Rebecca Gerny | Hum 190 | May 12, 2020

Introduction

In the fall of 2018 I studied abroad in Dakar, Senegal. When I arrived, the trees were filled with mangos. They flooded open air markets, small stands on street corners, and even the pails of women selling from their homes. Then, in September, they were gone. Replaced by pineapples, watermelon, and bananas. By the time I left, oranges were falling off carts and peals lined the sidewalks. Towards the end of my stay, craving my favorite fruit, I naively asked my host mother, “do you not have berries in Senegal?” She responded of course they have berries, they just aren’t in season — if I stayed until March I would see. In the United States, the industrial food system has allowed Americans to all but forget the seasonality of produce. Despite the fact that California produces over 80% of the country’s strawberries, the ones I sliced into my cereal this cold April morning were grown on a farm in Mexico. They were cleaned and shipped to a packaging warehouse where they were bundled up and moved to a transport hub in the United States. They were then placed on yet another truck and distributed to grocery stores throughout California, before I selected them from a shelf in Trader Joes and drove them home. I am separated from the food I put in my body by close to a thousand miles, thanks to the convenience of industrial agriculture. Yet what is the cost?

Industrial agricultural is responsible for 25% of global greenhouse-gas emissions, 70% of freshwater withdrawals, and 60%–70% of biodiversity loss. In addition, the food and agriculture sector is the single largest employer in the world, despite a majority of its workers living in poverty. There is more food available today than ever before, yet up to 800 million people are chronically undernourished, and more than 4 billion people are either micronutrient-deficient or overweight. Climate change in turn threatens up to 25% of crop yields and a rising global population, expected to reach nearly 10 billion by 2050, exacerbates the strain on food systems.

Moreover, agricultural is at the center of the American democratic project, and the heart of governance structures around the globe. From the moment humans stopped roaming and started planting seeds, the size and scale of the communities they were able to support exploded. These large collectives of people, working together to support each other’s basic needs, developed structures of decision making and collective governance in order to maintain the success of their community. In America, the partitioning of violently dispossessed indigenous lands and districts to farmer communities allowed for the expansion of the thirteen colonies into fifty states. Even the Grange movement in the 19th century, where farmers united their voices against invasive railroad construction and spoke as one collective, formed the beginnings of the Democratic Party as we know it today. Food, and how we grow it, farm it, and distribute it, is at the very center of our lives, and thus, our societal structures and governance.

Yet, as a culture and society, we have decentralized our basic need of food production, limiting our democratic voice in influencing their distribution, production, and quality. Moreover, these systems have disconnected us from the land, the soil in which all begins, to which we owe our nutrition and our life. The alternative to this drastic democratic disconnect — food sovereignty.

As defined by Mercin Gerwin (2011) food sovereignty is a right of communities and countries to self-define their agricultural and food policies in a way that caters best to the needs and expectations of people, and enables them to reach sustainable development goals without having a negative impact on other communities at the same time. It puts the aspirations, needs and livelihoods of those who produce, distribute and consume food at the heart of the food systems and policies rather than the demands of the markets and corporations. The foundation of food sovereignty is based on the necessity of democratic participation in shaping agricultural and food policies by everyone affected, especially people living in rural areas. This entails a larger community involvement in every aspect of food production, the collective management of markets (farms and grocery stores) and a deep reconnection of humans with the land that provides for them their basic needs.

By creating spaces where our typical role of citizen participation (voting) is reimagined and moved closer to the locus of power — in this case, the soil — we are more clearly able to practice our democratic rights.

In a sense, this project aims to understand food sovereignty in a variety and specificity of contexts. Primarily, I analyze how community gardens, in the act of occupying, reclaiming, and repurposing public land, are able to perform the democratic act of localized food production as well as community building. Specifically, I use the Gill Tract Community Farm in Berkeley, CA as an example of this reclamation. Moreover, I affirm that the Gill Tract has created a new, radical space of democracy completely outside of the traditional values of our neoliberal, colonial, purportedly democratic society. I argue that as a primary need, food production is a critical lens with which we may better understand democracy, and where we grow that food, the space, and the place of food production and distribution, can also lead us to consider performance, or what I’m calling ‘democratic performance,’ how we play our role of citizens in exercising our basic human right to food. By creating spaces where our typical role of citizen participation (voting) is reimagined and moved closer to the locus of power — in this case, the soil — we are more clearly able to practice our democratic rights. When we have agency over our own bodies, our needs, our community, and our land, we are more concretely see a future where our political and economic systems are transformed as such, to achieve a more equitable, just, and democratic system.

