It’s 8 a.m. on a Sunday morning when ALMA Backyard Farms turns its signage from closed to open. Set on a landscape of 22,000 square feet in Compton, a dozen fruit trees, 64 raised wooden beds of vegetables, and 36 rows of gardens are bringing medicine to a South L.A. community that no human being should go one day without.

ALMA is just one of a growing number of farming activists providing South L.A. residents access to fresh, healthy foods and weeding out systemic health disparities plagued with the highest rates of food insecurity and heart disease-related deaths in L.A. County, according to the Los Angeles County's City and Community Health Profiles in 2018. It’s no coincidence that the neighborhood is also considered a food desert by the United States Department of Agriculture, with over 40% of residents having limited access to healthy, affordable food, per USC's Institute for Food System Equity.

For Erika Cuellar, saving a city started in her backyard. In 2013, along with her partner, Richard Garcia, Cuellar co-founded the nonprofit ALMA Backyard Farms to help community members source local, organic, affordable food and build community in the process. “We are in an area of Los Angeles in the Compton neighborhood where access is very limited. The access to quality, organic, nutritious food is very limited,” says Cuellar, who gives her grounds the white-glove treatment because she says she understands the connection from plant-to-plate and farm-to-table for every human being regardless of where they live.

The Los Angeles County’s City and Community Health Profiles data from the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health also found that 35.1% of L.A. County food-insecure residents comprise South L.A., which is the highest in all of L.A. County. Here in Compton, residents represent 25% of total Angelenos living below the poverty line and is considered a food desert with little access to fresh, nutritious food. Most of the food available is over-processed and inexpensive. Fast food chains and convenience stores replace grocery stores, leaving residents no choice but to consume foods that are dangerous to their health.

“CHD [Coronary Heart Disease] outcomes, like those of most if not all chronic diseases, correlate with the social determinants of health. I think if you were to control for differences in these factors – like income, employment, educational attainment, access to healthcare – it would explain the majority of the differences between L.A. communities,” says Dr. Janina Morrison, the Chief Physician of the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health and former Director of Clinical and Preventive Services specializing in chronic disease and prevention.

Communities of color are disproportionately impacted by poor diets than white communities. “It’s very closely tied to poverty and systemic racism that there’s all these barriers that you have as a person of color that continue to work against you as you try to access things like fresh produce and fresh, non-processed food,” Morrison says. “I had a fair amount of patients from South L.A., low-income, either second-generation immigrants or African American Angelenos. There’s just generations of poverty and trauma and institutionalized racism, so there’s layers of stressors on families that make it demanding to change their diets.”

For Compton’s 289,000 residents, ALMA’s farm-to-table meals not only determine their livelihoods but more so their life expectancy and that of their children’s. Predominantly made up of Black and Latino households, Compton sees a struggle that goes beyond food insecurity. What is needed more than food security is nutrition security.

“The leading cause of death is what we eat, which is kind of crazy. Food is meant to keep us alive and healthy, but it literally is the thing that’s killing the most people in L.A. County and the United States,” says Kayla de la Haye, the Director of the Institute for Food System Equity, within the University of Southern California's Center for Economic and Social Research. As a result of inequitable food resources and distribution in urban areas such as Compton, Black and Latino communities suffer at a rate more than two times higher than white communities. “Eating healthy isn’t a knowing problem,” she says. “It’s a doing problem – The problem we need to solve is making it easier for people to have access to healthy food.”

The Los Angeles County’s City and Community Health Profiles data also found that chronic diseases, such as cancer, obesity, diabetes, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and cardiovascular disease, are higher in South L.A. than the rest of L.A. County. Overall, the research discovered that the prevalence of chronic diseases is higher among residents living in food-insecure households than food-secure households. In other words, when you don’t have access to fresh healthy food, you are going to be at a higher risk of disease.

Without urban farms creating nutritional food options, the people of South L.A., in this case Compton, can expect to live at least 10 years less than someone living in another city in L.A. County who has better socioeconomic opportunities and resources to not only survive but thrive, as also found in the Los Angeles County’s City and Community Health Profiles data.

In 2013, when ALMA first broke ground, the options for farmers’ markets for residents in South L.A. were zero according to the Los Angeles County’s City and Community Health Profiles data on the city of Compton mentioned earlier. Today, ALMA’s farm stands, open every other Sunday, in addition to farm classes and a children’s farm camp, are some of the ways Cuellar is breaking ground, but there is still work to be done.

For Jamiah Hargins, saving a city started in his front yard. As the founder of Crop Swap LA, Hargins understands what other urban farmers, like Cuellar, understand: Easy access to affordable, nutrient-rich food is a right, not a luxury.

