Good Earth Community Garden: A Resource for South LA Residents
Yesterday included a visit to SoLA Food Cooperative’s partner Good Earth Community Garden, where local (and some nonlocal) residents can rent plots of land for urban farming in the middle of South LA. We were lucky enough to receive a tour from Good Earth’s chief steward and master gardener, Steven Meeks.
Good Earth Community Garden is on land owned by the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. It stretches about nine miles out, and you can bike to the beach along it. It has the ability to host large and small format film screenings and community gatherings.
Good Earth is part of The LA Community Garden Council’s network of 47 food-producing gardens in the area, which together, serve about 2,000 households. According to its website, the Garden Council was founded in 1988 following the Rodney King riots as a beacon of hope and resilience in the face of racial tension, social isolation, and inequity in Los Angeles.
For the past three years, Good Earth has been part of a pilot program to support a micro-economy of urban farms inspired by Fannie Lou Hamer, a civil rights activist who established the Freedom Farm Cooperative in the Mississippi Delta as a way to empower Black sharecroppers and tenant farmers. Congresswoman Sydney Kamlager-Dove was instrumental in securing $7M in funding for the pilot program.
"This is a country that has politicized and has weaponized food,” Assemblymember Kamlager-Dove told Brennon Dixson of the LA Times when announcing the funding back in 2023. “And we have created an environment where large corporations are dictating what we eat, how much of it we eat and how much we pay to eat it.”
Three years later, Good Earth Community Garden is still here, and still home to a flourishing array of fruits and vegetables. There's a bee hive on the property now, with another on the way, and a chicken coop in the works too. You never know what else might be on the way.
Good Earth Community Garden online
