It's been nearly two years since the city of Los Angeles permitted a private developer to bulldoze a community farm in South Central Los Angeles. In these days of global warming and ever-expanding carbon footprints, the farm was a brilliant example of a community doing something right. Its demise is an urban outrage.

I wrote this story in February of 2006. It was never published.

Early every weekday morning, hundreds of tractor-trailers packed with fresh fruit and vegetables unload their goods at the Los Angeles Produce Market south of downtown. Peaches from Chile, apples from Brazil, and bananas from Ecuador are auctioned off and parceled out before journeying on to stores and restaurants from Beverly Hills to Boston. Only then are they sold to the public.

A dozen blocks away in South Central, an area of high unemployment, low incomes, and scarce supermarkets, Maria Gonzales sets out on a quest for something fresh and tasty just as the produce trucks are heading for the freeways. Most will not be stopping in her neighborhood.

Despite its proximity to one of the largest wholesale-produce distribution marts in the world, South Central faces a scarcity that confronts inner cities across the United States. Residents must travel out of their community to find much of the fresh food that routinely rumbles past.

Fortunately, Gonzales does not have to rely on the dictates of global commerce for her produce. Three years ago, she secured a backyard-size plot at the South Central Farm, a 14-acre urban garden just a few blocks from her home.

For $13 a month, to cover irrigation and portable toilets, the 70-year-old grandmother grows enough lima beans, radishes, broccoli, sugar cane, corn, and cactus to stock the kitchens of three generations of her family.

She scoffs at the idea of buying peaches and bananas imported from thousands of miles away when she can barter for them, freshly picked from a neighboring plot. During her frequent walks through the farm, she sometimes discovers greens and medicinal herbs she hasn’t seen since she left her native Jalisco on Mexico’s Pacific coast. “I love the farm,” Gonzales says in Spanish. “Without it I’d sit in my house all day and stare at the walls.”

Over the past 13 years, the South Central Farm has emerged as an urban antidote to a food supply increasingly defined by corporate domination, global transport, and product homogeneity.

In all, 350 low-income families work the land, their plots demarcated by a patchwork of salvaged chain-link fencing and made homey with plastic-crate seating and bowers fashioned from vines of the gourdlike chilacayote. Most of the farmers are immigrants from Mexico and Central America who rely on the food they grow to supplement wages from menial labor. “This project has cost the city practically nothing, while feeding families who might otherwise go hungry,” says a spokesman farmer who goes by the name Tezozomoc. “For all practical purposes, this is one of the most successful projects the city has ever had.”

But despite its success, the farm may soon be gone, supplanted by yet another hulking warehouse. The developer who owns the land has said that unless the farmers can come up with the market price for the property, he’ll kick them out. They are preparing for the worst, maintaining a 24-hour watch at the site, camping in a small cluster of tents near the entrance, and granting access to only those with gardens inside.

There is little public money available for the purchase, and the Trust for Public Land, which is leading an effort to raise the funds from private donors, acknowledges the difficulty in generating philanthropic interest in the site. “Public funding is very limited right now when it comes to urban parks or open space,” says Alina Bokde, a project manager with the Trust. “One of our challenges is connecting the wealth that exists in the city of Los Angeles with the community of South Central.”

The roots of activism began taking hold at 41st and Alameda in the mid-1980s, when the farm was a forgotten stretch of rotted out cars, squalid encampments, and garbage heaps.

Using eminent domain laws, the city took the land from private developer Ralph Horowitz, intending to build a giant trash-burning plant.

When an environmental impact report found that the operation would emit airborne toxins, angry residents launched a massive door-to-door canvassing drive and forced the city to back down.

After the 1992 Rodney King riots, the Los Angeles Regional Food Bank secured permission from the city to clear the trash and make a garden.

Plots were doled out to the neediest families, and the farm was born.

Horowitz, however, did not forget the land. He sued to regain his property, intending to raze the farm for a warehouse, and in the summer of 2003, the city brokered a closed-door deal to sell him back the land.

