KALWNews.org

By Tess Kenner

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West Oakland is a community of about 24,000 residents, and about a quarter population living below the poverty level. It’s bordered on three sides by freeways, so West Oakland is an island of pollution, and it has one of the worst air quality zones in the state West Oakland residents are hospitalized for asthma more often than people in other parts of the county. And the community has high rates of allergies and cancer as well.

Limited access to healthy food and recreation may account for why West Oakland’s hospitalizations due to diabetes are more than triple the rest of the county.

In 2001 a group of West Oakland residents founded City Slicker Farms to give community members access to healthy food and a healthier lifestyle. These farms have become an oasis in Oakland’s food desert. KALW’s Tess Kenner reports.

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TESS KENNER: It’s a beautiful, crisp, sunny day, and I’m walking from the West Oakland BART stop to a City Slicker market farm at 16th and Center Street. I arrive at the 16th Street and Center Street farm – it’s tucked between two brightly painted houses. It’s tiny, but bustling. There’s a crew of about eight people here, working, doing different things, weeding, clipping fruit trees. There’s a whole chicken coop with beautiful Rhode Island Reds.

Plants are gingerly climbing the fence. I see rosemary, lemons, a bit of fava beans, probably putting nitrogen back into the soil. It’s just one of those lovely days that reminds you how amazing California is. And looking at the farm, it’s easy to forget about West Oakland’s farms – its pollution, its limited access to healthy food, and its lack of equitable resources.

BARBARA FINNIN: West Oakland is a low-income community of color, and if you drive around, what you’ll see is a lot of corner stores and liquor stores, a lot of old, boarded-up businesses.

Barbara Finnin is the executive director of City Slicker Farms.

FINNIN: You’ll see a freeway surrounding the community, you’ll see the Port of Oakland, you’ll see a lot of homes that are distressed, people not being able to afford the upkeep, painting, all those kinds of things.

West Oakland’s nearest full-service supermarket, anything beyond its 40 liquor stores which sell alcohol, tobacco, and packaged food, lies outside the community’s freeway borders, leaving residents suffering from limited access to quality food and nutrition.

City Slicker Farms and its community farmers have a vision of transforming Oakland into a healthy community.

FINNIN: City Slicker Farms is a non-profit in West Oakland, and we’re partnering with low-income West Oakland residents to achieve equal access to fresh, healthy, affordable food. And the way we’re doing this is growing our own, right here in West Oakland. And we’re doing that in a variety of ways. One, we transform vacant lots into community market farms, where all the food that’s grown there is distributed at a farm stand at donation-based prices. We also partner with West Oakland residents at their home to grow their own food right in their backyard for the table. We also have an urban farming education program, where we meet people where they’re at if they just want to volunteer and learn how to garden and farm, or if they want to intern, apprentice, or be a part of a workshop series – we’ve got it all.

We have this really amazing map where all of our community market farms throughout West Oakland are, and around them, you’ll see where all the background gardeners are. These are all the folks who applied to our program and wanted to grow food again for their table to get fresh, healthy food. And whenever we have a community market farm, all around it people are starting to grow their own food. So it’s a really great space to inspire people that they don’t need to go to a community market farm to grow food – they can grow it themselves.

KENNER: So, what’s your name?

JESS DITEMAN: Jess Diteman, I’m an apprentice at City Slicker Farms, and I work at the greenhouse. I produce all of the seedlings that we plant out in our farms, and we also sell all of our seedlings to the general public and to, and we give them away to our backyard gardeners involved in our program. Right now we have a lot of collard greens and kale and Swiss chard growing. Soon we’ll have tons of tomato seedlings and pepper plants that we’ll be planting out in all of our farms.

So we are actually turning Center Street Farm into an orchard. We’re going to be planting about 10 fruit trees as well as a little blueberry patch, hopefully. And we just base our choices on what the people in this area are asking for, so they want some apples, apricots, plums, and berries if possible.

Finnin says that seeing a garden farm inspires people to grow their own food, and City Slicker Farms aids West Oakland community members in turning their own backyards into farms.

In the fall of 2010, City Slicker Farms was awarded $4 million from Proposition 84, a 2006 California bond initiative that earmarked $5.4 billion for statewide park development projects. With that money, City Slicker is looking to purchase what is their largest farm site – a 1.4 acre parcel of land at 28th and Peralta Streets in West Oakland. The lot, formerly a site of a paint factory, is boarded up. I’m here now, and it doesn’t really look like an enjoyable, beautiful place to be. There’s big puddles and lots of stuff in them like plastic bags, broken apart chairs, cardboard boxes, but it’s definitely big and open, and you can kind of start to imagine City Slicker’s plans.

FINNIN: There is an acre and a half that we’re looking at right now, and right now it’s just a blighted sight. It’s about two acres, and it’s full of trash, there’s big holes in it with water just pooling in. It just needs a lot of love and attention, and folks that live around there have really wanted it to become something that is beneficial for the community. So what we’re doing is looking to buy it and then create a community market farm and a park. We had a wonderful time last year doing a community process where we went out and talked to hundreds of folks to see what you would want, what folks would want in their community. And people did want a farm. People just want a place where they can hang out, a lawn, a place for young children to play, a place for people to bring their dogs – all those kinds of things, so it’s really a community asset. And it was really fun planning it with the community.

From West Oakland, I’m Tess Kenner for Crosscurrents.

Do you have access to healthy food in your neighborhood? How has access or lack of it impacted your life? Let us know on our Facebook page.

This article originally appeared on KALWNews.org