Editorial Intern
Rows of produce line the dirt under the hot sun. Decked in a sun hat and jeans, Jesse Frutos hunches by a bush of strawberries with a young child learning to pick the red morsels. Meanwhile, Kelli Johnson directs a group of teenagers on the day’s course of action. This was once nothing but rubble, weeds and trash in a one-acre empty lot. Now, the Spring Street Farm Project is entering its fourth summer.
Johnson takes a break to discuss the project, though she has to occasionally pause to answer a stray question here and there: Put that there. I’ll text her to check. She too wears a sun hat; it seems necessary here. Days begin early in the morning, around 7am, and end towards noon because of the heat.
Johnson’s role is to lead and manage the many youth volunteers at the project, there as participants in job-training programs. Johnson was there from the start. The project started as a partnership between the City of Long Beach Youth Opportunity Center (YOC) and Long Beach Community Action Partnership (LBCAP) for the green jobs program, a part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. The Salvation Army owns the plot of land and granted it to LBCAP. The green jobs program eventually expired, and now Johnson and the youth volunteers are funded by a different grant. They spend days outside the farm too– recently, she and volunteers worked three days at Hughes Middle School, for example.
Johnson was a volunteer in the community before finding employment with LBCAP. “I got a job through my volunteering, which is why I always tell that story to the kids,” she said. “I thought this was going to be an eight-week, convert-this-lot-into-a-garden gig. And this is the beginning of my fourth summer.” In turn, she sees volunteering as key to job opportunities. “Even though there’s not a lot of paid work opportunities, ‘internships’ are things you can put on my résumé,” she said. “Who’s out volunteering on [the California Heights] Clean Streets [program] Thursday mornings? Business owners, people who are invested in the community. The whole idea of the youth workforce is to get them out into the community and to help make connections. Networking and connections.”
LBCAP’s Spring Street Farm Project first broke ground in July 2009. From there, the project incrementally expanded– especially with the added labor of the youth volunteers. “What I like to say is every cohort of teens built something, grew something and cooked something,” Johnson said. It first started with the teaching garden, or “The Green Lab,” where the chickens and ducks are penned. A 650-gallon cistern for rainwater collection stands near the coop, while vertical structures support growing vegetables, and the compost awaits more scraps.
Johnson further mentions an aquaponics system (in which aquatic animals and plants co-exist sustainably) and raised-bed gardening while inside the teaching garden and describing it. She tells a youth volunteer to clean up the area in preparation for a bevy of volunteers arriving the next day to work on the coop, and she rushes to close the gate before the chickens exit as they chase a bug.
Everything expanded rapidly. “I think the process of getting a new group of teens each quarter really kept it evolving quickly because we wanted them to have something interesting to do,” Johnson said. “That’s when I brought in Jesse because he’s got a tractor and he’s a real farmer.” Enter Jesse Frutos as the farmer and owner of Lincoln Spring Farms, located on the same one-acre plot.
Frutos bends down to cut the ends of radishes nestled together in a neat row as he talks. He is the one behind the farm stand and the row farming. He is the third-generation of farmers in the family, with another farm in Cypress. This is his first parcel independent of his father. He grew up farming, and in the wake of an accident his father had undergone, he took over full-time. Frutos never had a farm quite like Lincoln Spring Farms, whose namesake stems from the street his Cypress farm is on– Lincoln– and the street his Long Beach farm is on– Spring. His one in Cypress is three times larger and located in an urban area as well. “When I got to know Kelli about doing this, the program she had with LBCAP, I decided to educate the kids, the new generation,” Frutos said. “Now we’re actually getting involved, which is great, isn’t it?”
Frutos, volunteers and workers run the farm stand. It is open Tuesdays and Fridays from 10am to 5pm on 3031 Elm Ave. Some of Johnson’s youth volunteers went on to work for Frutos, whose farm and commercial venture is an example of community-supported agriculture (CSA). As a CSA, the farm delivers the season’s batch of produce weekly to the doorsteps of local residents; the current scope of the delivery service is Orange County. Subscribers can also patronize the farm stand itself, at Lincoln Spring Farms. “There’s other farms. They do the same thing. So I decided to do it too…I saw it was a great idea,” Frutos said. “It’s starting to pick up slowly, but it’s going great I’d say.”
CSAs have fresher, local food grown without artificial pesticides or fertilizer. However, as the consumer buys local, he or she gets both the benefits and the drawbacks. During bad seasons, the customer simply doesn’t have a certain crop. “Last year, actually, we did have one, a bad harvest with the Bagrada. That’s one of the bugs that can wipe you out completely,” Frutos explained. In turn, there were no cabbages to eat.
Frutos has also fundraised through the CSA system to support local schools and a church too. “Whoever’s in charge of the PTA will give us 10 families, and if they get 10 families the promo will work,” Frutos explained. The boxes are sold at a discounted rate, and the $5 difference goes right to the PTA (or church, for that matter). His farm also supports the Salvation Army. “We give to them, and they actually give to low-income families,” Frutos said. “They subscribe there, they qualify for their program…we’ll give to them for free.”
Frutos and Johnson are looking into expanding by adding similarly modeled systems at other local locations like Cal State Long Beach. The Spring Street Farm Project is busy with people building, cleaning, gardening and more. The sun beats down, but Frutos and Johnson do have those sun hats. Johnson noted playfully, “My goal is to have [the youth volunteers] walking in eating hot Cheetos, and they leave eating kumquats or cherry tomatoes– depending on the season.”
