On the first and third Sunday of every month, Alma Backyard Farms hosts brunch. Long, elegant folding tables are set up between raised beds packed with dinosaur kale, collards and beans. Butterflies weave around sage.
Diners order chilaquiles, then shop at a farm stand stocked with persimmons, mustard greens, bread from a local bakery and the farm’s own salsas.
“I love the butterflies, I love the bees,” said Patrice Offord, a local who comes regularly with friends. “I’m in Compton, but I’m not in Compton. I’m on an island full of greenery and vegetables and high vibes.”
Alma is an ambitious organization, especially for its scrappy origins and small size. The farm offers job opportunities to formerly incarcerated people and works to create food security for neighborhoods where there is little. But adding a brunch service helped Alma achieve a third, less tangible goal: to cultivate beauty.
Erica Hicks, one of Ms. Offord’s dining companions, said that she had been skeptical of Alma before she started going to the brunches. As she put it, “It’s the disbelief that Compton would have something so great.”
A vacant lot is reborn
Richard Garcia and Erika Cuellar founded Alma Backyard Farms in 2013. The couple had both spent time working at Homeboy Industries, a groundbreaking Los Angeles nonprofit dedicated to gang intervention and helping people re-enter the community after incarceration. They started a small urban farming program at a cafe affiliated with the nonprofit, and found that working with soil was a powerful way to reach people struggling to leave their former lives behind.
“There’s something about urban agriculture that creates a space for someone to inhabit an old space in a new way,” Mr. Garcia said.
Alma began in the founders’ backyard. In the beginning, they planted haphazardly, wherever they were granted space to put a raised bed. They crisscrossed the Los Angeles sprawl in a 1992 Toyota Camry to tend to the dispersed farm.
Mr. Garcia had considered becoming a priest. After a friend from his time in seminary became the pastor at St. Albert the Great, he invited Mr. Garcia and Ms. Cuellar to use an empty lot on the property.
Alma signed a lease with the archdiocese and got to work on planting and designing a community space with, as Ms. Cuellar put it, “winery vibes.”
“Good food, organic food and beautiful spaces are associated with a different class,” Ms. Cuellar said. “A big role we play is in reminding people of their own dignity and their deserving of this space. Healthy foods are a core of all of our cultures.”
Attendees often described Compton as a food desert, but many also had direct experience growing their own food. Some groups at the brunch were multigenerational families, and often the older generations had backgrounds in agriculture. Vanessa Saravia came with her parents, grandparents and her two young children. She said Alma offered her access to fresh ingredients that she usually struggles to find, like dill, as well as vegetables her grandparents used to grow. She said her family members would spot beans or squash growing and say, “‘We used to have this in El Salvador, we used to cook this.’” Many of the recipes were for soup, and she said with a laugh, “This soup has everything.”
When Ms. Hicks brought home Alma’s collards, she said, her mother called them the best she’d ever had. “Once you realize what we have, it’s healing to know our community can provide this to us. Every time I come here, I feel so lucky.”
Why there aren’t more farms in L.A.
Los Angeles County is littered with parcels of open land like the one Alma transformed into an island of green.
“I used to wonder why there are so many vacant lots in L.A.,” Mr. Garcia said. “Now I think it’s because there have been good souls who looked into wanting to grow there, but when you try to do it the right way, it’s a little too much.”
Mr. Garcia and Ms. Cuellar had never farmed before their time at Homeboy Industries. They were inspired by the 2000s ethos of restaurants growing their own produce. Mr. Garcia’s father and grandfather were farmworkers, and he grew up in his mother’s lush garden. Neither he nor Ms. Cuellar had any training in farming beyond informal apprenticeships and a few classes. But farming, it turned out, came naturally.
“A lot of this is observation,” Mr. Garcia said. “Farming is in humanity’s DNA, and experience unlocks what we have a natural inclination to do.”
The hard part was — and is — getting access to land. The couple’s first farm was in their own backyard on Alma Avenue in the Boyle Heights neighborhood of Los Angeles. Their growth strategy was asking private homeowners for access to their backyards.
“We were so dumb and young,” Mr. Garcia said. “Anything that presented itself was an opportunity. We didn’t have specs or long-term plans about water access or electricity. There was one instance where a couple offered their big backyard and ended up splitting up and sold the house. That woke us up to a different reality — we can’t just go in.”
In the rare instances when they’ve been able to get land access, they still have had to contend with the city of Los Angeles’s robust, confusing regulations. In 2021, four years after they opened the Compton farm, Alma added a second farm, in the San Pedro neighborhood, on a lot that had been vacant for seven years. While they believed that they had cleared every regulatory hurdle, a few months into running a farm stand there someone called the city and got it shut down. The violation was for doing illegal business out of a garage, even though, Ms. Cuellar said, “There’s no garage on the farm.”
The couple spent three years holding meetings with city planners, getting pro bono legal advice and even seeing new people elected to the City Council, all to amend an existing ordinance. At one point, the city wanted an erosion study on the San Pedro lot, and Alma reiterated that it was farming on raised beds. Finally, in 2024, Mr. Garcia and Ms. Cuellar believe they have cut through enough red tape to have some hope of selling produce on that farm in the future.
Alma is renegotiating its lease for the Compton farm with the archdiocese for the second time. Mr. Garcia and Ms. Cuellar credit the church for taking the risk on their project, but the prospect of rent hikes complicates long-term planning for the organization.
Alma’s next project will be portable: The farm is converting three trailers into mobile units. One will become a flower cart, one will serve beverages and the third will become a mobile kitchen, so they can save time setting up their modular cooking equipment and serve brunch more often.
“We’ve been around for 10 years, and recognize that food security is only possible with land security,” Ms. Cuellar said. “How do we create spaces like this, and assist in communities like this without fear of disappearing because the funds or the land is gone?”
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