TAKEN FROM FOODFIRST.ORG

Spiral Garden in Berkeley, CA USA

Spiral Gardens Community Food Security Project: Food From the Ground up

By Emma Tome with photos by Jeannie Li

Lisa Stephens, ‘gardener in chief’ at Spiral Gardens Community Food Security Project, can’t quite estimate just how much food the farm produces each week, nor how much food they sell. “It really depends on how many people are working on the farm,” she says, “In a good year, we’ll get up to four tons.”

Spiral Gardens consists of two small plots on either side of Oregon Street. The southern plot is a nursery crowded with racks and racks of vegetables, herbs, some flowers, and fruit trees. In front is the produce stand, open each Tuesday to the public. Their produce stand at Sacramento and Oregon makes about $1400 every Tuesday. This means about 650 pounds of fresh produce is funneled into the community each week. The food sold is primarily from local organic growers, bought at wholesale prices and re-sold at cost.

The farm on the northern plot does not produce food for sale. The harvest is shared between the volunteer growers and the low-income senior residents in the adjacent apartments. The gardens actively encourage the local neighborhood to work on the farm and share the harvest.

Spiral Gardens models a system of environmental sustainability, advocating organic and local food production. However, Stephens is quick to point out that sustainability involves more than one type of green—the other, inescapably, is money. “Part of sustainability is being economically sustainable,” Stephens acknowledges, “and right now, that isn’t really being accomplished”. Spiral Gardens only pays $100 each year for its lease of the property, but an additional $1300 is required each month to cover the cost of an office a few blocks away (Zoning laws restrict any structures on the farm itself, save for a small shed without electricity, phone, or plumbing). Add to that another $300 for insurance, and overhead costs pile up quickly. Lisa works at the gardens as if it is her full time job, though none of the workers there see a paycheck.

“The cost of land is the biggest impediment to keeping land as agriculture,” Stephens says. “Laws and public policy simply don’t see a garden as important as an office building or shopping mall- they say that land is too valuable to have a community garden”. Stephens finds that the public largely sees the idea of an urban farm as “quaint” and offers little credence to the potential for this model to take hold. In addition, urban land use policies tend to run counter to efforts like Spiral Gardens, and undercut the value of urban farms. Spiral Gardens used the majority of its $150,000 grant from the USDA for legal work necessary to obtain agricultural space.

Spiral Gardens chose their site intentionally, as a way of bringing good food to a neighborhood where it was lacking. This lack of accessibility has resulted in a local lifespan ten years less than that of residents of North Berkeley. This community has limited access to niche markets where small, sustainable farmers offer a high quality product for an equally high price tag. The residents of this area are largely African-American and Mexican, and the community is rife with substance abuse problems. “When we initially got started, the city was afraid that people would be selling drugs here, or hanging out. Some people wanted us to put up barbed wire on our fences,” Stephens recalls.

Instead, the corner of Sacramento and Oregon has improved dramatically. A steady stream of customers visits the produce stand weekly, and the local neighborhood is getting involved with the farm. Students from UC Berkeley, Merritt College, and San Francisco State volunteer along with local elementary and high school kids. On this afternoon, a group from Berkeley’s YouthWorks Voices Against Violence program are hanging out at the produce stand. Most of them have one ear plugged into an iPod. Stephens seems quietly frustrated: “You know, I want them to work, but I won’t make them—they have to decide what they want to learn.” The garden and adjacent farm certainly provide a multitude of opportunities for young people to learn to grow their own food, but this doesn’t necessarily mean the idea will catch on right away.
In many ways, this unfamiliarity with gardening is due to a palpable generation gap. High school students seem at a loss when it comes to growing a plant, especially given our modern system of “convenience foods.” Good organic food seems a luxury to many, and our recent food crisis is seeing an increasing divide between those who can afford good food and those who can’t. Spiral Gardens is seeking to bridge that gap by offering a reliable source for these good, local foods without the steep price tag.

Neighbors may trust this project run by volunteers and neighbors, but it is taxing for the farmers and volunteers. Ultimately, this isn’t yet economically sustainable in an era of industrial farming. However, the number of urban gardens are increasing and form a small, but potent, force that is starting to change the way we feed ourselves. “The policy simply isn’t there,” Stephens says. “But if I can tell you anything, it’s that this movement is going to come from the ground up”.

The Spiral Gardens produce stand is open each Tuesday from 3-7 PM. For more information about Spiral Gardens, visit their website at http://www.spiralgardens.org/