Farming in the City
Thanks to urban agriculture, even the most die-hard city slickers are getting back to the land.
By Luna Anona and Photography by Create+Gather
Sacramento Magazine
November 4, 2020
Excerpt:
Imagine: A vacant lot transformed into a fruit garden. An apartment balcony repurposed as a tomato nursery. A backyard that functions as a grocery store. They’re all urban farms, producing food in the city—and literally changing the landscape in the process. Country and concrete can not only co–exist; they can also address food insecurity, nutrition education and healthy eating as well as carbon footprint reduction, all while creating and empowering community. Here are four little urban farms that are accomplishing big things in and around the farm-to-fork capital.
Sara Bernal was a social worker managing housing subsidies for homeless shelters in San Francisco when a relationship took her to a farm in Fair Oaks. Her partner at the time had landed a farming apprenticeship, and Bernal, visiting from the city, was enchanted by her first glimpse of farm life. When the relationship ended, she decided she wanted to farm, too. After an internship in Penryn and a job at Chico’s Grub Farm, she headed to the Delta to start her own farm on a leased plot of land she’d found on Craigslist. Four years later, she lost the farm, but a new opportunity arose: The city of West Sacramento was looking for someone to spearhead an initiative for an urban farm. “I was like, ‘Holy crap, that would be cool!’” recalls Bernal, who wrote a grant proposal and partnered with the nonprofit Center for Land-Based Learning. Now, she works as program manager for West Sacramento Urban Farms, which converts vacant lots into urban farm business incubators that help small-scale farmers get established.