Literature Review

Due to the scale of this project, I have selected certain key authors from which to draw theoretical grounding for my project. I start by discussing the nature of the Gill Tract as land occupied for public use, I include a short discussion of the public and private spheres as theorized by classical philosophers before moving into a modern context as presented by Kohn (2013) in her analysis of Occupy Wall Street. Using the malleability of public and private as a jumping off point, I pivot to discussion of the localization and domestication of democratic performance as posited by Butler (1993) and contextualized socio-politically by Bradley (2014). Finally, I include a short discussion of food sovereignty as a guarantor of direct democracy supported by a variety of authors in Gerwin (2011).

The Gill Tract is located in North Berkeley native Ohlone land. In the late 1880s Edward Gill a local horticulturalist and arborist bought 104 acres of land and established a large nursery, garden, and his home on the site. When he died UC Berkeley purchased the land and for the next 100 years built a community center, baseball fields, research labs and greenhouses, developing much of the land. In 2012, facing a large housing development, the movement Occupy the Farm established a three-week encampment and planted 15,000 seedlings, to prevent the land from being developed. After a long tenuous struggle, in 2013 the university agreed to preserve 10 Acres of Gill Tract for community agriculture, and the Gill Tract Community Farm was born. Over the past seven years, the Gill Tract has become a hub for agricultural research, innovation, and education, working with Berkeley schools and UC Berkeley students. Through their pay-what-you-can food stand and community workshops, they provide healthy, sustainable food to their community. Moreover, they have rematriated 50% of their land to a group of Ohlone indigenous women who have created an herbal garden and perform traditional practices there, as well as host workdays to teach about indigenous land stewardship. At the very core of the Gill Tract rests their occupational origins, the reclaiming of land for the health and land being of the land’s original residents and the land itself.

In this same vein, drawing from a variety of space and place theorists Margaret Kohn (2013) argues that the appropriation of space can be seen as a broader call for collective control of the commonwealth of society. Thus, occupations can be synecdochally understood as struggles over the meaning between public and private, a fight to redistribute space to common use. Kohn (2013) presents two views of the public. The Sovereigntist/ Hobbesian which posits that the public is authorized by state institutions rather than an aggregate of citizen-subjects, and the Populist/ Machiavellian which argues dissent and expression (the reclaiming of the public) is how citizens participate in democracy. Kohn (2013) argues that a representative democracy, one where the government guarantees the right to dissent, is an ideological erasure of the distinction between the public and the state. Yet, in states where this right is not upheld and citizens are unable to work within the political system to enact change, the occupation of public space is critical. Occupations, as performative acts functioning outside the political system, become the utmost democratic act — a reclaiming of democratic rights when they are not protected. Public space thus becomes essential as “by occupying a diverse range of public, quasi-public, and even private spaces and turning them into sites of deliberation, community, and political activity” citizens can democratize their political participation. The performance of occupation and the spaces that foster this reclamation are thus essential for democracy.

The Gill Tract functions in this exact way, a public space; a hub at which citizens can gather and collectivize decisions. This not only creates space outside the political arena for political activity, but also distributes the locus of democratic performance back to the community level. Quintin Bradley (2014) presents the community as a liminal space between the private and the public, a locale that holds unique social responsibility and behavioral norms. Community action is thus distributing the ethic of care into the public sphere, rather than solely the private sphere. Localism is thus a special governmentality that hails communities as subjects and agents of governance, producing a new embodiment of the public. These new localities demonstrate a more radical transformation of power, reordering the political space as an easily accessible public accountable to each other. Judith Butler (1993) posits this is essential to true systemic change, arguing that localism privileges the familiarity of place and the agency of the domestic place, where citizens perform social wellness that is typically reserved for the private family. When this is affirmed by collectives, it begins to reveal ‘gaps and fissures’ of sociospatial positioning that bring power and decision-making structures into reach. In other words – the creation of a formalized public space where domestic acts of social responsibility are performed can act as a hub for decentralized decision making. Thus, the Gill Tract as an occupied, localized, community space contains all of the key ingredients to reenvision and provide new access points to power and decision-making structures.

