A Fruitful Harvest

Urban Tilth grows food and opportunity in Richmond

Story And Photos by Madelyn Markoe

 

 

AFTER LEAVING THE RESTAURANT INDUSTRY AT THE END OF 2022, I began volunteering with 18 Reasons, a Bay Area nonprofit focused on empowering community through creativity and skills-building in the kitchen. One of the many free community programs they offer is the Cooking Matters series. These are six-week courses designed to teach people in food-insecure households how to buy, cook, and eat nutritious meals on a budget.

When May 2025 came around, I was working as a Cooking Matters instructor and had signed up to teach a series at the Corrine Sain Community Center in Richmond. My group of participants would be team members from Urban Tilth’s HEAL (Healthy Eating Active Living) program and their director, Chinue Fields.

Since 2005, Richmond-based Urban Tilth has been a driving force in local food sovereignty. Using a network of urban farms and gardens, they train and hire local residents to grow and distribute fresh produce and to develop and care for community gardens and orchards. The nonprofit’s HEAL team members help enact its programs by teaching other community members how to grow food and cook healthy, delicious meals from food they get from the program’s CSA boxes or Free Farm Stands, which are stocked with produce from Urban Tilth’s North Richmond Farm and a diverse network of BIPOC-, women-, and LGBTQA+–led partner farms.

 

 

I’d taught the Cooking Matters series several times by this point, but this session was immediately different due to the unique insights of the participants: The HEAL team members in my kitchen classroom were simultaneously learning to grow and harvest food at Urban Tilth’s North Richmond Farm. At the end of each meeting, we would plan the following week’s menu based on ingredients the team knew were ready for harvest at the farm as well as dishes they were genuinely excited about learning how to cook.

One week’s menu included pesto, but since I had found no basil to buy at the market, two of the HEAL members headed over to the farm to harvest from plants that were thriving under the early summer sun. Not only was it a treat to incorporate herbs just picked from less than a mile away, but we also got to experience the full circle of farm to table in real time. When we sat down to eat together, a sense of deep appreciation rippled throughout the room in recognition of the teamwork and chance to enjoy the farm’s fresh offerings in a delicious dish.

Returning to Urban Tilth on a sunny Monday this spring, I learned more about the HEAL team’s work on the farm. Tania Jacobo, who works as the Free Farm Stand manager, was meeting that day with four community volunteers who had come to learn about cover crops. Before the knee pads came out and hands got dirty, the volunteers learned how cover crops are planted in winter to aid in managing soil erosion, fertility, and quality. The crop in front of us—a wild-looking blend of fava, crimson clover, hairy vetch, and rye grass—was knee high and dancing in the light wind as the volunteers prepared to chop it down and return the nutrients to the soil.

 

As Jacobo picked up some large garden shears, volunteer Nathan Hinchey remarked, “So, we’re giving them a buzz cut!”

Hinchey explained that his desire to participate on the monthly Free Farm Stand days had everything to do with gardening. “I had been looking for a local gardening thing to show up to,” he said. “I had driven by Urban Tilth before, and it seemed like a cool idea. I wanted to be committed to the physical land.”

Down the row, volunteer Trina Thierry and her daughter were making a dent in the high grass. Thierry first discovered Urban Tilth in 2018, telling me she recalled the timeline based on the worsening California wildfires. It was also around MLK day, she recalls, as Urban Tilth was building a clay fire pit for a local school, which caught her eye. She began participating in workshops and volunteered for the first time in February of this year.

“I really just wanted to learn how to garden,” she said. As a former resident of Richmond, being at the farm felt good to her. “Learning more from them has been really helpful, and it’s hands-on. That’s how you learn.” Turning her attention back to the cover crop, she continued to shear with a calm sense of care and appreciation. “I enjoy being here. It’s more of a me feeling.” For these volunteers, connecting with land nourishes more than just the soil.

My visit gave me a chance to meet team members devoted to running the farm. I found Farm Coordinator Keshawn “King” Stanley harvesting mature chard and spinach.

“That spinach right behind you grew over the weekend,” he said on this day near the end of California’s record-breaking mid-March heat wave. “They were very low on Friday and in two days they got like that.”

King said he came to Urban Tilth three years ago after dropping out of high school. “I was working at a water store in downtown Richmond,” he said, when the Urban Tilth director came recruiting. “I didn’t know he was the director, but it’s just like I tell everybody, ‘Treat everybody kindly because you never know who that person might be in the future.’”

King was invited to participate in Urban Tilth’s Rudy Lozito Fellowship. “It was beautiful, because I didn’t know anything about that,” he said. “It was probably the best program ever. They paid you to learn how to farm.”

On completing the fellowship, King was offered a farm coordinator job at Urban Tilth. “It was always my dream to learn how to farm. It felt like it was in my blood, like this is what I’m supposed to be doing. There’s unlimited food here: I can eat from the trees: apples, pears, and things of that nature.”

I asked King about crop germination, but he quickly pointed toward the greenhouses. “That’s Miss Maria,” he said.

“Miss Maria” is Greenhouse Manager Maria Hernandez, a 20-year resident of Richmond, who learned most of her skills on her family’s farm in Oaxaca, Mexico. “It’s a big rancho with 2,000 fruit trees,” she said with a huge smile. “I’m planting flowers today, but I’m usually inside.”

She took me into a nearby greenhouse and picked up a stick from the mulch-lined floor to use as a tiny trowel for digging a zucchini seedling out of a tray to plant in a larger pot, where it will flourish until it’s strong enough to handle the direct sun out among the row crops. In another greenhouse, she pointed out cuttings of rosemary, fig, blackberry, and passion fruit that were sending new roots into the soil. They would soon be transplanted elsewhere on the farm, or, more likely, into the yards of community members.

In my conversations with HEAL Director Chinue Fields, I learned that the impacts of food distribution from Urban Tilth’s Free Farm Stand and 450-plus membership CSA have been considerable. But since its inception in 2005, Urban Tilth has functioned through donations and government grants, and as Fields tells me, “The fundraising landscape has changed,” with individual donations slowing as well. An example of the loss of funds sits visibly on the North Richmond Farm in the form of the unfinished Community Resilience Center, which was funded in 2023 by an EPA grant of $19 million for new environmental projects. Intended as a refuge for Richmond residents during climate emergencies, the Center would also provide a space for food distribution, economic endeavors, and community gatherings. Urban Tilth had obtained permits and begun construction when the grant was revoked without warning in March 2025, leaving the project in limbo and causing ripples of uncertainty throughout the organization. Readers interested in learning more can visit urbantilth.org/epa-community-change-grant-status.

 

 

Fields says that HEAL’s Food as Medicine program has been able to expand programming with help from a California Strategic Growth Council Transformative Climate Communities grant, which also supported the March opening of partner organization Richmond Rising’s office and community hub.

Urban Tilth is a dynamic manifestation of community values like joy, recovery, and gathering. They are a model for how working together can cultivate a future where residents return to the land with a more sustainable outlook and a deepened relationship to themselves and others. ♦

18reasons.org | urbantilth.org | richmondrisingca.org

Madelyn Markoe is a Bay Area photographer and songwriter whose work explores people, place, and connection through narrative-driven imagery. A former restaurateur with a background in music, her photographs have appeared in Condé Nast Traveler Spain and Bon Appétit. When she’s not behind the camera or with pen and paper, she can be found playing in the wind and surf or at the piano with her cat. madsophotography.com