Reflecting on the Los Angeles Wildfires
Photo Attribution: Jae C. Hong/AP
The widespread devastation we are now witnessing represents a failure in our collective will to mitigate the effects of climate change and to seriously fortify and expand our public safety infrastructure. Every challenge that California farmers face -- equitable or sufficient access to water, depleted reservoirs, drier conditions, higher temperatures, unpredictable weather patterns -- the County of Los Angeles just faced in a terrible confluence of events. By now we all know that large-scale, industrial farming has degraded soil health, reduced critical tree cover, diminished plant and animal biodiversity and generally contributed to a decline in the natural resilience of our ecosystems. We know that the industrial food system creates a tremendous abundance, much of which is wasted due to market factors and supply chain realities. The current state of Big Ag in California is unsustainable. But, many of us consumers prefer to have strawberries year round than to acknowledge that our lands have seasons. Many of us consumers prefer to have cheap avocados year round than to enjoy local, seasonal varieties. (Local avocados are often far more expensive, making them 'elite' or 'undemocratic' because of the burden of cost independent growers must pass to the consumer under current land and water use policies in our State.) Many of us consumers would prefer to overlook the fact that soil health must be replenished, carbon sequestered legitimately and groundwater recharged. Many of us consumers are disconnected entirely from the source of our food, and we believe that only an industrial scale can provide for us. The problem feels insurmountable. But it doesn't have to be. The solution can be smaller, more regional, more local, more seasonal, more connected.
Photo Attribution: David Swanson/Reuters via @nytimes
We live in a deeply extractive paradigm, and we are witnessing the effects of our collective logic as real-time catastrophe. It is more important than ever that we acknowledge and repair our broken systems, and that we fold in both new technologies and Indigenous wisdom, through cross-sector partnerships and mutual respect. We are hopeful this is a serious wake up call for California. If we want to share our nature, agri-culture and cosmopolitan-culture with future generations, we're going to have to be smarter than this.
Further Context:
My name is Anna Rose Hopkins. I am the co-founder and Executive Director of Farm2People, an LA-based nonprofit dedicated to securing local harvests and fighting hunger in the Los Angeles area. Our org was born out of the Covid Pandemic, as we were watching 2 concurrent calamities -- the soaring rates of hunger in the densely-populated county of Los Angeles and the breakdown of the food supply chain. We were watching as legacy hunger relief orgs scrambled to provide for food-seekers with a combination of urban-farmed produce, recovered produce (i.e. food unused or unsold by grocery stores or businesses that would otherwise be wasted) and shelf-stable, highly-processed emergency rations via federal relief programs. The efforts of our peers were essential and heroic, but we witnessed a gap. There was no reliable access to scalable, locally/regionally grown food. Much of the recovered food flowed from our international port or produce terminals, or was wholly untraceable.
Our solution was to bring in whole, 100% viable, fresh fruits and vegetables procured from the surplus supply of local and regional farmers while paying farmers a wholesale rate to keep them economically stable. At first our efforts were 100% volunteer and supported through crowdfunding and grants, but three years into our project, more attention from state and federal was placed on independent (i.e. non-commodity, smaller scale), socially disadvantaged of all creeds (i.e. Low-Income, Black, Indigenous, Persons of Color, Veterans, Women, etc...) and 'regenerative' (i.e. soil-health focused, sustainable and/or organic practicing) farmers. Since that point, Farm2People's work has increased by orders of magnitude.
We have now procured nearly 2 million pounds of 'regeneratively' grown fruits and vegetables, which amounts to more than 8 million serving sizes provided for free to food-insecure residents. That also means that we have economically supported more than 70 independent, local and regional farmers with critical sales of produce that was previously deemed surplus.
We will continue to share information and resources regarding mutual aid, climate, and food justice in LA on our Instagram account, as well as updates about our own efforts to strengthen the local food supply chain, so follow our work there!
In grief, hope, and eagerness to replant💚