Cali Grown, City Sown Poster
Cali Grown, City Sown Poster (2025)
Poster Overview
The inaugural Growing Urban Agriculture poster is now available! Created by former Bay Area resident, now Brooklyn-based artist Julia Foote, this poster showcases efforts by government agencies and non-profit organizations to increase programming and support for urban agriculture as well as California’s vibrant urban agriculture landscape.
If you’d like your own copy of this 18” x 24” poster, please let us know and we’ll be in touch!
About the artist
Julia Foote is a Brooklyn-based multidisciplinary and multimedia artist whose work blends bold colors, nostalgic motifs, and dreams for liberation. With a background in climate organizing, Julia approaches her art with similar commitments to reimagining and envisioning a more just world, as well as a playful escape from present realities. Her visual storytelling is her tool for social and environmental justice. Inspired by her own experiences with urban farming, Julia’s designs often center locally-rooted and sustainably-focused food systems. She has collaborated with environmental organizations, grassroots political advocacy groups, and small, local businesses to create illustrations that honor the vitality of human-land connections in everyday contexts.
For the 2025 Growing Urban Agriculture poster, Julia brought her artistic and environmental justice experience and distinctive style to illustrating a thriving vision of our state’s urban food system, where farms, communities, and advocacy spaces converge. She designed a poster that not only celebrates our present foodscape but imagines a more abundant future for urban growers across the state.
Learn more about Julia at juliafoote.art and follow her on Instagram at @juliafooteprints.
Poster Vignettes
Highlighting USDA Resources for Urban Growers. USDA has been expanding its support for urban agriculture. As part of this initiative, the Farm Service Agency (FSA) created Urban Service Centers that bring their services and staff directly to urban growers in Oakland, Los Angeles, and 15 other cities across the country. FSA has also established 17 urban county committees, where urban growers help decide how FSA programs are carried out locally. Read more about USDA funding, conservation, and technical assistance programs available to urban growers here. Click here to find FSA and NRCS staff who can assist you in the Bay Area and Los Angeles.
Growing Urban Agriculture Partnership. To help connect urban farmers to USDA programs and services, the Farm Service Agency partnered with organizations already dedicated to supporting urban growers. The cooperators help to bridge any gap between the USDA and urban farmers through outreach and programming. In California, CAFF has been leading this work, with support from the LA Food Policy Council, Food Access LA, Veggielution, Agroecology Commons, and UC ANR. Their work has included microgrants to urban growers, an urban agriculture fellowship program, and regular community events where urban farmers and gardeners can learn about FSA and NRCS services.
Florence Fang Community Farm. To honor Ted Fang’s many contributions to urban agriculture in San Francisco, the Bay Area, and nationally, the poster includes a booth representing Florence Fang Community Farm—the largest community farm in San Francisco. In addition to serving as the San Francisco Farm Bureau’s first president, Ted Fang was an inaugural member of the FSA’s Bay Area Urban County Committee and was appointed to the USDA’s Federal Advisory Committee for Urban Agriculture and Innovative Production. Established in 2014, Florence Fang Community Farm has served residents of San Francisco’s Bayview-Hunters Point neighborhood for more than 10 years. It was the first urban farm in San Francisco to receive a farm number from the FSA and it hosted the kick-off event for the FSA’s urban agriculture initiative in California in May 2024.
Culturally Relevant Crops. Across California, urban farms sustain the diversified diets and traditions of our communities. From watermelon and daikon to okra, chrysanthemum, and a seemingly endless variety of chili peppers, the crops shown here reflect just a fraction of the vast culinary and cultural diversity that defines our state’s food system. For immigrant and refugee communities in particular, access to culturally meaningful crops is more than a dietary preference–it grows belonging, serving as a connection to memory and tradition. By supporting diversified and culturally relevant diets, urban farms play a critical role in advancing food security, biodiversity, and cultural resilience. To learn more, watch this short video about the connection between culturally important crops and biodiversity in Bay Area urban gardens.
Seed Saving is an ancestral practice for many groups of people around the world, and is vital for preserving both cultural heritage and biodiversity. Heirloom and culturally significant seeds, unlike privatized and genetically modified ones, help to maintain resilient food systems rooted in long-held cultural knowledge. Ecologically, seed saving supports adaptation to changing environments, conserves heirloom varieties, and reduces dependency on commercial seed markets, which supports greater food sovereignty and sustainability.
Food Sovereignty refers to community control over food systems, including production and distribution, in ways that are culturally appropriate and ecologically sustainable. It reduces reliance on industrial agriculture and fosters community resilience, including through the international movement La Via Campesina. Food sovereignty within urban agriculture responds to conditions of food apartheid, and prioritizes place-based community needs and goals, including promoting culturally relevant crops and pursuing social and environmental justice. Learn more about food sovereignty here.
Land Justice. Under the oak tree, an Ohlone mother and child gather acorns using traditional handwoven baskets and serve as a reminder that California’s urban landscapes are layered atop unceded Indigenous homelands. Acorns were a staple in Indigenous food systems, sustaining communities through the careful stewardship of oak woodlands and the passing down of traditional ecological knowledge across generations.
Collaborators
Keely Cervantes
CAFF
Ana-Alicia Carr, Thomas Martinez & Nikhita Jain
Los Angeles Food Policy Council
Marie-Alise Recasner-de Marco
Food Access LA (former)
Leah Atwood & Jeneba Kilgore
Agroecology Commons
Emily Schwing & Fernando Fernandez
Veggielution
Team members
Yesenia Valverde
UC ANR & UC Berkeley
Hasmik Djoulakian
UC ANR & UC Berkeley
Amanda Fong
UC ANR & UC Berkeley