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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