People Focused Farming: A Short Documentary on What Defines Urban Farming
This Voices was written by Sawan Garde as a part of his O’Shaughnessy Global Food Fellowship.
Sunflowers and corn from The Three Sisters plot at The Edible Schoolyard Project. Photo by Sawan Garde ’27.
I had two goals in mind when thinking about how I wanted to spend this past summer. The first was to connect with my home through community-based work. The second was to work, in some way, with food systems. Urban farming became an obvious way to realize these goals.
I was fortunate to work with The Edible Schoolyard Project in Berkeley, CA and Urban Tilth in Richmond, CA this past summer. I grew up in the East Bay of the San Francisco Bay Area and quickly came to realize just how impactful these two organization’s decades of work have been on improving food equity in the East Bay.
On Tuesdays and Wednesdays, I would work at The Edible Schoolyard Project, which was founded in 1995 by the chef Alice Waters. The Edible Schoolyard Project is located in Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School, Berkeley’s largest public middle school. It is an outdoor classroom, sanctuary for King students, and community gathering space. In fact, the gates to the garden are only locked during school hours. The Project is a key piece of King’s curriculum, and every student will take many arts, humanities, and science glasses in the garden and kitchen throughout their middle school education. My responsibilities included farm maintenance, cover-cropping and developing curriculum. I even got to test out my food justice and soil health curriculums on summer school students at King.
Preparation for a cooking class in which we explored food supply chains with summer school students and cooked fresh pasta with tomatoes from The Edible Schoolyard Project garden. Photo by Sawan Garde ’27.
On Thursdays and Fridays, I would work at Urban Tilth’s North Richmond Farm, only thirty minutes north of Berkeley. Urban Tilth feels like a completely different world. North Berkeley’s tree-lined streets with flowers overflowing from every front yard gives way to broken glass on shadeless streets lined on each side by industrial warehouses. Urban Tilth was founded twenty years ago by Doria Robinson, a lifelong resident of North Richmond. Located directly next to the Chevron Refinery, California’s third-largest oil refinery, North Richmond struggles with some of the worst asthma rates in the country. Urban Tilth’s programs range from youth education to job training, public health education, subscription-based weekly produce bags, and watershed restoration. The organization makes sure to serve its community holistically, operating sites all throughout Richmond and providing employment opportunities for community members. While there, I worked on farm maintenance, staffing their free farm stands, and public health education.
Leading a nutrition workshop in Lucas Park, a public park in Richmond, at the end of the summer. We discussed the impacts of sugary drinks on our health, gave away free produce, and made fruit and vegetable smoothies together. Photo by Sawan Garde ’27.
Throughout the summer, as I explored the work of my host organizations, I became curious about how two organizations that operate in such different, yet complementary ways, could both be considered urban farms. What defines urban farming? What makes an urban farm an urban farm? What struck me in the first weeks of my summer was just how many people I was meeting daily. I began to pose my curiosity to them, capturing their answers on video. What has resulted is a short documentary exploring the many ways of defining urban farming.
Implicit in my decision to create a documentary lies my answer to this question. Urban farming is people focused farming. It prioritizes connecting community members to their neighbors and to the land over monetary profit. It envisions an urban food system where people are empowered to grow their own food. It also challenges the physical status quo of urban spaces, giving soil once covered by concrete the chance to heal and breathe again.
Just as urban farming helps defines and redefines so many relationships, it has redefined my connection with home. Working with the dirt, alongside passionate community members, gave me a new, tactile connection with the place I come from, a connection I could not have anticipated.
Setting up for the Friday free farm stand at Parchester Village in Richmond. Urban Tilth operates free farm stands every day of the week in different locations throughout Richmond. Photo by Sawan Garde ’27.