When I met Judith Gerber at the café at Nordstrom’s, she glanced at the stylish fashions with curiosity. “This isn’t the kind of place I usually shop,” she confessed. “I’m a farm girl.”
That might seem like an odd statement from a Torrance native, but as Judith documented in the book “From Cows To Concrete” that she coauthored with Rachel Surls, local farming was once a big business here. This isn’t something Gerber learned from prowling through old records, but something she vividly remembers.
“I grew up in the South Bay and I remember going to Meadow Park dairy, I remember going to Ishibashi Farm by Torrance Airport until it closed in 2012,” Gerber said. “Torrance had farm animals until 1965, when the city passed an ordinance outlawing them. Most people have heard about the rancho days in California, but don’t realize that farming and ranching went on a long time after that. That lifestyle vanished not long ago, but until I started documenting it nobody was telling the story.”
Gerber documented local agricultural history in “Farming in Torrance and the South Bay,” a picture-heavy book issued by Arcadia Press, then decided she wanted to go deeper into the subject and see how this affected all of Los Angeles. She mentioned this ambition to a friend who was an academic at UC Davis and got a very surprising response: someone else in her program had the exact same idea. Would they like to meet each other? They did, and as Gerber remembers, it their interests were almost eerily aligned.
“After Rachel and I met we each did an outline and showed them to each other,” she said. “It was scary how closely they matched; they were almost identical. I don’t have AG science degrees and Rachel does, so she had a little bit more information about that… I have a Masters in Public Administration so I had that orientation. Once we decided to write the book we knew that the University press would publish it, but I wanted it to be something more aimed at the general public.”
A major regional publisher, Angel City Press, was indeed interested, and after seven years of research, writing, editing, and production the book came out this year. The beautifully produced and illustrated hardcover includes bucolic views of places that are now gritty urban or industrial neighborhoods. A promotional real estate piece for the farm community of Vernondale has no resemblance to the modern city of Vernon, and you’d never guess that the placid sheep grazing in an old photo are in what is now Highland Park. The whole book is full of revelations about the way that agriculture first built Los Angeles and then was destroyed by it, as some of the most fertile farmland in America was paved over to accommodate newcomers who craved a suburban lifestyle.
Judith not only documented this transition, but is doing her small part to reverse our separation from the land. As an accomplished writer and editor she took freelance jobs, one of which took her career in a new direction.
“I was writing and editing a newsletter for Torrance Memorial, called Advantage, for people over 50. I noticed that they were always looking for new classes, and it started me thinking,” Gerber recalled. “Along with my training as a master gardener I got a certificate in agriculture therapy, which involves the psychological effect of gardening. There have been studies that have shown that it is better for us physically and emotionally to work the earth as we age.”
“The people at Torrance Memorial liked the idea and I started out doing classes at the hospital, but there was no space there to garden so I ended up teaching in a conference room. One of the most popular was called ‘Grow your own salad bowl,’ and I had to turn people away. It was frustrating to give people this information in an environment where they couldn’t immediately put it into practice.”
Gerber hit on the idea of obtaining a plot from the Community Garden Program, and after three years on the waiting list was granted 90 square feet. Once she made adjustments to fit her unique uses, the outdoor classes were off and running.
“My husband built a raised bed with fencing, so it was accessible to someone who was using a walker or a wheelchair,” she said. “We broke ground in July of 2012 at the Columbia Park Community garden, and the program has been going very well. I teach classes in organic gardening on Saturday mornings, and though it started for seniors we have opened it up to all ages. If you come out and help us, anything you harvest that day is yours – that’s your payment for helping. I hope to work with more people who can teach people what to cook; I can teach you how to grow things, but I am not the person to teach anybody to cook. I was kind of a latchkey kid and never learned a whole lot about that. If I don’t have a recipe, I don’t know what to do.”
The program is still a work in progress, and she hopes to eventually expand it.
“I have dreams… I’m still looking around for places around the campus where we might be able to grow right by the hospital, which would be most convenient for patients to visit. It would even be good for them to just be able to see it from their rooms. I would love to grow some food and have them serve it in the hospital, whether to patients’ rooms or in the cafeteria.”
Whether or not that happens at that scale, Gerber continues to teach and promote local agriculture. In a time when the Farm-To-Table movement is hailed as a new idea, Gerber is ready to remind us that it wasn’t new, even to our grandfathers, and to help us experience the joy of doing it ourselves.
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