Past graffiti-marked buildings, tent-lined streets and empty fields, with the biggest building in sight being a church, you will find Crop Swap LA in a residential neighborhood with the only lawn on the block whose grass has been replaced with soil, tall crops and planter boxes. Hargins designed the front yard to incite a conversation from passerby.

Crop Swap LA was founded in 2018 to grow and distribute organic produce in areas that are hit hardest by food insecurity and food apartheid. It started when Hargins’s first daughter was born because his immediate concern, like many in South L.A., was how he was going to have enough good food to feed her. “Right now, the food issue is directly killing people. It’s shortening our lives by 20 years,” Hargins says. “It’s taking so much of our money away. We don’t have to abide by that system anymore, and we are showing here now that there’s a much simpler way.”

What began as Hargins growing his food on his front lawn has grown into three micro farms and two school farms he oversees that currently distribute over a ton of food annually. He believes that to plant seeds of change is one thing, but to help them grow is another.

“I’d hope that we can install multiple gardens, so that people can see that the entire neighborhood is behind the movement,” Hargins says. “Right now we’re a few rogue leaders who are stepping forward and putting our necks out on the line to make this happen.”

Similarly, a major part of Cuellar’s operation involves negotiating leases with other landowners in L.A. County to transform underutilized spaces into other productive, urban farms. She says that she specifically looks for neighborhoods that have high rates of food insecurity and limited access. “We often talk about how, instead of us choosing the land, the land chooses us,” Cuellar says. “The land invited us to be here.”

Like Cuellar, Hargins says he wants to do more than put healthy food on tables throughout L.A. County. He wants to teach residents how to do it, to increase the chances of feeding more people across South L.A. “We started what we call micro farms on front yards,” says Hargins, whose mission has evolved from one micro farm on his property to setting up two micro farms on other homeowners’ front lawns, as well as two school micro farms and one church micro farm to teach them how to grow and share their produce with the local community.

“There’s so much front yard space and backyard space that’s completely unused and could be used to grow food and sell to your neighbors,” says Nikhita Jain, Senior Urban Agriculture Program Associate of the Los Angeles Food Policy Council. Jain says her daily work is in understanding and targeting the barriers that need to be removed that are preventing people from taking action. “If you increase the number of urban growers that are able to operate successfully as businesses rather than just solely educational programs, for example, because they’re not able to scale their operations, they would have more of those types of farmers,” Jain says. “Then you increase the amount of healthy food available throughout L.A.”

To further expand the outreach and impact of the work that urban farmers, such as Cuellar and Hargins, are doing, Freedom Farms also serves as the muscle behind the shovel by providing the financial means that can serve as a barrier for urban farmers. “With urban farming, you’re limited to urban spaces and oftentimes there’s not affordable land for sale throughout Los Angeles,” Cuellar says.

Freedom Farms invests in local urban farms that are a part of the movement that ALMA Backyard Farms and Crop Swap LA are growing. Their goal is to not only enhance food accessibility but to also support healthy eating in the community in hopes of strengthening the local food economy. One way the organization does this is by offering financial grants to local schools, community gardens and urban farms, for example. Freedom Farms also partners with community-based organizations, non-profits, churches and synagogues to further their work and expand their outreach to continue to advance the movement of healthy food ventures and urban agriculture.

Not only is the advocacy work of groups like ALMA Backyard Farms, Crop Swap LA and Freedom Farms feeding a nutrient-poor South L.A. community, they are also saving lives by changing them even if they don’t yet realize their groundbreaking impact of combating deadly diseases. “Once people learn that we’re here, they are very happy that we’re here, in their backyard literally. People express a lot of gratitude and excitement that we’re here,” says Cuellar. “This is a place where people come together to get really good carrots and tomatoes but also leave feeling satisfied and nourished.”

And the momentum is building. “Once we go from three to 10, from 10 to 30 to 100, Los Angeles will begin to be known as the garden city of the farm city or the micro farm city, and there’s an irreversible effect there,” Hargins says.

Urban farming is an empowering way to advocate for health and reclaim the hearts of communities like South L.A. that are plagued by systemic food and health disparities. By providing affordable entry, education and resources to the neighborhood’s barriers of nutrition insecurity, activists like Cuellar, Hargins, Freedom Farms and a growing number of community garden projects help bridge the gap between diet and disease.

“ALMA in Spanish means ‘soul,’” Cuellar says. “We believe that we satisfy that deeper hunger of the soul, the hunger for connection.”