Coastal Roots Farm and Feeding San Diego join hands to serve the Iipay Nation of Santa Ysabel

This past February, Feeding San Diego launched a new mobile pantry distribution on the Santa Ysabel Reservation in San Diego County. Our pursuit is to provide much-needed food assistance to the Iipay Nation of Santa Ysabel and neighboring communities. Coastal Roots Farm, is a nonprofit Jewish community farm and education center. Similar to Feeding San Diego, they serve the local community, so we decided to partner on the distribution. Garth Denton-Borhaug, Post Harvest & Distribution Manager at Coastal Roots Farm, shares how the partnership with Feeding San Diego began and its impact on the Native American community.

“When I learned that Feeding San Diego’s first food distribution was happening on the same day as ours, it was almost like a stars-aligning kind of moment! Feeding San Diego was distributing these incredible vegetables and shelf-stable items in pre-packaged boxes and Coastal Roots Farm had set-up our pop-up vegetable stand right next to your truck. It was beautiful to see both organizations working alongside each other. Our teams immediately got in touch and decided to coordinate our distributions in the future,” shares Garth.

Much like Feeding San Diego, Coastal Roots Farm is dedicated to serving vulnerable communities in San Diego County. They are able to do so by providing them with healthy, nutritious food. Located in Encinitas on approximately 17 acres of land, Coastal Roots Farm engages in organic vegetable farming. This is done by integrating ancient Jewish wisdom, sustainable agriculture, and food justice as their core values. “Our farm is really an educational farm where we produce quite a substantial amount of food each year. Last year alone, we grew and distributed nearly 60,000 pounds of food. Everything we grow is California certified which we distribute to the community in several ways,” explains Garth.

Utilizing a pay-what-you-can system, Coastal Roots Farm has an on-site farm stand. This stand is open twice a week to public, providing organic produce to people don’t typically have access to it. Explaining how the system works, Garth says, “It’s just like a normal shopping experience for people who come to our farm stand, like in any other standard farmers market. Cutsomers can pick their produce, and at checkout, we present them with the true cost of growing those organic vegetables. However, we also offer a discount of up to $30 for a purchase of 8-10 different vegetables, which is equivalent to a CSA box or a full grocery bag. So, if your order comes to $35, you would pay a minimum of $5. People don’t need to bring any sort of documentation or identification; it’s a very dignified way to shop, even if you are unable to pay full price.”

In addition, Coastal Roots Farm also takes their food off-site through several unique distribution programs, “Some of the communities that we’re serving include Holocaust survivors around North County San Diego. We also serve low-income, uninsured families, at Vista Community Clinic once a month, and approximately 50 military families at the Camp Pendleton Military Base once a month.”

Emphasizing the growing need for hunger-relief across the county since the beginning of the pandemic last year, Garth says, “COVID-19 has undoubtedly impacted the need for food assistance greatly. We conducted a survey a few months after the first lockdown almost a year ago. It was found that three out of every four customers visiting the farm stand had been financially impacted. We saw a huge increase in demand for our services, especially at the pay-what-you-can farm stand.”

When Coastal Roots Farm learned about the rising need for food assistance among families living in Santa Ysabel as a result of the pandemic, the team partnered with a local food pantry on-site at Iipay Nation to deliver pre-bagged produce to homebound elders in the community. “Since May 2020, we have been reaching out to nearly 100 Indigenous and Native American families every month. Limited access to resources, especially food assistance, combined with COVID-19 has really made these folks extremely vulnerable. Indigenous people have been much more disproportionately impacted by COVID-19 than any other ethnic group in the country,” explains Garth.

Stressing the importance of the budding partnership between Feeding San Diego and Coastal Roots Farm, Garth further adds, “We are excited to partner with Feeding San Diego and keep these distributions going successfully in the future. This partnership honors the ancient Jewish wisdom that guides us as an organization about equitable food access, care, and compassion. It also honors the indigenous people living in Santa Ysabel. Fresh, organic food is difficult to come by for a lot of communities. We’re always looking for ways to genuinely and positively impact people we were serving, including Indigenous and Native American people.”

Thank you, Garth and Coastal Roots Farm, for your valued partnership. We look forward to working together over the next several months.