Addressing food insecurity head on at Esperanza Community Farms
PHOTOGRAPHY BY CRYSTAL BIRNS
Kids and teens discovered with delight that the green tufts at their feet were not weeds but carrots, while others found out how to pick the ripest corn on towering stalks at Esperanza Community Farms’ annual u-pick event in Watsonville. The farm’s rolling three-acre plot is fertile ground for growing vegetables, fruits and a local food movement.
“It’s one of the satisfactions of agriculture, to see the people and show them how the products grow, where they come from, what we do for the plants,” says Guillermo Lazaro, co-leader of the farm. “It is a wonderful experience to see the diversity of the community; to see them happy, it makes me happy.”
The project promotes healthy eating and economic justice by providing affordable organic produce to under-resourced families in the Pajaro Valley. It was started in 2017 by Santiago Moreira, a farmworker, his daughter Candy Moreira, a nurse, and Ana Rasmussen, a local social and environmental activist. Initially the farm was supported by a two-year grant from the Central California Alliance for Health (CCAH) and designed in partnership with the county clinic in Watsonville to ensure children on the diabetes to obesity spectrum, and their families, had consistent access to farm-fresh produce.
“Food insecurity was the reason the program was started,” says Mireya Gomez-Contreras, who was one of the farm’s first CSA members before joining the organization in 2019 as co-leader. “They came at this problem with the intention to ensure that families that are low income had access to nutritious local organic food. It was very literal. We need to grow the food, package the food and take the food to them.”
A year into operations, the team unexpectedly lost the land it was renting, which meant the farm no longer qualified for the grant and everything came to a halt. Fortunately, the CCAH agreed to re-award the funds if Esperanza secured new land.
After a year of hibernation, the founding team was ready to re-establish the program and recruited Gomez-Contreras to make it happen. She brought passion and extensive experience with nonprofits and systems change, as well as farming and social justice. Once the land on Lee Road was secured, they needed to get operations up and running and hired Lazaro, a lifelong farmworker newly trained and certified in organic farming practices through the four-year program at the Agriculture & Land-based Training Association (ALBA) in Salinas.
“My whole life I was farming, but I got into how to grow more natural,” he says. “It’s not just about growing produce; it is so many other things, taking care of the environment especially.”
Beginning with 16 families served in the first year, the farm has grown large enough to provide produce for more than 100 food-insecure families or individuals and 50 other CSA members who simply want to support the project. Though it expanded its reach, Esperanza still gets food to those who need it most—offering CSA delivery and accepting SNAP benefits, which is rare in most CSA programs.
“At the end of the day, we come from this community,” says Gomez-Contreras. “Because everyone on the team comes from that experience, that’s really foundational. It also gives us the ability to connect with our members.”
After a small, impromptu student tour in 2021, Gomez-Contreras realized that education was another avenue to support the organization’s mission. Within a few months the farm hosted more students from more districts around the region, involving them in planting, weeding and other farm tasks. During a tour with Pajaro Valley High School in fall 2021, the students started saying, “We want to eat this,” and asking, “Why can’t we eat this at our school?” From those remarks sprouted an idea to achieve just that: serve locally grown, farm-fresh salads at the high school, conveniently located a half-mile from the farm.
The project promotes healthy eating and economic justice by providing affordable organic produce to under-resourced families in the Pajaro Valley.
Last spring Gomez-Contreras and a core group of PV high schoolers held weekly meetings to develop the program, and once Gomez-Contreras secured funding from a local donor the Farm 2 Cafeteria (F2C) pilot launched for summer school. Student volunteers helped harvest vegetables and prep salads in the cafeteria for daily lunches, and as more students got involved in the program over the summer, enthusiasm spread. As a result, F2C has continued during the school year— and expanded to trial runs at three other schools in the district.
“Because this community is so agricultural and so many people work in that industry, I think there’s extra pride in knowing it’s local and a lot of extra love goes into these salads,” says Jeanie Aitken, the food and nutrition services director at Pajaro Valley Unified School District.
“I’m super excited that Mireya has the vision and drive to do this. She supports so many people in the community through Esperanza, and it’s wonderful that she’s expanding into the school environment and what’s possible. We’re just trying to pave the way and figure out how to do it.”
Social justice work is not easy but the Esperanza Community Farms team remains committed, motivated by the wins they’ve had so far and humbled by the challenges they’ve faced.
“I grew up my whole life as a farmer but when I came to this program, it was totally different. We never stop learning here,” says Lazaro. “That’s why we invite our community, so they can see and learn where the food comes from. To try to connect more people as a community and participate in this, that’s the mission. This is what Esperanza is.”
Esperanza Community Farms
275 Lee Road, Watsonville
esperanzacommunityfarms.org
About the author
Ashley Drew Owen is a writer and Massachusetts transplant. Her passion for learning about local food is only overshadowed by her passion for writing about or eating it. Safe to say, she is a lover of food and words, and also driving very fast in the left lane.
