Nestled in the trees between Twin Peaks and Glen Canyon, a high school campus with a varied history is reviving an over 20-year-old farm. The campus has been home to three different high schools. Originally McAteer High School, it is now shared by Ruth Asawa School of the Arts (SOTA) and The Academy at McAteer. Due to shelter-in-place orders during the pandemic, farm operations were put on hold, and the one-acre plot at the southeast corner of the campus became overrun with weeds and vandalism while instruction shifted to remote learning. 

Through a concerted effort by its collaborators over the past four years, the farm is set to have its first large harvest by the end of summer 2025. The McAteer Campus Community Farm is experiencing a renaissance. This revitalization is not just about growing produce; it’s a story of community, education and sustainability.

Clearing the Weeds

Amy Morris, a SOTA parent and environmental infrastructure consultant with experience in campus greening projects, has been instrumental in this transformation. At the start of the 2021 school year, Morris became the McAteer Campus Community Farm Working Group Coordinator. In this role, she organizes the volunteer work days at the farm. These work days bring organizations and individuals together to do heavy lifting projects that students and the farm manager, Alex Aguilar, may be less equipped to manage without additional labor. 

“For a lot of those first two years, especially, it was really just trying to keep the farm from completely falling apart because structures had been damaged during the pandemic. There had been some dumping on site and just weeds were really out of control,” said Morris. “So we were just kind of trying to do basics, keep things from getting too overgrown and unsafe.” 

In the 2023-2024 school year, Morris led the farm working group in a grant application for $100,000 from the USDA’s Farm to School program. 

“What we really realized was we needed staffing again,” Morris said. “There had been actual staffing of the farm before the pandemic, and we just were not going to be able to get the farm up and running and productive in the way that we wanted it to be without paid staff.”

This grant secured funding to partner with Urban Sprouts, an educational nonprofit that partners with schools and communities to establish urban farms. Through this partnership, Aguilar was assigned as the McAteer Campus Community Farm farm manager in July of 2024. 

Parallel Goals

While Morris organized on-the-ground work at the farm, Jacqui Lopez was building infrastructure and collaboration with local food producers and Student Nutrition Services, the department responsible for feeding the SF Unified School District (SFUSD).  

Lopez, chairperson of the SF Urban Agriculture Committee (SF Urban Ag), worked with Student Nutrition Services to create farm-to-school relationships. In 2023, she met Josh Davidson, the chef at the SOTA and Academy High, who feeds a portion of the 50,000 students fed by SFUSD daily. SFUSD is one of the largest food buyers in the city.

“School lunches are so important, and there’s an emotional memory and connection everyone has to their school lunch.” Lopez said. “What can we do to bridge the gap of making that food a little more local?”

With the drive to create a local food service to feed public school students, Lopez and SF Urban Ag collaborated with McAteer Farm to start producing food that is grown, cooked and consumed on the same campus.  

“Our budget was very small and our progress was very slow, but as soon as we got a grant, we were able to bring in Urban Sprouts, and they have a larger team to just like, get things going really fast,” Lopez said. 

Building Momentum

Once the collaboration between McAteer Farm and Urban Sprouts was established through the USDA grant funding, the campus had a devoted, employed farm manager for the first time in more than five years. 

Since Aguilar’s assignment as farm manager, the farm has made significant progress. In just the span of a couple of weeks in February of this year, the farm had made a noticeable transition. At the start of the month, the farm was a cleared out one-acre lot with only two 20-foot rows of freshly planted lettuces, a dilapidated chicken coop and empty compost bins.  

By month’s end, multiple raised beds had been built, the pizza oven was up and running and the first of over 20 fruit trees were planted in what will soon be an orchard, accessible to students at their will.  The trees will provide not only apples but avocados, lemons, peaches and plums.

During a volunteer work day in February, approximately 20 community members gathered to work on the steps necessary to establish a productive farming year. Lopez brought long-haired and pointy-eared Kunekune hogs, Gracie and Betty, to help clear overgrown grasses and till soil. Morris’ sons, Milo and Baxter, built raised flower beds and cooked wood-fired pizzas for the volunteers. Aguilar’s cousin, Frankly Jeronimo, worked alongside volunteers as the Urban Sprouts representative.

“We kind of do this every month. So, whatever big projects we have, we’ll hold it off. And then when the volunteers come, we just do all that,” Aguilar said. “Because doing all that is really back breaking.” 

The farm is a community hub with community goals.  It’s a living classroom, a community builder and a step towards a sustainable future, where everyone has the opportunity to learn and grow.

Growing Together

The 2025 goals for McAteer Campus Community Farm include rebuilding a hoop-house structure to act as a greenhouse for seedlings, reestablishing a chicken coop and compost pile and planting the first crop of ‘the three sisters’ – corn, beans and squash, which form mutually beneficial relationships when planted near one another. 

One of Morris’ sons, Milo, a senior at SOTA, secured a $9,000 grant to fund a raised-bed flower garden near the farm’s plot. He is leading the project to establish the flower garden, naming it Wolves and Dragons Garden. He plans to grow plants from seeds and sell the seedlings on campus to SOTA and Academy students who can then plant the flowers at McAteer Farm, just steps away. The proceeds will then go back into the gardens. 

“Our mascot at SOTA is the dragons, and then the McAteer Academy mascot is wolves and we both share a campus,” Milo said. “So this project is really meant to encourage people from both schools to hang out and work together. And we have people from both schools working on the project as well.”