Yet, this analysis lacks one essential detail — the Gill Tract is a community farm, a provisioner of food for the community it supports. By coupling the localization of food production with decision making, the Gill Tract has become an ultimate site of food and democratic sovereignty. Michel Pimbert (2011) argues that food sovereignty movements pursue three joint objectives. First, equity — the securitization of community’s fundamental human right to food, affirming and celebrating cultural diversity through inclusion, and combating the inequalities responsible for poverty and exclusion. Second, sustainability — the promotion of human activities and resource use compatible with ecological sustainability. Finally, direct democracy — empowering civil society in decision making and the democratization of government institutions for community empowerment. Peter Rosset (2011) further argues that democratizing food production through community distribution is the first step in alleviating poverty and reducing malnutrition. The Gill Tract community farm proves a perfect case for observing these key objectives in action. The next section of this paper is devoted to an evaluation of the farm’s activities to achieve these goals.

The Gill Tract Community Farm —Creating a Radically Antithetical Space

During the fallout from the 2008 financial crisis, a series of occupational movements developed across the United States and Canada, opposing corporate greed and the governments prioritization of the rights of corporations over individual citizens. In Oakland, California, this group was particularly militant and radical, staging sit ins and organizing take back the streets events. Yet, within its ranks, many members were uncomfortable with the entire premise of occupy. As a key informant (names are omitted to preserve anonymity) explained, occupation has historically been a tactic of colonial and imperial oppressors. Though occupy’s goals were to reclaim public land for public use, many members wanted to shift the rhetoric towards decolonization of the land and our relationship with it. One protester explained, taking back land makes space of a radical reimagining of space and our relationship to the land. Some of these members, working with agroecology graduates at UC Berkeley began planning an action to take back a piece of land in North Berkeley on the border of Albany — The Gill Tract. “We were a group of people who cared about people, seeds, sovereignty, and land, and used good old fashioned organizing to make sure those issues were prioritized over corporate wealth.”

The UC has owned the Gill Tract for over a century, using the land primarily for agricultural research. Yet, in 1995 they demolished the majority of labs and greenhouses, ending the organic research project that had used the space for a decade. the spring of 2012, the Capital Projects committee of UC Berkeley announced they would be moving their agricultural research outside of the urban area and turning the Gill Tract into a Wholefoods, Baseball Fields, and a housing complex. Though the document has not to be found, public lore speaks of a contract between UC Berkeley and the Gill Family that the land at the Gill Tract must always be used for agricultural practices.

“We were a group of people who cared about people, seeds, sovereignty, and land, and used good old fashioned organizing to make sure those issues were prioritized over corporate wealth.”

Moreover, professors in the Berkeley College of Natural Resources, students, activists, and farmers had been negotiating with the university for over ten years to create a public, urban garden on the Tract. After getting nowhere, they “decided it was time not just to call on the UC to do something different with the land, but to actually DO something different with the land” explained an organizer in the documentary film, “Occupy the Farm.” With this justification and the need to promote urban farming and food sovereignty rather than allow public land to be coopted by private interests, on Earth Day 2020, the group “Occupy the Farm: Take Back the Tract” did exactly that.

Starting at Ohlone park, over 300 people marched along the Ohlone trail in North Berkeley, before arriving at the Tract. It was there when organizers clued everyone in, today was the day they would take back the land and make a statement. An organizer donned a wide rimed straw hat, climbed onto a truck, and shouted through a bullhorn “Come right in everyone, come right in! I plan to take back the tract.” Though many marchers were skeptical of the action, the goals of the occupation soon became transformative. As the organizers explained “If you have ever put your hands in the dirt, if you have ever planted a seed, you are a farmer. It’s time to farm!” In this way, the occupation of the Gill Tract was transformed not just from a small action by a revolutionary group, but a community reclamation. Neighbors flooded to the farm, helping to weed, till, and plant. By the time the day was over, an entire acre had been tilled and planted.

“If you have ever put your hands in the dirt, if you have ever planted a seed, you are a farmer. It’s time to farm!”

