The point is vehemently brought up by Temu Bey, a young Compton leader, that the CDFA (California Department of Food & Agriculture) and USDA federal programs regularly end fiscal years with a budgetary surplus that is, unused dollars up for grabs for individuals and groups who foray into horticulture and urban farming. We discussed the merits of cross-cultural exchange within the community garden and the CDFA’s “Specialty Crop Grant Program,” through which urban farmers, ranchers, community organizations, tribes, and schools could ostensibly receive a state-sponsored stipend by growing intensively cultivated crops such as fruits and vegetables, tree nuts, dried fruits, floriculture and nursery crops.
I met up with the crew at noon under the garden’s vine-wrapped pergola to deconstruct some lingering ideas from our previous conversation. I should know - I came up (and still live) in North Long Beach, an equally under-resourced neighborhood just 3 minutes south of Compton Community Garden. Summer afternoons in this part of South LA are brutal, especially these days.
As the world struggles to adapt, Compton is creating the framework for a new, ecological world. Collectively, they have coalesced around the Compton Community Garden as a home base a tactile, living, breathing outdoor garden built from the ground up with the intent purpose of offering to South LA’s largely Black and Brown communities a safe space to reaffirm our innate belonging to the natural world - a starting point to the development of a new agriculture of farmer-citizens and citizen-farmers, community-centric, democratic, diverse, owned by all.
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