Editor’s note: This profile is from a story focusing on the legacy and future of Black farmers in the U.S., part of The Packer’s ongoing series about urban farming.
South Los Angeles is a food swamp — with more liquor and convenience stores than grocery stores, says Pastor Eddie Anderson, CEO of Partnership for Growth LA, Los Angeles.
Freedom Farms, the flagship program of Partnership for Growth LA, was established to meet the food needs of this community.
“We have 8.5 liquor stores per square mile in South L.A. We have 18 retail grocery stores, and 10 of them do not sell any fresh fruits or vegetables,” he said. “When we realized this and the limited access to fresh produce, we assessed the situation and realized we were not helping our community.”
Los Angeles is the second-most populated city in the U.S., situated in the third largest state, Anderson says, yet African Americans live 12 fewer years on average in Los Angeles County than anywhere else.
“And that is partly because of what we eat,” he said. “We have higher rates of diabetes, of stress, and the foods we eat do not help that.
“We found that 1 in 4 kids in our neighborhood were food insecure, which corresponds to 1 in 4 families in Los Angeles are poor,” he added. “So, we decided that to meet that need, we’ve got to start with food and education — and food farming was our solution.”
Anderson said organizers looked to the past for inspiration and named the program Freedom Farms after Fannie Lou Hamer’s Freedom Farm Cooperative, founded in 1969.
“Looking at the past, we knew the Black Panther Party gave away free food. We knew that community development corporations have tried this in L.A. previously,” he said. “There was a pastor in the 1930s named Clayton Russell who had five Victory Markets, cooperative grocery stores in Los Angeles. But they were redlined by the city; the stores all closed, and that took away healthy food.”
Anderson decided the solution would be to create a farm-to-fridge movement in South and West Los Angeles. Through Freedom Farms, they aim to democratize and scale urban farming and enhance food accessibility by investing in local urban farms.
Anderson, a pastor, co-founded the organization with Rabbi Joel Simonds. Their goal is to create 37 urban farms over a five-year period that started in 2021. They’ve created 15 so far.
The process involves starting urban farms in the community but also visiting existing community gardens and figuring out what they might need.
One example is a garden at an elementary school on the west side, where Anderson says the food grown feeds the families of children attending the school. They took larger community gardens and turned them into urban farms, then brought in an educational program to train the children to farm.
“During the summer they grew a couple hundred pounds of food, and we took that food, along with food grown by another grantee on a rooftop, and we fed an entire neighborhood farm complex,” Anderson said.
The goal is to make food accessible and healthy; with land prices in Los Angeles at a premium — a two-bedroom home can cost in the millions — it’s important to find creative ways to grow food, Anderson says.
“Finding land is hard, so we’re doing hydroponic farming, we’re doing raised beds, we’re growing on rooftops … and we’re trying to maximize the land available like abandoned and vacant alleys,” he said.
As the projects grew, the next challenge became where to sell the food and how to educate residents about cooking and eating fresh produce.
“We realized we needed a touch point where people can go and learn, so we’re building with a local community developer in the heart of Black Los Angeles, The Grocery Store,” Anderson said. “We’re aggregating farms and the produce stand there, but we’re also providing temporary programming where we’ll have fancy L.A. chefs teach people how to eat the food, how to prepare the food, what is the life cycle of the food … so it connects folks back to the land and how we can move forward.”
Anderson sees the solution as finding innovative ways to farm in urban cities and ways to bring fresh food to the community through partnering with local markets.
One group working to bring this food to the city is the Los Angeles Food Policy Council. Anderson says the council takes liquor stores in the food swamp and turns them into healthy neighborhood markets. It seeks local urban farmers to supply the markets so that “when someone goes to the convenience store to buy liquor, they can also get fruits and vegetables,” he said. “I see that legacy as cooperative economics. I see that legacy as understanding we can eat healthy and extend our lives. I see that legacy living through us and finding ways to balance the scales for food equity and urban societies, and that’s a direct correlation to the stories and foodways of our ancestors.
“Our ancestors’ legacy lives through us as we try to balance the scales for food equity and urban societies,” Anderson added.
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