The Orchard Amid Concrete

There’s a farm in Los Angeles, tucked between a faded American Legion Post and a Baptist church in Panorama City. Behind the concrete columns and wooden fence lies Cottonwood Urban Farm, a composting site and small orchard of mulberry, fig, pomegranate and stone fruit trees — peach, plum, apricot, pluot and nectarines. The May gray of Los Angeles’ spring is just starting to burn off as I find Elliott Kuhn, standing on a folding chair, picking Pakistani mulberries and carefully packing them into small cardboard containers for sale later.
 

Join our email list to get the stories that mainstream news is overlooking.
Sign up for Capital & Main’s newsletter.

 
He invites me to pick the sweet, long berries as I ask him about his farm’s designation as an Urban Agriculture Incentive Zone. Kuh was a recipient of a 2013 property tax incentive intended to support urban farmers and address food insecurity by creating farms in neighborhoods close to residents who need wholesome food most.

“I was able to save a chunk of change,” Kuhn said, noting the California state tax break helped him add a new water main and install an electrical line on his quarter-acre farm. “I think they had a great idea, but I think it didn’t play out the way they envisioned.”

Elliott Kuhn picks mulberries from a tree and and packs them into cardboard containers.

“They” are policy makers in Sacramento: Assemblymember Phil Ting, former Gov. Jerry Brown and other elected officials. Recognizing the need to address food insecurity and food apartheid in California’s urban centers, they crafted Assembly Bill 551, which created Urban Agriculture Incentive Zones, essentially a tax break for owners of vacant land who agreed to convert their property into small farms in cities with more than 250,000 residents.

2023 marks the 10-year anniversary of AB 551’s passage. About one-fifth of California residents are food insecure — lacking reliable access to the amount of wholesome food necessary for a healthy life. The vision of AB 551 was that the communities that needed food the most should have the opportunity to grow it in their own neighborhoods.

Unfortunately, the vision hasn’t materialized yet. Very few farmers and landowners are aware of the law, let alone applied for the tax break. AB 551 has not changed the landscape for urban farms. The state does not track applications for the incentive, nor those approved and their impact in local communities. Food insecurity has not lessened since 2013. Nonetheless, urban farming advocates believe there remains a path forward.

“Urban Agriculture Incentive Zones as a policy is a failure,” said Janet Valenzuela, business counselor and program associate with the Los Angeles Food Policy Council (LAFPC). “It’s what happens when a policy concept doesn’t match local needs.”

His speech sprinkled with California beach slang and dressed in gray t-shirt and dusty, faded black jeans, Kuhn points to the 100-year-old cottonwood tree on his property — the farm’s namesake. He bought his home in 2011 from Hollywood set designers living in Panorama City, a neighborhood surrounded by freeways in the northeast corner of Los Angeles’ San Fernando Valley. That year, Kuhn started a small garden with row crops. One year later he was selling his produce at local farmers markets. In 2014, he bought the vacant lot next door — about a quarter of an acre of land, or enough space for a baseball infield and room for families to watch from the side — for about $250,000. The following year he incorporated his farm.
 

Urban Agriculture Incentive Zones offer landowners a tax break, based on USDA farm rates, if they agree to lease their land for farming for five years.

 
With the new land Kuhn focused on fruit trees and composting. Gardeners and community members know to drop off their cuttings and food waste. Today, he shares the space. There are three dogs, 20 ducks, seven chickens and two beehives. Black Thumb Farm sublets his row garden to provide education and experience for local Black, Indigenous and other youth of color. A ceramics artist has a kiln for pottery. Just recently they hosted 65 first graders on a field trip to the farm.

Kuhn’s income does not come from what he grows. Rather, it’s from what he knows. Kuhn has turned the garden into an educational space while also taking his knowledge into the community, helping to build and run school gardens and creating curricula around the environment.

“The narrow vision of urban agriculture — growing food in the city: That’s not how I earn my income. I had to lean into what I know,” Kuhn explains, noting he has a master’s degree in education, allowing him to teach in classrooms in the United States and Mexico as well as with local environmental organizations. “It’s not a one-size-fits-all method by any means. What’s your skillset? What’s your intention? What’s your community?”

While Kuhn knows other urban farmers in Los Angeles, he doesn’t know any that benefit, like him, from an Urban Agriculture Incentive Zone.

*   *   *

In 2013, inspired by the budding urban garden movement, policy makers in Sacramento proposed Assembly Bill 551, creating Urban Agriculture Incentive Zones (UAIZs), to address food insecurity. UAIZs offered landowners a tax break, based on USDA farm rates, if they agreed to lease their land for farming for five years. Farms had to be at least a tenth of an acre — about the size of a high school basketball court.

When the initiative became law in 2014, it was up to counties and cities to implement. But local governments were left with little direction beyond the text of the law. There is no coordinating agency. There is no dedicated website. No phone number to call.

Four years after the law’s passage, the San Francisco Bay Area Planning and Urban Research Association, or SPUR, followed up on its implementation. The results were underwhelming. Only four cities (San Francisco, Sacramento, San Jose, San Diego) and three counties (Sacramento, Santa Clara and Los Angeles) had implemented the law as of 2017.

