http://www.newvillage.net/Journal/Issue2/2fairviewgardens.html
By Chris Lazarus
Compared to the micro-scale agriculture
projects scraping sustenance from the harsh inner city, Fairview Gardens
(in Goleta, near Santa Barbara) seems to have it made. Twelve and a
half acres of rich farmland are tended organically, producing 100 varieties
of fruits and vegetables, as well as chickens and goats -- all in all,
enough food to feed 500 families and employ 23 people full time. Equally
enviable in the eyes of those farming on someone else's property is
the fact that the land is owned by a local non-profit dedicated to
urban agriculture and protected from development in perpetuity
through a conservation easement with a land trust, specifying that
the land must continue as a working organic farm.
Life
at Fairview Gardens wasn't always so serene and well-ordered. Typical
of agriculture projects in heavily developed areas, success has come
-- after many years -- as the result of an enormous amount of dedication
and hard work on the part of one persevering visionary and those whom
he has inspired.
Michael Ableman arrived at Fairview
Gardens 20 years ago to graft fruit trees, soon became the manager
and, through trial and error, transformed the small fruit farm
shipping its produce to distant markets into the abundant organic
supermarket for local consumption that it is today. He is passionate
about involving and educating people, particularly children, in
the process of growing their own food, and initiated many outreach
programs to the local suburban community, as well as the inner city
of Los Angeles, 100 miles south of Goleta. More than 5,000 people visit
Fairview Gardens every year for tours, farming and cooking classes,
internships, festivals, and cultural events.
Ableman
is also the author of two books (From the Good Earth and On Good
Land), lushly illustrated with his own photos, describing his own
organic learning process of working with the land and the long, ultimately
successful, struggle with developers and suburban neighbors, who don't
want to listen to tractor motors humming after 5:00 p.m. or roosters
crowing at sunrise.
The farm is run on a for-profit
basis and is economically viable, selling organic and unusual
produce to the affluent community surrounding it. Ableman focuses much
of his non-profit outreach and educational work on communities in need,
however.
Fairview
Gardens has enjoyed many advantages over inner city farming experiments.
The fertile land had never been anything other than wild or a
farm. Its owners (until 1994 when the non-profit purchased it) were
sympathetic to the concept of organic farming and tolerant of the changes
wrought by Ableman. Despite the complaints of tractor noise, compost
odor and roosters, crowing, the surrounding suburban community seems
a world away from the crime, drugs, and poverty of the most blighted
neighborhoods of our largest cities.
But
two aerial photos of Fairview Gardens, one taken in 1954 and the
other in 1998, poignantly reveal a more ominous threat to healthy food,
sustainable culture and humans beings, connection to land and nature
than any criminal or chemical pollutant -- the destruction of some
of the richest farmland in the world by wasteful, automobile-dependent
sprawl development. In the first photo, Fairview Gardens was just one
fairly indistinguishable farm in a lush, gentle landscape of fields
and orchards. The second photo, taken from the same vantage point not
quite fifty years later, shows a tiny green island nearly swallowed
up in a concrete and asphalt ocean, crowded in on all sides by industrial
parking lots, tract housing, roads, and shopping malls.
Here
is the ironic corollary to the accelerating abandonment of urban
properties. While community and entrepreneurial gardeners in large
cities labor mightily to coax life out of debris-strewn, contaminated,
abandoned plots, huge holdings of clean, fertile, relatively untouched
land are being paved over in more sparsely populated areas so that real
estate developers can reap their far more lucrative harvest.
Confronted
with this insatiable appetite for land, responsible for the annual
loss of 400,000 acres of farmland in the U.S., the persistence
and flourishing of any small farm, even one as blessed as Fairview
Gardens, must be recognized as a miracle. Michael Ableman is one
of the many heroic Davids battling the Goliaths of an unsustainable
system.
_________________________________________________________________
Contributing Editor, Chris Lazarus, is a principal
of A.J. Lazarus and Associates Public Relations in New York City.
As a freelance journalist, she writes on environmental and sustainability
issues for television, radio, and print media.
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taken from http://www.newvillage.net/
The journal of enlightened leadership in community planning,
development, and revitalization.
New Village is published by the national organization Architects/
Designers/ Planners for Social Responsibility (ADPSR) and is
written for practitioners and citizen activists, alike.