Urban farm to rise on Excelsior field
Land owned by S.F. agency to become social justice garden
At the western tip of San Francisco’s Crocker-Amazon Playground, a 6-acre plot of land inhabited by little save for a few small trees is being transformed into a symbol of restorative environmental and social justice in the city’s Excelsior district.
The once-fallow field, owned but previously unused by the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission, is on its way to becoming an urban farm capable of growing up to 1,000 pounds of fruits and vegetables each year — a bounty that will help provide affordable, healthy food to communities in the
Excelsior.
The land, at the corner of Geneva Avenue and Moscow Street, is being put to use thanks to an ordinance passed by the PUC in 2011 to create three pilot programs that would transform parcels of underutilized land into urban agriculture projects in partnership with local community organizations.
The College Hill Learning Garden in Bernal Heights was the agency’s first such program. Opened in April 2016, the center is designed to teach students about healthy food and environmental sustainability and is operated by Education Outside, a nonprofit focused on science and environmental education.
The new garden is the PUC’s second urban agriculture program, and the third is still “under consideration,” according to Tracy Zhu, the agency’s acting community benefits manager.
“As an agency, what’s really important for (the PUC) is to develop public and community partnerships, and one of the opportunities that the agency has is activating our land,” Zhu said. “As we think through the best way to ensure that our underutilized land is maximized, local partners help define what those uses (for the land) might be.”
To help figure out the best use for the Crocker-Amazon field, the agency enlisted the help of the nonprofit People Organizing to Demand Environmental Justice and Economic Rights, or PODER, which operates primarily out of the Mission and Excelsior neighborhoods. The organization will oversee the garden’s operations.
Tere Almaguer, PODER’s environmental justice organizer, said the group set to work in 2013 soliciting suggestions from those neighborhoods on how they’d like to see the land used.
“We wanted to make it something accessible to families and something that felt like a community,” Almaguer said. “We did 300 surveys door to door asking people, ‘Do you want a farm? Do you see yourself participating?’ And we got an overwhelming response of ‘Yes!’ ”
Almaguer hopes the garden will serve as a community hub, where the mosaic of peoples who make up the Mission and Excelsior can come together to till the land, learn about the benefits of healthy eating and share in the bounty that the garden provides.
“We always talk about connecting to the fact that a lot of our families are immigrant families that come from rural areas, and we’re seeing how the health of our families living on rural farms is better than how our parents are living now in the cities,” she said. “We wanted to create that connection of how growing our own food, our own herbs and using preventative medicine helped our grandparents live to be 100.”
Supervisor Ahsha Safaí, who represents the district, said the garden is a particularly positive development for a neighborhood that can at times feel encircled by the more unsavory trappings of urban life.
“Our community in particular is surrounded by two freeways, has BART aboveground and has industry not too far away. It’s an area dealing with all different levels of children in poverty,” he said. “This is an opportunity to use these pieces of land as a way to bring the community together around something positive.”
At an event held at the garden in November, the PUC and PODER unveiled the space’s name: Hummingbird Farm — an homage to one of the many pollinators that Almaguer hopes to attract there.
It will be some time before the garden begins to bear its fruit. So far, Almaguer said her organization has planted about 1,000 local plants, including mugwort, hummingbird sage and soap fruit, to help return essential nutrients to the soil and to encourage pollinators to begin visiting the land. She said her group will spend the next few months recruiting volunteers to help make decisions about what fruits and vegetables to grow once the soil is adequately restored. The organization also plans to bring in school groups to educate children about the connections among food production, nutrition and the natural environment.
“I look forward to seeing a younger generation seeing the importance of projects like this,” Safaí said. “And I look forward to it growing in future years, no pun intended.”