The tiny paradise lost of Oceanside church land once had been alive, according to a KPBS report. Not just with crops but with the pulse of something older than property lines, something that stretched back to the first hands that broke earth and placed seed.
Community Roots Farm, 4510 N River Rd #5116, Oceanside, CA 92057, sat on its acre like a defiant whisper in a world growing louder with pavement and profit. It was a living thing, its gardens thick with food, its spaces dense with people—workers, volunteers, families, neighbors—moving through its rows as though drawn by instinct to the quiet work of tending, growing, giving.
“Everyone is always so surprised at how much you can do on an acre of land,” Bianca Bonilla, Community Roots Farm executive director, said to KPBS. Bonilla seems like the kind of person who speaks with the certainty of those who have worked their belief into the ground with their own hands.
“It’s not only the amount of food we grew,” Bonilla continued, “which was thousands of pounds, tens of thousands of pounds every single year that went out into our community, pesticide-free local produce—but it was all of the people that were here.”
But ownership is a thing measured in contracts, not in effort. Bonilla didn’t own the land. It was leased, borrowed from the good graces of Shepherd of the Valley Lutheran Church. That is, until grace ran dry.
Two years ago, the church installed a new pastor, one Joel Luckemeyer, a man who arrived not with a spade but with a mind to reshape the soil in his own vision. “He made it very clear to our organization that he did not approve of several of our activities and our communications,” Bonilla said.
The language was careful, but the meaning was sharp. The farm, once a thriving expanse of green, was now a stretch of dead weeds and dry dirt, an acre of absence where once there was life.
The end of a farm is never just the end of a farm. It’s the end of meals that won’t be eaten, hands that won’t work together, conversations that won’t be had. It’s the slow erasure of something rare—a patch of earth that for a time had belonged to no one and everyone at once.
The Farm had always been a refuge, a place where the undercurrents of community and culture met under the wide California sky. But the trouble began, as trouble always does, with a whisper that grew into something heavier, something weighted with the unspoken authority of tradition.
What’s happening/Community Roots Farm montage
It started with a post—just a gesture, a digital nod of support to the LGBTQ+ community. Then came the murmurings from the church, like the cautious clearing of a throat before the sermon begins. Their concerns multiplied, took shape in the form of disapproval, a tightening grip.
The Summer Solstice event? Pagan. The Día de los Muertos celebration? Worse—blasphemy, a flirtation with devilry. The Farm was becoming, in the church’s eyes, something untamed, something that could not be quietly tolerated.
Then came the lease. Bonilla, standing at the intersection of principle and survival, was given the terms—every event, every sign, would need to pass through the gatekeepers of moral acceptability, a 30-day purgatory of review.
And the verdict was already written between the lines. Día de los Muertos would not be approved. Many of the messages that defined the Farm’s soul would be silenced before they had the chance to breathe.
“We realized,” Bonilla said, voice steady with the clarity of hard choices, “this was no longer a safe space for our community.”
The church refused an interview. The pastor, Joel Luckemeyer, offered only a statement—crafted, measured, devoid of the heat that had driven the Farm away. A conclusion without a conversation.
POINT
Community Roots Farm has rented space from Shepherd of the Valley Lutheran Church for 10 years. During that time, their activity has expanded beyond growing and providing produce to advancing causes which conflict with the biblical teachings of our congregation. Having honored our most recent lease, the church offered a new agreement (at similar, favorable terms) which clarified the approval process for events on the property (a requirement that has been in the lease for many years). This clarification for event approval in the new lease was to ensure hosting events on the property that expressly conflict with our mission and confession of faith did not occur. The Farm has chosen not to enter into a new lease. We pray God’s blessings for them and those they have served.”
— Joel Luckemeyer
COUNTERPOINT
Their values are firm and so are ours. Their boundaries are firm and so are ours. The protection of our most vulnerable communities, of our BIPOC, LGBTQIA communities, our immigrant communities, that is the most important to us, that they feel safe. These kinds of issues we are seeing on the media on a grand scale, right? We’re seeing these tensions. And here we are living it on this micro-scale…In conversations I would say, ‘If we can do this, if we can work this out, anybody can, right. There’s hope.’ How are we going to carry this?”
— Bianca Bonilla
The loss of the Farm was more than the loss of land, more than the slow creep of concrete swallowing another patch of earth. It was the unraveling of a space where people had come to plant more than vegetables—where they had rooted friendships, sowed a sense of belonging, harvested something intangible but necessary: acceptance.
Bonilla saw it clearly. “We’re living the same tensions you see on the news, but on a smaller scale,” she said. “And I kept thinking—if we can figure this out, if we can make this work, then maybe anyone can. Maybe there’s hope. But how do we carry this forward?”
The city had no answer. The church had already spoken. And open green space, that rare and fragile thing, was slipping away.
But Bonilla wasn’t done. The mission would not wilt just because the soil had been taken from beneath it. Instead, it would grow sideways, find new ground in an unlikely place—a warehouse, a concrete shell waiting to be filled with life. She called it The Plant Lab.
“We’re going to build something there,” she said. “Workshops, a place for community, a space where people feel safe—especially our BIPOC, immigrant, and LGBTQIA communities. More than anything, it’s going to be collaborative. A place where people come together and build something stronger than the forces pushing us apart.”
The Plant Lab would open in Oceanside before the year was out. But the Farm, the place that had given so much, would close by the end of March.
Another space lost. Another fight carried forward.
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