LONG BEACH GROWS
Welcome
LONG BEACH GROWS is dedicated to promoting urban agriculture in Long Beach, California, and other activities that educate, enhance and grow our communities by ensuring and safeguarding local food security. LONG BEACH GROWS calls for freedom to grow your own clean healthy food in your own backyard, including eggs and milk, if that is what you want to do. You are what you eat and what your food has eaten. The best food is home grown or grown by you in one of our Long Beach community gardens, i.e. food that you know and can trust. Other good choices include agricultural products grown and raised locally, available through our local farmers markets and CSAs. This site will help you find what is available in our community, as well as explain what you can do to help see that urban agriculture in LONG BEACH GROWS™.
This project grew from my being told NO. See my story. Read our petition. Please help Long Beach GROW. Your donations are tax deductible. JOIN LONG BEACH GROWS™ today.
Our Urban Farm Co-op
A major goal of LONG BEACH GROWS is to establish a community farming co-operative in the heart of Long Beach, a major urban center, where people can grow and harvest real food together while building community.
Towards this goal, we have submitted multiple applications and requests to the City of Long Beach. In fact, ours was the very first application received in response to the City of Long Beach new Community Garden Program. We have been in communication with the Department of Parks, Recreation & Marine, and the Office of Sustainability, to get this going. Although the city works in slow and mysterious ways, we remain hopeful that a great site will materialize soon.
But, so as to not put all our eggs in one basket, we have also been seeking partnerships with private landowners to establish our urban farm co-op. If you have any personal leads, please step forward to help.
Our farming co-op will be unlike any other project in Long Beach. The mission of LONG BEACH GROWS is two-fold, 1) to provide expert public education on urban agriculture (including but not limited to gardening, animal husbandry, food and nutrition, food science, food safety, food preservation and cooking) and 2) to ensure and safeguard local food security through the development of sustainable community urban agriculture co-operatives in the heart of the city.
Unlike the model upon which community gardens are normally based, we envision these community farming co-ops to live up to the name. The LONG BEACH GROWS co-ops will be truly cooperative sites where shareholders work for the benefit of the whole not on individually “owned” plots but also on more productive community plots and other projects.
In other words, this is not my farm, it is OUR farm.
Join us NOW. Please spread the word to help see that Long Beach Grows!!
MUCH THANKS TO OUR CONTRIBUTORS
see the Donations page for more info
Food security: affordable, nutritious, and culturally appropriate food for all people at all times.
(As defined by the U.S. Department of Agriculture National Institute of Food and Agriculture)
