Growing and Delivering Healthy Food to Tackle Santa Barbara’s Food Insecurity

When asked why she saved the Santa Barbara Agriculture and Farm Education (SBAFE) Foundation’s farm from development, CEO Leslie Person Ryan replies: “Because there were actual fights over food in Summerland after the fire and debris flow cut the community off… That disaster brought front and center our Achilles’ heel. It is, without a doubt, food security. When you study food security in Santa Barbara County, one is struck with the lack of farms participating and you come to understand that in a crisis,  unless you have a working farm nearby, you may experience food insecurity.”

In Summerland after the debris flow, the town’s unique geographical position made this area’s experience particularly isolating in the days following the catastrophic event. 

The U.S. 101 closed down, and with it, the town’s only avenue for food. Summerland residents were trapped for over a week, with no grocery store. Ryan recalls that when one woman told her story of being forced to fight over the last stale sandwich at the liquor store to feed her family with three children, “I knew we needed to do something about it.”  A food desert is quantified as an area without access to healthy food. Summerland was such an area. The farm now solves it.

Ryan, a former farmer, community organizer, and CEO, recognized it was a community problem she had to solve. She started a green food cart and sold fresh organic produce. Then, when a young employee confided in her that her family was food insecure, she started Sweet Wheel Farm’s food program to the communities most fragile, delivering organic produce for free to those in need. 

Known as Sweet Wheel Farms, Ryan led a campaign to save the Summerland farm from development. Since then, it has since expanded its scope to help more hundreds of residents weekly and is now delivering food to medically and financially  food insecure from Carpinteria to Goleta. What’s more, some of these deliveries now happen on electric bikes as a part of the organization’s pledge to lower fuel emissions. “The mission is to grow chemical-free food, solve the food desert every day in Summerland, and feed our county’s most food insecure while educating our next generation and the community,” says Ryan.

Food is delivered anonymously, helping struggling and low-income wage earners, the medically infirm that cannot afford organic food, seniors without transportation and veterans who may be medically unstable. 

Ryan recalls a father with cancer whose two young boys did not have access to enough food. Ryan interviewed the older boy. At 19 he was angry and upset. They had already been on a food program and he said that they didn’t eat the kind of food they were being given. “Our farm gives food that families would normally eat; and, it’s chemical-free grown in pure soil and free of charge,” she reflects. 

Additionally, Sweet Wheel Farms is dedicated to farm education in the community with hundreds visiting annually for regenerative practice techniques. “There is a lot of healing on the farm too” she adds. “It is a serene farm.” 

Food should be a basic human right. Summerland Sweet Wheel Farms and the Santa Barbara Agriculture and Farm Education Foundation know this better than anybody. They are changing a food desert into a food oasis, but they rely on the help of donors like you to make this happen.