The Garden and Save the Farm . This trend is slowly infiltrating Southeastern San Diego. Mt. Hope Community Garden recently found out its property was being sold when a for-sale sign showed up on their fence. Elizabeth Studebaker, Neighborhood Investment Manager at the City of San Diego notes that the property “historically had been dedicated for an intended future use of development for affordable housing.” Mt. Hope Community Garden, which has been growing on the property for eight years with rent of only $1 per month, has always been temporary from the perspective of the city. Now, Project New Village will have to buy the property or move the garden elsewhere and pay rent. In search of an alternative location, Diane contacted the owner of a vacant lot down the street; he is asking $3,000 dollars per month for rent. She will have to secure a reliable revenue stream in an increasingly competitive landscape to maintain the garden . As renters, community organizations are extremely vulnerable to development pressures, unless they are able to own the land. Coastal Roots Farm and Solutions Farm do not share these struggles – each of their properties are owned by their parent organization. The struggle of Mt. Hope Community Garden to find permanency in Southeastern San Diego is tied to its struggles to attract capital. Indeed, capital and land are intimately connected – land is considered a good financial investment that can accrue wealth, but requires capital input upfront to acquire it and also in the long-run to cultivate it productively and generate revenue. In this way,raspberry container capital drives the entire process. Capital also drives the pools of talent that are available to manage and transform urban agriculture spaces.

The next section considers issues around labor highlighting the role that capital plays in determining access to relevant knowledge and skills. This factor of production has perhaps received the most attention in the food justice literature, which often emphasizes economic opportunities for growers, including jobs, income, and food security . Food sovereignty and food justice movements critique the exploitative race-, class and gender-based labor relations that undergird the corporate food regime and often call for “redistributive reforms of basic entitlements” including property and capital to give farmers more control . The labor of women and communities of color is typically undervalued in alternative food systems and communities of color remain underrepresented in urban agriculture . Growing food in urban environments is hard work and often not lucrative. It requires people with skills that range from a green thumb to a science degree , as well as people with skills in leadership, fund-raising, and management. These skills vary among communities. For example, in Southeastern San Diego, college degrees are few, and even if gardening skills are present, its low-income residents often lack the time and energy necessary to tend a garden. In addition, there is often a reluctance to grow food among people of color for whom farming is personally connected to histories of oppression . Mary, a retired, local resident and certified producer at the garden, understands the struggle: “People have jobs… I have to leave my house and come over here and check on my harvest. They don’t wanna do that. If you’re working, they don’t wanna be bothered with that.” Mary grows food for Project New Village’s markets and farm stands as a volunteer; however, the profits are too small for her to take a percentage for herself: “If we can make $100 [per week], that would be great. That would be something that I wouldn’t mind taking a percentage of that. Right now, we’re not making that much.” She instead takes odd jobs to support her retirement.

The absence of commonly recognized leadership and management skills also presents challenges. Mt. Hope Community Garden benefits from the dedicated leadership of Diane Moss at Project New Village, who often goes without pay, and her incredible success at building relationships with powerful stakeholders in the region such as the San Diego Food System Alliance – a regional nonprofit that focuses on food system advocacy in San Diego County. However, Diane must continually engage and maintain this network while acting as the intermediary between the outsider stakeholders and residents. Residents make final decisions on any new direction for the organization, which builds a strong sense of place and community, but complicates governance. The other two urban agriculture spaces take top-down governance approaches which do not require community input, and therefore, limit procedural justice. They also benefit from substantial access to capital which allows them to recruit high-talent leadership directly into their network. They also are able to hire consultants. For example, Solutions Farms flies in consultants and scientists to optimize its aquaponics systems. As an enterprise, Solutions Farms is also able to employ and compensate its target population, although the workforce skills it provides are production line skills, reinforcing divisions between “knowledge work” and manual labor . Through its workforce development model, in which work is often tied to housing assistance, Solutions Farm reflects the neoliberal model of workfare that has become common since the 1996 Welfare Reform. It also illustrates the trend of shrinking the welfare state by shifting state responsibilities onto the nonprofit or private sector and encouraging market-based solutions . While such employment opportunities may provide a platform to better jobs, they are relatively poorly paid. Still, the Solutions for Change program is life-changing for many of its participants. “Solutions for Change was my only hope and I’m so glad that I came here.

