Kaplan’s support—and further pressure on Planning staff by City Council President Jane Brunner—was essential for getting the Planning Department to begin integrating urban agriculture into the current zoning update. The passage of SF’s urban agriculture ordinance also provided a significant boost to urban agriculture advocates in Oakland. Pesticide Watch, one of the NGOs active in the SFUAA helped to found the East Bay Urban Agriculture Alliance in February 2011. The organization, made up of a combination of “urban homesteaders” and food justice activists, has been engaged with the OFPC and Oakland-based NGO Bay Localize to finalize recommendations to the city for its integration into the zoning update. Many of the involved urban agriculture activists were also motivated by the highly publicized case of urban farmer and author Novella Carpenter who was cited for non-compliance with city permit requirements . Under mounting pressure both from City Council and the public, the Planning Department launched a plan to update urban agriculture zoning, a process that has galvanized community members, plastic nursery plant pot as evidenced by the July 2011 meeting I discuss in the dissertation’s introduction.
The first phase of the zoning update, approved by City Council in October 2011, was the legalization of sales of produce grown in home gardens . While these changes at the policy level to scale up urban agriculture are only beginning in Oakland, they signal a transition from lip service to implementation on the part of municipal government. Indeed, Planner David Ralston captures the shift in the receptivity of city officials, “Now they won’t laugh you out of town when you talk about urban agriculture” . In a modified version of the People’s Grocery logo that briefly appeared on fundraising website for non-profits, a white male in a baseball cap stands to the left of the other three young urban farming activists, one hand on a shovel, the other on the Asian male’s shoulder . This addition seems odd at first, an apparent afterthought, or perhaps a nod toward politically correct multicultural inclusiveness, or simply a more accurate representation of Oakland’s demographic make-up. But the addition also befits the story of the rise of the contemporary urban agriculture movement in Oakland. At each historical moment, from the Black Panthers to the EJ campaigns, to the rise of garden-based community food security and job training programs and urban agriculture’s current food justice-oriented incarnation, the success of urban agriculture activism has depended on multiracial, cross-class coalitions; indeed, as history sadly tells us, such alliances are necessary because the efforts of the poor acting alone are likely to be crushed. In addition to capturing the demographic of the 21st century urban agriculture movement , grounded in the ideology of food justice, the alternate logo pays homage to the radical groundwork underlying the food justice movement.
In the cases of the Black Panther Party, the EJ movement, and Urban Habitat, activists challenged the racial, political, economic, and ecological disparities between the flatlands and the hills. The struggle for healthy food, clean air, and green space mobilized community members at these different moments. Their successes depended on the discursive rescaling of the language of struggle in a way that helped cultivate multiracial and cross-class alliances. Using the language of Cox , these groups were able to expand their spaces of engagement through this politics of scale, to defend and improve their spaces of dependence, their neighborhoods and the food they eat. These coalitions, in turn, were able to marshal the resources necessary to grow the movement, tilling up vacant lots for food production, education, and youth employment. As organizations grew with the slow trickle of public and private funding, they became legitimate in the eyes of funders, who then opened the spigot further. While the specific goals of the urban agriculture organizations varied, their gardens nevertheless served as training grounds and/or inspiration for the current generation of food justice-oriented urban agriculture activists, intent not only on teaching nutrition and science, but also on creating an alternative provisioning strategy in Oakland’s flatlands while raising awareness of the structural inequities of the corporate food regime. Returning to the logo, the rays of sunlight beaming upwards, silhouetting the urban skyline and raised fists of the activists, embody the hope and vision of the food justice movement, the dawn of a just and equitable food system that contributes not only to the health of the city’s inhabitants, but also to broader goals of environmental sustainability and economic justice. On one level, these urban agriculture organizations have helped to move Oakland closer to these goals, as the growing patchwork of gardens and food policy attest.
