Beyond Organic: The Vision of Fairview Gardens

During the 1980s, when urban sprawl brought big changes to California's Goleta Valley, a rich agricultural region near Santa Barbara, the 12-acre family farm Fairview Gardens found itself surrounded by housing tracts, highways, and strip malls. New area residents complained about the farm's smelly compost pile and noisy animals, while developers circled like vultures. Happily, Fairview Gardens did not become another casualty of America's land preservation wars, as Meryl Streep narrates in this upbeat tale of how vision and determination helped unite a community behind one farm's goal of producing pesticide-free food while promoting a diversified, sustainable agricultural environment. Michael Ableman and his team of dedicated employees and interns gradually won the community over with class visits, open houses, and educational tours. Today, a "farm market" provides direct marketing of produce and a communication link to the residents, and customers show their loyalty through a "friends of the farm" arrangement--buying produce and supporting the business through its slack season. Now an educational, non-profit land trust, Fairview Gardens' future seems assured. Unfortunately, we're told, 46 acres of American farmland are lost every hour, and while the solutions outlined here may not work everywhere, Beyond Organic's insights into the urgent national problem of farmland preservation should spark creative ideas and debate. Recommended. Aud: C, P. (S. Rees)