Most houses in South Los Angeles have a typical front lawn. But once Jamiah Hargins is done with them, they’re planted with kale, rainbow chard, tomatoes, and enough other produce to feed 50 families in the neighborhood each week.
“My company partners with homeowners who have a front yard and want to do something positive,” says Hargins, the founder of Crop Swap LA, a startup that installs and manages the community gardens, which it calls microfarms. Neighbors pay for monthly subscriptions to the ultra-local food, and homeowners get both a share of the produce and a cut of the proceeds. “We maintain it, but they get part of the income every month,” Hargins says.
View Park, the neighborhood where the first microfarm has been planted, is considered a food desert because residents there don’t have easy access to large supermarkets. Through Crop Swap LA, residents can subscribe to a 3-pound mix of fresh, organic greens and vegetables for $36 a month, or $43 with delivery.
A water recycling system cycles water through the soil, making it nutrient-rich, and using a tiny fraction of the water needed to keep a lawn maintained. “We’re only using 8% of the water that was previously used to grow grass there, but now to grow food. I think about 700 gallons per day were needed to keep that grass healthy. It’s amazing how much it is when you really count it,” Hargins says, noting that the water bills went down dramatically for the View Park homeowner of that first microfarm.
A grant from LA2050, a Goldhirsh Foundation program, helped Crop Swap LA install the first microfarm. Hargins says that because each garden requires extensive maintenance, it wouldn’t make sense to convert every front yard. But he hopes to scale up to hundreds, vetting each yard by testing the soil to make sure it’s a healthy place to grow. It’s a smarter use of space than grass, especially in a drought-prone city where it’s hard to keep grass green, because it’s possible to grow so much food in a small area. “It’s embarrassing that we haven’t done this before,” he says.