“It is a solution that cannot scale to meet the problem of food insecurity,” explained Eli Zigas, food and agriculture policy director for SPUR.

To farm, you need land, resources and knowledge. UAIZs attempt to make land available. However, five years is just enough time to prep the soil and build out necessary infrastructure when starting a farm. Five years is just the beginning. And, most concerning, it is not permanent. In places like Los Angeles, San Francisco, Oakland and San Jose, where property values continue to climb, the law relies on the goodwill of landlords.

“A tax break is not enough to incentivize most private property owners to turn their land into an urban farm or garden,” Zigas said.
 

“The cost of land is prohibitive to low-income communities of color — the people who stand to benefit the most from urban agriculture initiatives.”

~ Kaye Jenkins, policy research consultant

 
This truth is the lesson of the South Central Farm, once the largest urban farm west of the Mississippi. Approximately 350 families tended the 14 acre plot — an entire industrial city block. In 2006, the farmers were evicted at the insistence of the landowner, who claimed he had an offer of a better deal with a prospective buyer intending to build a warehouse on the property. Advocates argued the farm provided jobs and fed a neighborhood lacking markets for fresh, wholesome food. On the morning of the eviction, Los Angeles County Sheriff’s deputies surrounded the farm, arrested 40 people protesting the action, including actress Daryl Hannah, who clung to a tree, while bulldozers uprooted and destroyed walnut trees, peach trees and rows of nopales. In July 2019, the Los Angeles City Council voted to move forward to build an office park on the Alameda Street site, dashing the hopes of activists who sought to restore the farm.

Today, Zigas advises those seeking to create an urban farm that a better use of effort and time is to identify unused public land rather than seeking out private land. Partnerships on public land offer more long-term security, he noted. Kaye Jenkins is assisting Los Angeles County to do just that.

“The cost of land is prohibitive to low-income communities of color — the people who stand to benefit the most from urban agriculture initiatives,” said Jenkins, who is working with L.A County as a policy research consultant mapping public land viable for urban farming.

As an undergraduate at Occidental College, Jenkins studied AB 551 for her senior research project. I am not the first professional to call her about her work. She is quick to clarify that her undergraduate research is not peer reviewed. Nonetheless, our conversation is a sign of how little research exists on UAIZs.

No agency or office is tasked with publicly tracking urban farms in Los Angeles, let alone California. Even the definition of an urban farm is complicated — how is it different from a school garden or community garden? And yet there are pockets of Los Angeles — such as Compton — with a thriving, decades old urban agriculture community. But there are only seven farms that are registered and qualified as an UAIZ in Los Angeles.

“People are frustrated,” Kuhn acknowledges. “‘How do we access this?’ There’s no clear path.”
 

“Community production is often not seen as a valued asset of growing food.”

~ Janet Valenzuela, Los Angeles Food Policy Council

 
Kuhn recognizes his experience is unique because he owns his land. In addition, he had the help of a professional to guide him through the policy process of applying and becoming certified.

Like Kuhn, those most familiar with urban agriculture have recommendations to improve the process and realize more urban farms across the state. They say there needs to be standard zoning and policy rules spanning cities, counties and regions. Policy and zoning laws should not preempt growing food when there is a clear need in a community.

Municipalities need to dedicate funding, support and staff for urban agriculture. Through the Los Angeles Food Policy Council, Valenzuela is helping to organize an alliance of urban farmers.

Los Angeles and other communities need to start planning with and listening to urban farmers, Valenzuela said, noting the federal government’s 2018 farm bill included investments in urban agriculture.

“We need to ask ourselves: Are we prepared here to know where resources need to go?” Valenzuela said. “Do we have a community down for their shit; down for land sovereignty and food sovereignty — because this is labor intensive.”

*   *   *

Kuhn has been approached multiple times by developers interested in buying his land. While he has turned down those offers, he has imagined selling his farm to the Black Thumb Farm, taking what he has learned and starting anew elsewhere. But when he looks in the San Fernando Valley, he has only ever found lots starting at $1 million. He wonders why Urban Agriculture Incentive Zones need to be limited to vacant land. Why not open the process to all land, he asks.

In the meantime, he thinks identifying vacant public land, either owned by the city or local school districts, is the way for young farmers to go. Imagine, he said, allowing a young farmer to rent land on school grounds, with utilities and water already built in and the opportunity to teach young people about food and the earth.

“That would be transformative,” Kuhn said.

There’s another metric to urban farm land that cannot be gauged by square feet and property values: community wellbeing. Urban farms are intended for communities that not only lack access to wholesome food for healthy lives, but also safe outdoor space for people to gather.

“Community production is often not seen as a valued asset of growing food,” said Valenzuela.

But community is a consistent value noted by those familiar with Urban Agriculture Incentive Zones. Part of the allure of farmers markets is the relationships customers build with growers. Urban gardeners often note the importance of connecting with soil and plants despite being surrounded by concrete. Farming is inherently an act of sharing. And sharing is how communities thrive.

Copyright 2023 Capital & Main