To preserve their right to access, they created a tent city on the land, and welcomed whoever wanted to live, eat, and farm. Even when the UC turned off their water, neighbors all around the farm allowed members to fill enormous tanks to bring to the farm. Then, people would show up after work, grab their gallon of water, and get in touch with the plant” explained the lead farmer on the project. In this way, by occupying and redefining the use of the land, the Take Back the Farm movement transformed the so called ‘public’ space into a radical, wholly democratic space.

After a two-week long struggle, talks with the University, confrontations with the police, and getting nowhere, the organizers began to grow skeptical. In a meeting on the final day of occupation, with police surrounding the farm, the main organizers spoke to the large community that had formed, most of whom were former students, activists, and farmers; living and working on the farm. “What is our way of interacting with the cops?” they asked. “FARM!” the crowd responded enthusiastically. “We don’t want to be arrested fighting the police. If they want to take us, they will have to rip us from the earth, dirt in our hands, farming. That’s all we are here to do.” Clearly, those occupying the farm were carrying out their explicit intentions to produce food for the well-being of the community, raising important questions as to why their work was criminalized, and ultimately, on which side of justice the law would fall. As one organizer explained “there are so many things that are legal — collapsing the financial system, stop and frisk…. And farming is illegal?” By using farming and a return to the land as their activity, the movement forced a critical reconsidering of the values of the university, researchers, and the community as whole.

“We do not want a seat at the table, we are trying to create a new table.”

Though some professors were on their side, others wanted to use the land for corn research, on contracts with big companies like Monsanto, the anthesis of urban community organizing’s mission. Even when offered a seat at the table in a community projects meeting, they decided to boycott the meeting. One organizer explained, “we do not want a seat at the table, we are trying to create a new table.” Another emphasized, “we are not going to talk about what we want, not demand what we want, we are going to make what we want real".

Even as they lost ground and eventually were forced to leave the tract, community members stepped up to advocate for the project. One woman is videoed speaking to police with her children “This is a wonderful community where everyone is welcome. they are homeschooled, the farm is their school.” Education has always been a prime purpose of the Gill Tract. Even during occupation, tens of children run around the farm, learning how to farm, to put their hands in the ground. One parent explained “they are learning about relationship between our labor, our water, our education, our food — it’s a new kind of learning.” This is how the Gill Tract Community Farm began to reimagine space and place, by creating a space where the traditional understandings of land, food, governance, and community were reimagined.

“We are not going to talk about what we want, not demand what we want, we are going to make what we want real."

Moreover, in the creation of the community, they had to create a governance system from the ground up. There was only one condition for getting a vote — you had to farm. People in the community were from all walks of life. “Some came to put their hands in the dirt after work, some slept on the farm because they had nowhere else to go” explained a farmer. Though decision making was not easy, they managed to collectively withhold an 80% affirmation rate on all decisions. In this way, their system of governance also completely reimagined how democracy can function from the ground up. By starting with a return to the soil, the Gill Tract Community Farm reimagined a new space uniquely and fundamentally from the ground up.

Then, four months after they were forced from the land, the group returned for one last illegal day of farming — to harvest. Running tearful back to the farm, members picked zucchini, squash, lettuce, enormous smiles on their faces. Even under occupation and police pressure, the farm was able to produce over 1.5 tons of produce in their first season, distributed for free to the community which supported the farm and those who needed fresh food. Then, after months hard fought negotiations with the University, which many onlookers thought were fruitless, they were granted a 10 year stay on the land to continue to farm and promote innovative urban gardening and agroecology methods. This ultimate success speaks to the power of occupation and public protest to enact real, felt change and rests at the core of the Tract’s mission today.

Now, eight years later, the Gill Tract Community Farm has grown to host a multitude of activities, educational programs, and of course, food distribution programs. The farm is open to the public for about eight hours daily, with a free farm stand once a week where community members can pay what they can for the farm’s produce. The rest of the week the food is donated to local food banks. On the ten-acre farm they have a greenhouse, a medicinal herb garden, a library and children’s garden. They are supported completely by the work of volunteers, who have contributed over 18,000 hours of work to the farm over the past two years. Thanks to their hard work, the farm has grown over 24,376 pounds of produce in the past two years. They work with a number of social justice groups, including homeschool programs for POC youth, black agroecology and indigenous land sovereignty groups.