It’s really a great blessing and there’s so many resources and so much knowledge to gain and tools to gain from this program and this is one of the best decisions I’ve ever made,” says participant, Victoria, mother of three. Coastal Roots Farms relies heavily on volunteers, many of whom are affluent and white residents living in the areas surrounding the farm. Indeed, at a Sunday volunteer orientation I attended during field work, the majority of participants were white, ranging in age from high school students to retirees, hoping to “give back to the community” by volunteering at the farm. This reproduces the form of white privilege discussed by Guthman , Slocum , Alkon and others that is pervasive in the food movement. While upper- and middle-class people may benefit from volunteering in the form of social capital, exposure to nature, physical activity, and social distinction, others may not be able to enjoy these rewards. The three urban agriculture spaces I study illustrate the situated, particular nature of justice , especially the impact of local, socio-spatial settings on justice narratives and practices. At Coastal Roots Farm in Encinitas – a majority white, affluent neighborhood – a narrative of charitable giving to “the less fortunate” drives its distribution-centered justice practices, which are underwritten by access to capital, land and labor. These operations are supported by a philanthropic model that is not motivated by profit, but by its social mission. Because it leaves little room for the participation of marginalized people and the recognition of structural inequities underlying food injustices, this model, however,growing raspberries in containers tends to reproduce the status quo. In the diverse, low-income neighborhood of Southeastern San Diego, histories of oppression and racism inform a justice narrative around community cohesion and participation which in turn promotes justice practices that emphasize participation at Mt. Hope Community Garden. Nonetheless, the lack of resources prevents it from hiring staff hiring staff and investing in land and capital that would increase the income-generating activities of the garden and its potential to address community food insecurity and poverty. This creates a vicious cycle in which the lack of revenue makes it difficult to generate additional resources. Without significant philanthropic support, in a capitalist setting, Project New Village must contend with the imperative of earning revenue or continuously raising funds in order to support its community-oriented mission, including buying seeds, paying for water, maintaining the beds, and providing basic composting infrastructure. Difficulties in “scaling up” their communal, participatory model may limit the garden’s success in attracting this necessary funding, particularly from national organizations more interested in specific ‘deliverables’ than in building capacity and supporting a process. This observation reflects wider questions in the food movement on how to bring about systemic change through grassroots, communal models. In Vista where homelessness is a growing issue, Solutions Farms serves as an enterprise with a “social purpose” to solve family homelessness. The farm’s approach to distributive justice is to provide marketable skills and income to its participants – homeless adults with children. It takes a market-based approach that reflects trends in neoliberal governance. Further, its top-down organization structure concentrates ownership of capital and the means of production in company and nonprofit organization owners.

This top-down approach fails to achieve more participatory forms of justice. Still, its mission and innovative approach attracts capital and investment. Each of the sites contribute to justice in some form through production of outcomes and/or opportunities, but fail to achieve broader ‘trivalent’ visions due to limitations. Coastal Roots Farms donates food to alleviate poverty, but fails to address the issues underlying economic inequality. Solutions Farms provides jobs for homeless adults with families, but does not produce the skills or opportunities for workers that will lift them out of poverty in the long-run. Project New Village builds community cohesion and creates participatory environments, but lacks resources and well-defined outcomes. Clearly, justice is more complicated than a singular, perfect concept; it is a “placed” practice that responds to global and local circumstances and is malleable to the histories and struggles of its participants. Still, the three sites corroborate the thesis that “already well resourced groups receive a disproportionate amount of support” . Questions of ownership underlie the disparate experiences of these three organizations and their relative abilities to achieve justice. Project New Village struggles, in comparison to the other two sites, to expand its distributive justice practices due to its lack of land ownership and failure to obtain funding; however, the means of agricultural production are owned collectively and power is distributed among community members producing procedural justice. Communal ownership and participatory structure are central elements of food sovereignty , but also produce obstacles to attracting funding in a neoliberal model of social service provision that favors market-based approaches and distributive outcomes. Solutions Farms and Coastal Roots Farms, which benefit from parent organizations that own capital and land, possess more control over labor and resources andare better able to measure their outcomes and attract funding. I attribute this power to their compatibility with neoliberalism, which advocates “workfare” models and decentralizes poverty relief and welfare responsibilities. Ultimately, this research illustrates the nuances of justice. Justice is not about whether an urban agriculture space is soil-based or soilless – it is about engagement, participation, control, power, resources, and above all, ownership. Aquaponic and hydroponic facilities undoubtedly require substantial capital inputs and attract funders who see them as innovative and “cool.” However, these growing methods do not require top-down ownership and management – they may also be used to challenge the power differentials that are manifest in capitalist relations of production through communal ownership practices. Policies should focus on enhancing grassroots organizations’ capacity by investing resources in their neighborhoods and creating opportunities for local, nonprofit organizations to own land in their communities. Ultimately, justice is about practices – distribution, participation, and recognition. By showing how these organizations think and do food justice differently, we can better understand and acknowledge the imperfections of each approach and open up new possibilities for food justice.It has been fifteen years since Ian Cook’s seminal article, “Follow the Thing: Papaya” , introduced the geography community to the complex social relationships that shape the papaya global commodity chain. Using multi-locale ethnographic analysis, he juxtaposed vignettes of people, places, things and forces that influence and transform the papaya as it makes its way from Jamaica to the United Kingdom, introducing readers to the complexities and nuances that lie beneath the taken-for-granted global commodities that enrich some people’s lives while devaluing others. Like other work on global commodity chains and circuits , Cook’s article epitomizes the social concerns that have led to the rise in ethical consumerism and fair-trade standards seeking to lessen global inequalities .