Zenger Farm celebrates 25 years of creating equitable food systems

“We are shifting the food system from one of exploitation to one of care,” Rob Cato, Zenger Farm executive director, said.

Zenger Farm invited local community members to celebrate its 25th anniversary with a Día de los Muertos celebration Nov. 2. The event featured face painting, music and dance performances, a tamale and posole feast and an ofrenda — a traditional Día de los Muertos altar for the departed.

Like the traditional Mexican holiday, organizers said they intended the farm’s Día de los Muertos celebration to provide space for people to pass on remembrances of loved ones to a new generation, keeping those memories alive while connecting a younger generation to the earth.

Zenger Farm is a 24-acre, nonprofit urban farm working to create equitable food systems through land access, education and partnerships with community organizations. The organization works to empower the next generation of young farmers through various programs, a theme parallel to those inherent to Día de los Muertos celebrations and the food justice movement.

Cato said the farm’s Día de los Muertos events have grown significantly over the past seven years, both in the number of attendees and in how they choose to incorporate intersectional justice movements into the programming. For instance, in prior years, event organizers have incorporated a Black Lives Matter memorial into the ofrenda, highlighting the intersection of racial justice, Día de los Muertos and Black liberation, he said.

Attention to addressing social justice issues is planted firmly in the farm’s ethos. As with the broad food justice movement, Cato said farming and education are a form of resistance to inequitable laws and policies that have historically denied marginalized groups access to food, land and dignity.

That includes Indigenous land stolen from tribes, internment and displacement of Japanese Americans in the 1940s, and the decadeslong seizure of land from Black farmers — all of which happened across the U.S., including in Oregon. A 2022 study in the American Economic Association’s Papers and Proceedings journal estimated the compounded value of the Black land loss in the U.S. from 1920 to 1997 was roughly $326 billion.

“You’re resisting a particular system that was structured in a way to deny people a right,” Cato said. “We all have a right to food, and we all have a right to culturally significant food to us.”

Education

Education is a central part of Zenger Farm’s mission. The city of Portland, through the Bureau of Environmental Services, owns the land where Zenger Farm operates. The farm has a 50-year lease with the city, and it pays rent by providing a host of educational services, including youth education programs to increase access to outdoor spaces and knowledge of where their food comes from.

“It doesn’t take very long for someone to lose that generational knowledge that they have on how to grow — especially if you’re coming from a background where that particular work has been associated with poor working conditions, you know, agriculture workers, enslavement of Black folks,” Cato said. “All of that is really ingrained and makes it really hard to pass down that knowledge.”

The Powellhurst-Gilbert and adjacent outer-southeast Portland neighborhoods are some of Oregon’s most culturally diverse neighborhoods. Students in the David Douglas School District reportedly speak more than 60 languages at home.

Every 5th-grade student in the David Douglas School District engages with Zenger Farm through the Farm School program, which includes three four-hour field trips to learn about growing food and maintaining the land. Over the past decade, over 7,000 students have participated in the Farm School program, during which they engage in efforts around climate action and learn the importance of natural resources and food systems.

As an early part of its agreement, Zenger Farm helped heal the property’s seven acres of protected wetlands after years of cattle farming demolished them due to methane emissions and waste runoff. Students in the education programs can explore and learn about the native plants and animals that have found refuge in the rehabilitated area.

Access

At the Día de los Muertos event, a crowd gathered under a solar-arrayed roof to watch traditional dance performances as a volunteer passed out warm horchata. Many young people wore calavera makeup in celebration as a musician sang songs of resistance, including a tongue-in-cheek song about former President Trump, three days before the election. Event organizers spoke of the meaning of the holiday — first in Spanish, then in English — engaging with multiple generations of people in the audience.

The event also included a tamale and posole feast provided by volunteer chef Paula Hernandez, owner of the local Oaxacan food cart La Cuchara.

Much of outer-southeast Portland is a food desert, meaning a significant share of residents are at least one mile from the nearest supermarket, according to the USDA Economic Research Service. Public transit options are notably more scarce than in neighborhoods closer to the city center. The poverty rate is nearly five percentage points higher in the area than in all of Oregon, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

The Zenger Farm CSA program helps address some of the food access disparities by providing participants with organic vegetables through a sliding-scale payment model. Further, the organization partners with Multnomah County through CSA Partnerships for Health to deliver more than 300 boxes of food—along with recipes and other educational materials—to low-income communities, predominantly communities of color.

In a low-income neighborhood facing the impacts of the city’s homelessness crisis, Cato said it is essential for the organization to incorporate homeless neighbors into the Zenger Farm community. A long strip of Foster Road near the Springwater Corridor Trail has been an increasingly common area for people living in RVs and tents. Zenger Farm is a stone’s throw from the city of Portland’s Reedway Safe Rest Village, a tiny home village serving as a temporary shelter for homeless residents.

Rather than building anti-homeless barriers, which is relatively common across Portland, Cato said the organization developed resource kits and made efforts to do outreach, educating the community about what is available at the farm.

“Overall, I think that’s been really successful in terms of what it means to incorporate those folks into our community,” Cato said.

By welcoming cultural diversity into its space, Zenger Farm illustrates how building systems rooted in justice can grow into generational knowledge and care.

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This article appears in Nov. 13, 2024.