On another level, however, the increasing institutionalization of the urban agriculture movement begs the question: what has been lost as these efforts have been formalized, as funding ebbs from one urban agriculture initiative and flows to another, as cross-class, multiracial coalitions are formed, as action in the streets and vacant lots and gardens is translated into grant proposals and zoning codes? Furthermore, can we consider urban agriculture to be radical? To what extent does urban agriculture actually function as an alternative provisioning system and what is the extent of its reach? I conclude by highlighting a few key considerations. First, let me reiterate the absence of the city’s majority urban farmers in the contemporary urban agriculture movement, the immigrant and migrant populations who continue to grow food for home consumption and maintenance of cultural traditions . Food justice activists use this form of urban agriculture as symbolic capital to strengthen their claims, frequently proffering it as an example of urban agriculture’s contribution to food security, neighborhood beautification, cultural value, and ecological sustainability. As urban agriculture has become a movement, however, largely dominated by a multiethnic group of young, educated, middle class activists, these urban farmers play a limited role in defining the urban agriculture movement as a movement. While some reap the benefits of urban agriculture programs—garden space at a new community garden, for example—many are simply unaware that a movement even exists. Second, the institutionalization of the urban agriculture movement has depended on funding. Organizations frequently compete for the same modest grants and end up fighting for proverbial crumbs. Moreover, these crumbs, in turn, can ultimately define the missions of the organizations. If the funding “flavor of the month” happens to be school gardens, seedling starter pot then school gardens become a central focus of the activity of these organizations . Many urban agriculture activists are quite aware of this dependent relationship, as well as the dependence of communities on outside NGOs for the implementation of urban agriculture and other programs. The centrality of the “non-profit industrial complex” is, in many ways, simply an outgrowth of the so-called neoliberal turn, where NGOs have rolled out to fill in the gaps in the social safety net left by the roll back of the Keynesian welfare state . The ability of such a movement, so dependent on relatively small flows of public and private funding, to effect structural change or create a just alternative to the corporate food regime , much less to sustain itself, is doubtful. Finally, the scalar politics employed by urban agriculture activists and their radical antecedents exemplify the power of coalition building and the ability to slowly shift the dominant paradigm surrounding the food system, slowly revealing its connections to city planning and public health. Ultimately the story of urban agriculture in Oakland is one of urban agriculture’s de-radicalization and its institutionalization into the mainstream. But rather than a story of its urban agriculture’s appropriation by the mainstream, it is a story of change arising from within the system due precisely to urban agriculture’s new place within the system.97 Changes are taking place on some structural level as food policy is slowly drafted, adopted, and implemented. The extent to which these changes, piecemeal and limited in reach, coalesce and evolve into a robust framework of incentives and regulation that truly challenges the corporate food regime remains to be seen.The ratio of workers to full-time-equivalent jobs in an industry is one important measure of the nature of the labor market.
Over the last several decades, seasonal industries such as construction have restructured in ways that have reduced the ratio of workers to FTE jobs. To evaluate this aspect of the agricultural labor market in California, we analyzed data collected by the California Employment Development Department in 2016 and compared key findings with our earlier analysis of similar data from 2015.How many people work for wages in California agriculture? Answering this question has been surprisingly difficult, largely because most farm jobs are seasonal, lasting from several weeks to several months, and there is high turnover, with many workers trying farm work and soon quitting. EDD publishes data on farm employment for the payroll period that includes the 12th of the month; in 2016, EDD data indicated that average monthly farm employment was 425,400. This 425,000 average is not a count of all individuals employed in agriculture, because some workers were employed but not during the payroll period that includes the 12th of the month. Including these not-on-payroll during the 12th of the month workers provides a count of all workers employed in agriculture. EDD does not report the total number of unique farm workers. This article fills this information gap, finding that there were about 2.3 workers for each average or FTE job. All California employers who pay $100 or more in quarterly wages are required to report each quarter their employees for the payroll period that includes the 12th of the month and the wages paid to all workers during the quarter, and to submit appropriate unemployment insurance taxes. In 2016, some 16,150 California agricultural establishments — North American Industry Classification System code 11, including farming, forestry, fishing and hunting — hired a monthly average 425,400 workers and paid them a total of $13.7 billion. The data also show that over the past decade, the number of agricultural establishments fell over 10%, average employment rose over 10%, and total wages rose 50%. Over 99% of the agricultural establishments that report employment are farms or firms supporting farms such as farm labor contractors . There are very few workers who had their maximum earnings in forestry, fishing and hunting, only 0.8%. We use “farm worker” in this paper to mean all workers employed in agriculture, including supervisors and accountants employed by farms, acknowledging that a few are employed in forestry, fishing and hunting. The average monthly employment of 425,400 reported by EDD represents 12 monthly snapshots of persons on the payroll during the payroll period that includes the 12th of the month. As such, it is a measure of the number of FTE positions in agriculture in California. Employers do not report hours of work, so some of the workers on the payroll may have worked full time and others part time. The $13.7 billion total wage figure represents payments to all workers, including those who were employed at other times of the month but not during the payroll period that includes the 12th. Dividing $13.7 billion by 425,400 gives $32,316, which would be the average annual salary of a full-time farm worker. However, since many farm workers are employed fewer than 2,080 hours a year, average earnings for the individuals who do farm work are significantly less; our analysis of earnings by individual workers indicates that the average earnings from all jobs of all workers with at least one job in California agriculture was $19,762 in 2016. To investigate this difference, we captured all workers reported by an agricultural employer, tallying a total of 989,500 individual workers in 2016. This process allows us to compare the total number of farm workers with the monthly average number of farm jobs. Figure 1 shows that this ratio has been rising from two workers per average job in 2014 and 2015 to 2.3 workers per average job in 2016, suggesting more workers tried farm work. The analysis is based on Social Security numbers reported by agricultural employers when paying UI taxes. Because we had data on all of the California jobs associated with each individual SSN reported by an agricultural employer, we could assign each worker to the NAICS code in which he or she had their highest earnings. This procedure identified 804,200 workers who worked primarily in agriculture .