How California’s Central Valley is confronting environmental and food injustice by supporting farmworkers to grow where they live

Extreme weather events are increasingly making the reality of climate change known across almost every corner of the country. Earlier this year, this challenge became even more pressing for city and regional leaders as one of the nation’s largest metro areas, Los Angeles, was ravaged by fires that destroyed over 50,000 acres and 15,000 structures, with the damage estimated to cost over $250 billion—a number that would surpass Hurricane Katrina as the costliest disaster in U.S. history.  

Nationwide, majority-minority and immigrant neighborhoods are disproportionately likely to experience natural disasters and be impacted by the significant health problems related to environmental exposures. This relationship between place and environmental injustice stems from decades-old policies and practices that concentrate environmental hazards in low-income neighborhoods, such as the zoning of high-polluting land uses and the construction of highways through low-income neighborhoods. Today, many of these neighborhoods still lack access to amenities needed to improve their health and well-being outcomes, including supermarkets with fresh food, tree canopy, and safe, open spaces.  

California’s Central Valley—which lies between two of the state’s largest cities, San Francisco and Los Angeles—exists at the intersection of many of these challenges. As the “agricultural heartland” of California, the Central Valley is majority people of color (70%), home to a large immigrant community (22%), and is also one of the fastest-growing areas in the state. Despite the fact that the region produces nearly one-quarter of the nation’s food, 55% of its residents live in a state-identified “disadvantaged” census tract, and many are disproportionately burdened by multiple sources of pollution.  

In Southwest Fresno in particular, many residents work as farm laborers who produce the food that feeds the nation, but they are unable to access affordable, healthy food in their own community. In response to this contradiction, our team at Fresno Metro Ministry (FMM), a local (nonreligious) nonprofit, came together with the Fresno Housing in 2016 to launch Yo’Ville Farms—a community garden aimed at increasing access to greenery, fresh food, and entrepreneurial support for aspiring small farmers living in Southwest Fresno’s low-income apartments owned by the housing authority. 

FMM activated vacant land nestled between residential and industrial parcels as the Yo’Ville Farms community garden, which is designed to foster a more just local food system that allows residents and farmworkers to connect and grow together outside of their apartments. Our work on the community garden is aligned with the Central Valley’s broader efforts to foster inclusive agricultural innovation in the region as part of its Build Back Better Regional Challenge. 

This piece will focus on the key principles guiding this effort to address the intersection between climate, food access, housing, and community well-being.  

Digging out a space for every resident 

In 2016, FMM and Fresno Housing partnered to launch Yo’Ville Farms, in part to coincide with a city-led Southwest Fresno planning process focused on the land use needs of the community during the construction of a new bus rapid transit line over 2014 to 2018. Taken together, the greater public focus on the area, the issues impacting the residents, and the opportunities to develop open land created a fertile environment for a project like this.  

In 2016, FMM launched a culturally informed planning process for the garden, with site design workshops, surveys, and interviews (in English and Spanish) with over 500 community members. We invited residents to dream their own designs for the garden and offered examples of what previous community gardens around the world have looked like, while encouraging them to identify their own specific needs. At the culmination of this engagement, residents voted on the drawing that would serve as the basis for the final garden design. 

Permitting and construction for the community-centered garden began in October 2019, and by March 2020, Yo’ville Farms was ready to welcome its first visitors. We faced challenges with delayed construction throughout the development process (during which some enthusiasm and buy-in for the project waned), but we kept residents engaged in workshops and smaller gardening projects, which helped us maintain trust and momentum.   

The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic at the same time as the garden’s opening shifted its role, but only further reinforced the need for Southwest Fresno residents to grow fresh produce and stay connected with neighbors. Since 2020, community interest and participation in the garden has steadily increased, and it now serves as a thriving hub for education, local food production, and community-building. 

Today, Yo’Ville Farms consists of three main assets designed to ensure the whole Southwest Fresno community has ways to engage with the land and their neighbors, and access supportive tools for small business creation. These include:  

1. A total of 118 garden plots that families rent for an annual fee of $35 (which helps with purchasing irrigation supplies, shared tools, and compost). 
2. Fruit trees, native habitats, walking paths, and gathering spaces for residents, including those without a garden plot of their own to collect fruit, be active in green space, and access workshops about topics such as gardening, nutrition, culture, and resource sharing. 
3. A farm incubator program that provides five-acre farm plots to four beginning BIPOC farmers, giving them a training space to start a sustainable farm business and grow using regenerative agriculture. The farmers then sell their produce to community members, providing another way for residents to access local, healthy food. The ultimate goal is for small farmers to grow their business as they participate in the program, eventually graduating and buying their own land to operate as a small independent farm. 

To facilitate the affordability and reach of the garden, Fresno Housing provides access to the land for the gardens at no cost and covers a portion of the water costs. In the development phase, various public grants helped fund site planning and construction, while other local organizations donated trees and plants, volunteered to help with resident outreach and site development, and provided fundraising support. Today, the garden plots are fully occupied with a waiting list of over 180 people eager for space of their own. Some of the first members of the incubator program are getting ready to buy land and operate their business independently. 

At the end of the day, our hope is that Yo’Ville Farms has created a place that is not designed for the community, but rather designed with the community. This mission takes added significance in the agricultural heartland of the Central Valley, where many residents are skilled growers with knowledge of and ancestral connections to the land, but simply don’t have access to any land of their own.  

Caring for community physical and environmental health 

Five years in, Yo’Ville Farms not only provides a space for residents to nurture their economic and personal well-being, but it also provides an important pathway for improving the health of the soil and local ecosystems.   

For other communities wrestling with environmental and food access challenges, especially in the face of increasing climate disasters, we hope this model provides a roadmap for the collaborative creation of a space that enables residents translate their agricultural skills into food for themselves, their families, and their community through practices that also repair the local natural ecosystem. By connecting people directly with food and the land, this kind of garden empowers local residents to confront long-standing climate and food access challenges together.