The farmers had no intention of surrendering their urban oasis. They organized letter-writing campaigns, held fundraising concerts, and protested on the steps of city hall. They also marshaled a support network of civil rights attorneys, politicians, academics, and social workers, launching what became a three-year battle for survival.

Then, on March 1, Horowitz posted an eviction notice at the garden, requiring farmers to vacate within five days. At press time, their attorneys were still fighting to come to terms with the developer for the purchase of the land and the time to raise the necessary funds.

City leaders insist they cannot afford to repurchase the land, but some observers say no price is too high to secure such a dramatic example of grassroots urban renewal. “We struggle so, to create a sense of community, particularly in low-income areas,” says Ralph Fertig, an associate professor at the University of Southern California’s School of Social Work. “Here we are prepared to eviscerate the one unifying institution that came from the community itself.”

One of the largest urban gardens in the country, the South Central Farm provides what has come to be known as “food security,” a reliable source of nutrition and freedom from hunger.

The origin of the term is unclear, but in recent years it has been adopted by community advocates throughout the United States seeking to ensure that traditionally underserved neighborhoods have direct access to fresh produce, whether from farmer’s markets, subscription farms—where they buy advance shares of a harvest—or, better yet, their own gardens.

The farm, which is almost entirely crime-free, also acts as a safe, multigenerational gathering place for community meetings, church services, and concerts. After school, neighborhood kids gather at a cluster of picnic tables near an orchard of fruit trees to do homework or work in the newly created “teen garden.”

Devon G. Peña, professor of anthropology and American ethnic studies at the University of Washington, has studied the farm. “What I find so important here is that the South Central Farm is not just about food security, but also what I call food sovereignty,” Peña says. “If you want people to flourish, it is not enough to simply have food. What is going on here is that they are growing food that is part of their cultural cuisine. Invariably, what you wind up with is a situation where these folks don’t have the patterns of obesity and diabetes that you find in the larger Latino population.”

Recently, Peña launched a species study at the farm, identifying more than 150 different plants, nearly all of them traceable to heirloom varieties. Many of the farmers come from agricultural backgrounds and are practicing their craft at a highly developed level, Peña says.

“Unlike other urban farms I have seen, you are talking about a complex and cohesive agro-ecosystem,” he says. “There is a biodiversity, a knowledge of deepening the soil and intercropping, that is agriculturally sophisticated.” Peña has identified a dozen native varieties of Meso-American heirloom corn alone, with kernels in red, green, and black. “The range is incredible,” he says. “These folks are the seed-savers—the stewards of our agricultural biodiversity.”

Activists involved with the fight to save the farm are hoping to further extend the benefits of the two-square-block space. “It’s hard to try to solve something for just 350 families,” says Tezozomoc. “The strategy is that we have to have something feasible for the whole community.”

One plan, developed by 25-year-old farm volunteer and architectural designer Fernando Flores, calls for an ambitious transformation of the farm into a mixed-use space. There would be community rooms, art galleries, and a health clinic. The gardens would be more efficiently configured and smaller, creating 30 additional plots. “We know it’s a dream now,” Flores says. “But we have the will to make it real.”

That sense of urgency is palpable in an area so dense with warehouses and concrete that on any given day the sidewalks bordering the property are peopled with visitors who can’t even get inside the gardens.

South Central residents, hungry for open space, will settle for mere proximity to anything green. One afternoon, for example, as a factory worker spent his break reclining on an abandoned sofa in the shade of a banana tree that overhangs the sidewalk, two men climbed a ladder nearby, straining to reach guavas poking through the fence. Around the corner, another man sat on the curb reading the newspaper, while a couple on their lunch hour gazed into the garden as they dined on a picnic laid out on the trunk of their car, complete with metal utensils and a steel-topped salt shaker.

Yet even this bit of sidewalk wilderness is threatened. Inside the farm, working in her garden, Maria Gonzales pointed to a freshly planted corner. “Strawberries,” she said. “I hope we are here to see them grow.”