Small City Plots Foster a Sense of Agricultural Revival, but Fail to Make Up for the Steady Loss of Farmland in the San Francisco Bay Region

Goats from City Grazing trimmed the hillside behind Alemany Farm. Photo by Brian L. Frank

Fewer Farms to Feed ‘Local’ Appetite

By Justin Sheck
Wall Street Journal
San Francisco Bay Area
March 11, 2010

Pocket-size farms have sprung up in cities around the Bay Area in recent years, part of a movement to bring consumers closer to the sources of food they buy.

But even as these small farms show up in urban neighborhoods, bringing with them a sense of a local agricultural revival, the continuing decline in the availability of farmland in the Bay Area’s traditional growing areas threatens to leave consumers further away than ever from where their food is cultivated.

In recent years, the region has lost large tracts of farmland to housing and commercial development.

Between 2000 and 2008, Alameda County lost more than 12,000 acres of farmland, or 6% of its total, according to county data. In Santa Clara County, farm acreage dropped more than 5% between 1998 and 2008 to 229,608 acres, with organic acreage falling 39% to 377 acres between 2005 and 2008, according to county data. Farm acreage in Contra Costa and San Mateo counties also has declined.

“It’s really a conundrum,” says Sibella Kraus, president of nonprofit Sustainable Agriculture Education, or SAGE, which encourages sustainable local farming. “There is this demand for local, but we’re not really investing in local.” Ms. Kraus, known for her work planning the San Francisco Ferry Building market, says that while development is at a lull now due to the real-estate downturn, government at the state and local level hasn’t created enough incentives to prevent farmland loss when economic activity rebounds.

Farmers blame the longstanding desire by developers and local communities to generate revenue from new-home sales. “Cities and counties are looking for a larger revenue stream,” says Gregory Gee, the assistant agriculture commissioner in Alameda County.

A 2008 study by SAGE and the American Farmland Trust on farming within 100 miles of San Francisco found that 22% of Bay Area land used for urban development between 1990 and 2004 occurred on high-quality cropland.

That trend is likely to continue. “It’s questionable whether the agricultural land that’s in the Bay Area can remain,” says Ed Thompson, California director for the American Farmland Trust. Along with development, he notes that some small farms in the area have been forced to switch to high-profit crops like expensive salad greens, rather than staples like potatoes, in order to make a living.

To generate support for local farming and healthier eating, officials in San Francisco’s parks and health departments and urban-farmland advocates are trying to champion local agriculture. While the small projects can’t make up for the loss of large swaths of agricultural land on the outskirts of cities, the officials hope that urban plots will raise awareness about farming, while supplying fresh produce to consumers on a smaller scale.

At times, even those efforts have struggled. Antonio Roman-Alcala became involved with urban farming around five years ago. At the time, inner-city farming in San Francisco was at a lull after a nonprofit called the San Francisco League of Urban Gardeners, or SLUG—which had led much of the city’s urban farm efforts—collapsed due to a political scandal. In the aftermath, community farms such as Alemany Farm, a 4.5-acre parcel at the foot of Bernal Heights that grew vegetables and fruit trees, closed.

In 2005, Mr. Roman-Alcala revived the farm. It has since gotten support from the San Francisco Parks Trust, which is helping to fund several other urban gardens and help neighborhood residents turn vacant lots into green spaces.

On a recent Thursday, Mr. Roman-Alcala, several volunteers and a team of city workers funded with federal economic-stimulus money worked to prepare Alemany Farm for an Arbor Day event that was expected to attract 500 residents. Next to the buzzing 280 Freeway, volunteer Markos Major munched leaves from fava bean plants and said local residents have started planting new crops like taro root.

Despite such progress, Mr. Roman-Alcala and Kearstin Krehbiel, a Parks Trust program director, say San Francisco’s urban-farming movement is just starting to rebuild the network that was lost when SLUG collapsed. Ms. Krehbiel says that while she expects more small farms will pop up on vacant parcels, one challenge to boosting local food production is that some neighborhoods have chosen to plant flowers, not food.

Whether commercially viable farms can survive here might be answered in places like Morgan Hill. Last month, the historically farming-heavy city 20 miles south of San Jose finished a study on the feasibility of sustaining the local agricultural industry, mainly vegetable farms and fruit orchards far bigger than the area’s urban plots.

Greg House, an agricultural consultant and farmer who did the Morgan Hill study, recommended the city institute new taxes to support agriculture and modify local ordinances to discourage development on farmland. If they are willing to pass such measures, he says, other Bay Area cities might help stem the loss of farmland.

But in the long term, Mr. House isn’t optimistic. “This trend that we’re looking at has been going on for 100 years or more, and in no way does it look like it will be ending anytime soon,” he says.

See the article here.