Dianne AndersonThink Irvine, and the first things that come to mind are BMWs, Jaguars, five-star entertainment and upscale real estate in the state’s safest city.
But for local farmers, it’s all about luring food foragers from far and wide for tasty pickings from the city fields. The smell of corn is in the air.
“You can pick it, chew it in the field. It’s sweet like sugar,” said Robert Flournoy, gleaner middle man and president of Loaves and Fishes X10.
Thanks to local farmers Dan Manassero and A.G. Kawamura, the gleaners haul about 70,000 pounds a year of slightly blemished produce, called Number Two’s, which is distributed to Orange County food banks, pantries, schools, nonprofits and churches. Much of it is organic.
Everyone is invited out this month to come out to reap the good stuff for their nonprofits.
“L.A. comes down sometimes and picks up thousands of pounds. Other organizations pick up thousands of pounds. Eight bins of produce, about four tons are donated and goes back to L.A. It depends on how much is out there,” Flournoy said, adding that the produce goes to schools and throughout Santa Ana, into Garden Grove and well into Los Angeles County.
Robert Flournoy
Urban farming is all the rage these days, and it also goes a long way to feed the city’s hidden poor. Even so, it’s not without its challenges.
Local third-generation farmer Dan Manaserro said his five locations have strong community respect; but the downside is that Irvine land is scarce, the labor is short and workers’ comp is expensive. He hasn’t received much support from the city or business sectors over the years, and he’s not sure why.
“We have our customers. They’ve signed a lot of petitions, they like us there,” said Manassero, owner and CEO of Manassero Farms & Nature’s Best Farms, Inc.
By contrast, their Brea location is doing great, where the city wants him to replicate the Irvine model.
“They’re building a new development on the property we’re on in Brea. They want to set aside some property just so we can stay there,” he said. “The farm is there. People can come to take cooking classes from my wife Anne.”
Anne Manaserro, vice president of the Original Manaserro Farms, works closely with master chefs, and hosts fun community cooking demos. She wants to raise awareness on the importance of buying local produce, and encourages healthy eating.
“It’s mutually beneficial,” she said. “One of the big things for us is to promote healthy cooking, healthy ways of preparing food, especially for younger people on how to eat well. Cooking seems to be a lost art.”
For years, the nonprofit Food Finders comes daily to haul the produce that the farm can’t sell, but she said it’s good and fresher than what’s sold at the big supermarket chains.
“It’s nice to know that the food goes back immediately into use,” she said. “We certainly don’t want to see any food go to waste if it doesn’t have to.”
In answer to the question of local support, Mayor Christina Shea said the city appreciates Manassero Farms and its long-standing contributions to the Irvine community.
“The city is working very closely with the Manasseros to ensure that the farm stand and other structures and events held on-site meet basic requirements to ensure public safety. We look forward to a continued partnership with the farm and many more years of fresh produce and activities,” she said.
At a time when agriculture is shrinking on a national scale, urban farmers are trying to turn smaller and smaller city land-leased spaces into something good to eat.
OC Food Bank program director Mark Lowry said Manassero and A.G. Kawamura’s OC Produce have cultivated community ties, including the most hidden parts of Irvine that live 12 percent below the federal poverty line.
“There isn’t a ZIP code in the county that doesn’t have people receiving food stamps. There’s no community untouched by poverty and hunger,” he said.
Lowry, an outspoken poverty advocate, said urban farms have long served the city in more ways than meets the eye.
Kawamura is one shining example of a successful nomadic business model. Despite being frequently forced to relocate, he makes good use of county land. Instead of letting local properties become overrun with weeds and pests, Kawamura forms partnerships to maintain the land for the owners. It’s a cost-effective solution for owners, however, it costs Kawamura time and money to make it green and edible.
When those owners take back their land to develop it, he moves on.
Lowry has testified before the City Council on behalf of Kawamura’s farm proposal for a restaurant, fruit stand, live music and a cooking demonstration. Conceptually, it was approved, but those plans were delayed pending the veterans cemetery location decision.
Since new developments are always just around the corner, Lowry hopes the city can make more room to increase urban farming in the future.
“They talk about building golf courses, can there be greenery in that course? When they do housing developments, can there be community farms or edible landscaping?” Lowry asks. “It’s 40, 60 or 100 acres. He has great vision, he is always looking for the win-win-win.”
Historically, the city has supported the edible park. Irvine was at the forefront of collaborations with the Irvine Gleaning Taskforce over 30 years ago, which later morphed into the nonprofit Orange County Harvest, the Incredible Edible Park. Orange County Harvest is the nonprofit that now known as Solutions For Urban Agriculture (SFUA).
At the Great Park, the city sponsors and funds the Farm + Food Lab, and Kawamura’s group SFUA work alongside master gardeners from UC California Cooperative Extension. That, along with the urban half-acre micro-farm project is on land provided by the Nursery by Southwinds and produces all manner of living wall vegetables. Plants thrive in vertical towers stacked on top of each other. Innovative grow socks filled with soil are budding fantastic plants.
“We’re getting those to the food banks, and we’re showcasing it for the public to see so they can understand that they can transform their own backyards,” said Kawamura, owner of Irvine-based Orange County Produce.
As for the Veterans Cemetery location, Kawamura doesn’t know the current status, but still, he counts it all fortune to farm various locations as a non-owner. He said it’s an opportunity to build more farms, whether on city, county, private landlords’, utility or university properties.
“We’re kind of land managers with an edible landscape theme,” he said. “And, we’ve become pretty good at it over the years.”
One major concern for farmers everywhere is the wilder weather. No one knows what comes next, and contrary to varying opinions about climate change, one thing is for sure. In his experience, unpredictable weather means an unpredictable harvest. It’s hard to get the crop out.
“You get whacked on the head with unprecedented heat like last year in Irvine, that messed us up. If that’s the new norm, we start looking for adjustments that will make us more resilient,” he said.
There is also the deception that produce is always available in the stores, until it’s not. He wonders how many more Florida farmers will get out of the business after this season’s devastating hurricanes.
He feels the answer is in farming both big and small, local, organic or conventional. Different techniques are needed now because any single approach could fail. But he is optimistic that the world can turn the page on sustainability.
Some farmers are learning to adapt by going indoors, experimenting with vertical and horizontal food production systems.
“It’s not that we don’t have the technology today to create a better planet, but we don’t have the will, for example, to feed everybody on the planet,” said Kawamura, who is also the former Secretary of the California Department of Food and Agriculture.
Kawamura started opening his fields to gleaners over 30 years ago. These days urban farms serve a multi-fold purpose.
Greenery is good to eat, but it absorbs carbon to clean the air.
Beyond which location for whatever next project, he remains flexible in seeking new edible spaces to achieve the greater mission, moving toward the widely noted U.N. Sustainable Development Goals by 2030.
Agriculture is the solution, he explains, not the problem, whether climate-smart agriculture or addressing nutrition and hunger.
“Nothing has changed in our challenge to get a crop to harvest and yet what we see is less and less support for agriculture. It’s alarming to many of us, but we try to do what we can,” he said.
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