The Growing Experience, a 7-acre urban farm and garden in North Long Beach that laid off all but one of its staff members last July due to ongoing budget constraints, will be revived this July thanks to a new operating agreement.
Tucked away in the low-income Carmelitos Public Housing Development, a mishmash of different fruits and vegetables grow on the farm’s grassy landscape: lines of mango trees and citrus grow in a small orchard, a prickly pear cactus bears fruit, a tree bursts with orange and yellow nectarines, beehives buzz near a slab of crystalline honey.
The farm, owned and formerly operated by the Los Angeles County Development Authority, will now be run by the MAYE Center—a nonprofit that uses meditation, agriculture, yoga and education (M.A.Y.E.) to help primarily Cambodian residents deal with trauma sustained from the Cambodian Genocide.
Laura Som, founder of the Center, will be joined by her husband David Hedden, an urban agriculture wiz who built an extensive aquaponics system at The Growing Experience in 2016.
The site is known for its agricultural and educational programming. The fruits, vegetables and eggs produced at the farm are donated to seniors and sold at a low cost to the low-income residents of Carmelitos.
When Som and Hedden heard that The Growing Experience might be shut down, they made contact with Los Angeles County Supervisor Janice Hahn’s office, who routed them to LACDA, and made their case.
“The MAYE Center has the capacity, the experience […],” Hedden said. “We have all this network we’re working with, they’re already supporting us. You just give us the space to do it and we’ll bring the community to support it.’”
After a year of negotiations, the MAYE Center was granted a five-year land-use agreement, which will be signed “any day now,” Som said.
Hedden and Som have a personal stake in the farm, both for its significance in the urban farming community and its significance in their own lives.
The two first met at a dinner at The Growing Experience in 2016, where they were both awarded the “Toot Your Own Horn” award—an old-fashioned rubber horn given to humble leaders who are urged to speak up about their accomplishments.
On Friday, May 6, the two traversed the small orchards and chicken coops at the farm with their 1-year-old daughter Sierra, equipped with hiking boots and a penchant for picking fruit and chasing monarch butterflies.
“Remapping the irrigation, that’s our priority right now,” Som said.
Som’s vision for the site includes horticulture therapy, meditation, yoga, wellness retreats, job training, paid internships, vertical farming, aquaponics training, composting and gardening workshops.
“Space is often the limited resource,” Hedden said. “So we have a big space and a lot of collaborative partners—this is a very collaborative, community supporting each other, type of thing.”
Support from the farm, along with grant funding and partnerships, comes from “seeders, feeders and eaters,” Som said—people who help out at the farm, businesses who buy the farm’s produce, and people who support the farm by purchasing produce from the farm stand.
LACDA interested in developing the farm site into affordable housing, but would take ‘several years, if not more’ to plan
Since the emergence of The Growing Experience, the farm has been supported through discretionary funds—”with a grant here and a grant there over the years,” according to LACDA Assistant Director Don Swift.
Ultimately, Swift said, it was disinvestment from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and a budget deficit that forced LACDA to scale back operations on the farm. Without a partnership or additional funds, he said, the annual $500,000 price tag on the farm was untenable.
“You have to keep in mind, LACDA is housing. They’re HUD. They don’t operate as a farm, they never really have. It’s just always been fertile land that has beautifully grown into a farm, but they never had intentions to do anything with it, you know?” said program partner Yancy Comins with Hands in the Soil. “When it came to figuring out what to do with it, there was no one that had expertise.”
Before the MAYE Center officially joined the project, it was speculated that the space would be redeveloped into affordable housing, Swift said.
“I mean, affordable housing is critical, right? And affordable housing for specific populations, folks that need that, that we might be able to assist and to serve. So those ideas were tossed around,” Swift said. “But we also understood and knew that there was a lot of passion associated with The Growing Experience.”
It was Herlinda Chico, senior field deputy for supervisor Hahn, who connected LACDA with Long Beach’s urban farming community.
“We knew that, LACDA knew that, there was an expiration coming on The Growing Experience,” Chico said, noting that Hahn had already sustained the farm for a year using $100,000 in her district’s discretionary funds. “Once those funds were gone, we had to talk about what was going to happen. And LACDA felt that it was just not sustainable.”
As conversations began between LACDA and the MAYE Center, Swift said it became apparent that, even if LACDA wanted to develop the site, there was “no specific timeline for any kind of development.”
“It seemed to make a lot of sense that, if we have community partners that are able to step in and operate the farm and continue programming, which is very important, then there’s really no reason why we wouldn’t or shouldn’t be able to do that,” Swift said. “So that’s where we’re at.”
Som said she and partners are planning a grand opening of the site in July.
Comins hopes that The Growing Experience and the MAYE Center’s partnership with LACDA will become “an example for LA County and really the whole nation” for the potential of green space, specifically food forest space.
Long Beach Fresh Co-Director Tony Damacio, one of the partners on the project, is optimistic that the space will remain an urban farm as long as there is “strong partnership” and “good buy-in from decision-makers.”
“When you start to really look at the community health impacts, education impacts and environmental impacts of having it be an urban agriculture site—and then when we have more opportunity to really improve how well that works—I think I’m hopeful that there’ll be a bit of a change of heart in the long run about the potential use of the site,” Damacio said.
The Growing Experience is located at 750 Via Carmelitos.
