Leif Kemp and Judi Gregory, co-founders of Long Beach’s Grow2Zero Farms, hosted an unexpected tour for Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Lee Zeldin Wednesday afternoon.
“[I was] kind of shocked and surprised and stunned and excited,” Gregory said, describing receiving an email that the federal administrator wanted to visit their site. “When you do this work, you just kind of do it behind the curtain. To have him show up to our little farm and our little organization really means a lot.”
Zeldin also spoke with local media after the tour, alongside Kemp and Gregory.
“Combatting food waste is important to us here at the EPA and Grow2Zero’s work is really something I think should be a story told all across this country [and] should inspire others,” Zeldin said, adding that he’s never visited an operation like Ground2Zero in his nine and a half months as EPA administrator.
The site, once an abandoned parking lot often riddled with litter, has turned into a source of extraordinary pride that feeds thousands each year.
“Just think across the country, how many other blighted, smaller properties that are only one acre?” Zeldin said.
Another Long Beach nonprofit, Long Beach Fresh, helped Kemp and Gregory transform the location through the Urban Agriculture Incentive Zone Program close to a decade ago.
“The owner [of the then old parking lot] constantly [was] getting violation notices … he looked and said, ‘Well, my mom loves gardening, maybe somebody will want to come and grow something here and I don’t have to pay fines from the city,’” Gregory said.
The co-founders, Gregory and Kemp, both went to the same high school and are veterans. The nonprofit benefits them in different ways.
Kemp was in the Army and he used the farm to help with his post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
“I’ve got involved with growing food to address some of the issues that I was dealing with internally due to my time in combat,” Kemp said in the press conference. “I noticed real quickly the benefits of having my hands in the soil and I wanted to figure out a way to use veterans to heal communities.”
Gregory began dumpster diving in the first grade and said her whole world was about keeping stuff out of a landfill, recycling and reusing.
The idea for Grow2Zero started after Gregory watched a video of Kemp 10 years ago on how he was using farming to help rehabilitate veterans with PTSD. She said to Kemp that while she didn’t know anything about farming, she knew that there was a lot of food waste which could be composted and used to grow crops in the future.
“The next thing you know, we’re planting a farm,” Gregory said.
But creating that farm wasn’t that easy.
“It was literally one bed, one row at a time,” she said.. “A lot of long weekends.”
The nonprofit farm gives about 140 bags of fresh produce to residents per week. About 80 of those bags are distributed in person at their Everyone Eats event on Wednesdays from 4 to 4:30 p.m., which is located in the alleyway on the corner of Colombia and Santa Fe. On Thursdays, they do home delivery to Century Villages at Cabrillo, mostly to veterans with their families and people with disabilities.
“When people come up to get the food … it just really is impactful because people come up and say, ‘Thank you for what you’re doing. You’ve helped [me and] my family,” Gregory said. “No job or no anything can replace helping someone in need.”
Grow2Zero has received multiple grants to the tune of $600,000-$700,000 a year to give food away and educate the community on farming. However, both grants expired this year and now they only have one grant that’s close to $250,000 a year.
“One of the things as a nonprofit, there’s never enough money. It’s always, ‘How are we gonna pay our bills?’ What are we gonna do when this grant runs out,’” Gregory said, mentioning the nonprofit received initial funding from the EPA during COVID.
“What we do is supplement with some community service work, but grant funding, community funding [is] critical,” she said.
To learn more about Ground2Zero Farms, follow them on Instagram and to donate, check out their website.
