.
Danielle Johnson, 16, likes the spiny little lemon cucumbers “with salt and pepper and a little vinegar.” Damika Mark (no relation to Jason), 16, says she’s warming up to the vegetables. When she first started, she looked at “all the stuff that came out of the dirt like, ‘No way would I eat that.’”

Everybody loves the strawberries. “They taste different from the ones at the store,” says Johnson, carefully plucking a ripe red berry from its hiding place and popping it into her mouth.

The Price of Respect

On Wednesdays, Mark takes produce to the Bayview-Hunter’s Point neighborhood, where “we practically give it away.” Everything’s $1—a bunch of collards, a pound of onions, or cucumbers. The only thing that costs more is a pint of organic strawberries at $1.25. The farm stand is not a moneymaker. “It’s all about getting food to people,” says Mark.

So why not share the bounty of the farm with the nearby low-income residents of the Alemany housing project for free?

The question touches a nerve with Mark. At one point, the volunteers started a “free CSA” (Community-Supported Agriculture program) with about five families, in which they delivered a bag of fresh produce every week. They found the previous bag still sitting by the door, with rotting food in it, enough times to declare the experiment was a failure, that people must think that if the food was free, it must not be any good. They do hope to start up a farm stand for the neighborhood again, but they will charge for the food.

 “On the one hand you want all people to have access to healthy, fresh, organic local food as a social-justice principle. But if you give it away, through grants or whatever, where’s the social justice for the farmers?” says Mark. 

He points out that there are farmers outside of Fresno living on food stamps, that most small to midsize organic farmers are really struggling. “Don’t get me wrong—if someone is starving, they should get food. But to give away the food is to say that my labor, and the labor of those kids, is without value. And that’s not what we’re trying to communicate. We’re trying to communicate to people that to grow food is a profoundly human craft, and that it’s worth something, even if it’s only a dollar.”