Composting Inequity

On any given day at Alemany Farm, you are likely to find people from all walks of life enjoying nature: student groups gathered around picnic tables under the willow tree, volunteers of all ages planting out a freshly prepared row-crop bed, and neighbors harvesting their groceries for the week with their own two hands. You’ll also find urban farmers, beekeepers, viticulturists, medicinal herbalists, dye gardeners, craftspeople, native ecology stewards, and city agency representatives, all coming together to ensure the farm is a dynamic, thriving place.

That’s because at Alemany Farm, community agriculture is truly communal.

Unlike the conventional “community garden” model in which individuals preside over isolated pay-to-play garden plots, Alemany provides a shared space where neighbors work together with volunteers from across San Francisco to cultivate — and be cultivated by — the land, without dividing it or claiming ownership of it. Not only are many stakeholders involved in decision making, but the shared land is stewarded collectively. This is a powerful, replicable model that builds community across lines of race, class, gender, nationality, and ability. Through growing food with care and intention, Alemany Farm sows the seeds of a greener and more just San Francisco — a city where good health, fresh air, green spaces, nutritious foods, and clean waters flow in abundance for all. At least, that’s the idea.

The Islais Creek watershed in southeastern San Francisco was, for the longest time, a terrain stewarded by the Ramaytush Ohlone people, who — despite centuries of genocide, disenfranchisement, and erasure at the hands of Spanish and American empires — still call this beautiful peninsula by its first name: Yelamu. From the 1930s to 1970s, the area was reshaped by urban development, and what remained of Islais Creek was buried beneath wide roadways and highways. The watershed that fed it is now a largely concrete cityscape, while urban sprawl dominates hillsides once abundant with vegetation.

In the lowlands of this paved paradise sits the Alemany Apartments complex, a dense arrangement of units erected by the US Department of Housing and Urban Development. It is a site which today houses some of the poorest residents within city limits. Bracketed to the south by the 280 superhighway, and to the north by a steep hill, the Alemany complex is cut off from the more upscale residential life known in other parts of the city. Tenants here suffer heightened rates of chronic disease, mental distress, and other lifelong health problems. These outcomes disproportionately affect populations experiencing structural marginalization, especially folks making no or low income, but who are, nevertheless, powerful, vibrant, and wealthy in ways more essential to human thriving than numbers in a bank account.

For years, the space that is now Alemany Farm was a quasi-dump at the bottom of a public park called St. Mary’s. Despite the considerable amounts of trash dumped there, the 3.5-acre plot served as a sprawling backyard to hundreds of residents of the Apartments. Locals would frequent the grassy spread to take a break from turbulent and sometimes violent dynamics in the neighborhood, and to recreate with friends. Children used strips of cardboard like sleds to zip down the steep hillsides — a tradition that carries on to this day. Older residents grew vegetables here from seed.

The space was transformed into an urban farm in 1995 by a coalition of neighbors, city government, the San Francisco League of Urban Gardeners, and volunteers. A key figure in this transformation was Alice Caruthers, a queer, Black community organizer and resident of the Apartments for the better part of the past 40 years. Caruthers worked with youth from her neighborhood to tend the farm’s first crops.

Today, she is on the Advisory Board of the Friends of Alemany Farm (FOAF), a small but mighty project of Earth Island Institute that has stewarded food production and agricultural education at the farm since 2005. FOAF is now the most impactful agricultural nonprofit in San Francisco. We produce 20,000-plus pounds of food annually, provided free to more than 7,500 of SF’s low-income, food-insecure residents. FOAF also provides free garden educational experiences: We facilitated more than 17,000 service learning hours on site in 2019 (pre-pandemic). This makes the farm the second-most popular volunteer San Francisco Recreation and Park Department site in the city after Golden Gate Park.

But FOAF offers more than direct access to healthy food and the means of sustainable food production. Our Urban Agroecology Apprenticeship is growing the next generation of local BIPOC food-justice movement leaders and farmers by paying low-income area youth to learn marketable gardening skills. Alemany Farm is a cornerstone of food security in San Francisco.

Throughout its 16-year history at Alemany, FOAF has always understood land and labor as political: That inequalities constructed along lines of race and class grant different groups of people unequal access to vital resources, including fresh water, clean air, healthy local food, and quiet, green, fertile spaces (to say nothing of farming tools or skills). For that reason, FOAF designed its operations to achieve accessibility: Everyone is welcome, the site is always publicly accessible (as are all city parks), the food is always free, the educational offerings are always, “Pay what you can, and no one will be turned away for lack of funds.” This hallmark of Alemany Farm represents a radical break with comparably sized market-farm operations and is a marvelous exploration of community-based self-sufficiency that points toward ways of living outside of a capitalist economic system.

Learn more about this Earth Island project at: alemanyfarm.org

In recent years, however, it has become apparent that equal access is not sufficient to guarantee universal participation at the farm. An open-door policy does not account for many of the more insidious, less visible structural and cultural barriers to access, especially for historically marginalized groups. Since our vision includes growing the next generation of BIPOC food producers in SF and beyond, we are working to course-correct the ways our policies, practices, and culture obstruct marginalized population participation. We hope that through our internal efforts, as well as that within our networks, land-based work in San Francisco will organize itself increasingly around principles of anti-racism and decolonialism.

FOAF’s long-term objective is to grow within San Francisco (and beyond) a culture of equity, reciprocity, and collective thriving — from the ground up. Or in Caruthers’s words: “Let’s love and support each other.”

Earth is part and parcel of this vision. We are an organic eco-farm, meaning we organize our efforts as much around serving and protecting the natural world as we do around nourishing humanity; these two spheres are indistinguishable from one another. The health and thriving of the land is, as we see it, intimately linked to healthy, equitable relationships among humans. If humanity has a future on Earth, it will be because we shed our extractive capitalist paradigm and learned to live in right, balanced relationship with each other and the resources we (and all beings) rely on to live and thrive; that is to say, we must learn to treat each other, and Earth, and all of her creatures, with equal dignity and respect. Because many of us, especially urbanites, need places to get back into relationship with the sights, sounds, smells, and myriad gifts nature has to give, and we need places that teach us how to care for nature in return.