Urban Farm of Palm Springs
A backyard turned into a working farm, and a place to see conservation in action.
What this is
UFO Palm Springs stands for Urban Farm Of Palm Springs. It is our own farm, and it is where everything we sell to cities gets proven first.
It sits on an ordinary residential lot in Palm Springs. Soil, water, air and food production all happen here, at the scale a household or a neighborhood could actually copy. Nothing on this site requires acreage, machinery or a municipal budget.
If you want to understand what community composting looks like when it is working, this is the place to stand in.
How it started
The farm began with a question about food scraps and a front yard of sand.
Learning to compost, Prema started collecting food scraps from Whole Foods while setting up the first community composting site at St. Margaret’s Episcopal Church. Tree trimming crews working in the neighborhood were asked to drop their woodchips and mulch here rather than haul them away.
Cardboard went down over the sand, mulch went down over the cardboard, and soil began to build where there had been almost none. It is slow, it is unglamorous, and it is the whole method.
As the process and the recipe were refined, the intake grew. Food scraps came from the farmers market instead of a single store. By 2024 four Certified Farmers Market merchants were donating 500 to 700 pounds of food waste a week to the site.
The Community Composting for Green Spaces grant followed, along with three raised beds. Those were built out using hugelkultur, filling them with woody material that continues to break down and hold water underneath the growing surface. In a desert, that matters more than it sounds.
Why here, and why this matters
The Coachella Valley has a specific problem, and composting sits at the center of it.
- Work here is seasonal. The tourism economy does not provide year round employment, so income arrives in bursts and disappears for months.
- Food banks are over capacity, week after week.
- Close to a third of the food produced in this country is never eaten. ReFED, which tracks food waste nationally, put it at 29% of the US food supply in 2024, around 60 million tons.
California law now permits community scale composting. That means the material being thrown away can be processed locally, by local people, into something that grows local food. The waste, the unemployment and the hunger are the same problem viewed from three sides, and they have one shared answer.
Built with intention
Building a business on this took study as well as labor. Alongside the farm came the law, the permitting and a social entrepreneurship program, learning how to run a business without exploiting people or the planet to do it.
That work was recognized at SEED LAB 2024, where the project won the Audience Choice Award and $10,000 in funding. A mentor from SEED LAB passed on an application for the Thrive Inland SoCal Catalyst Fund.
The proposal was specific, and it was costed line by line. Fifteen raised beds. Twenty fruit trees. An irrigation system, a greywater conversion and rainwater harvesting, so water used once is used again. Twenty compost bins to process food scraps and tree trimmings on site. A shade structure, seeds and tools. And two paid interns from the Urban Conservation Corps, working on the farm for a year.
In August 2024 it was funded with $219,849.60 from the Thrive Inland SoCal Catalyst Fund, Round 1. One of nine Round 1 awards, and the only one funding backyard urban farming.
Where the money went
| Trainer pay, 1,000 hours a year | $85,000.00 |
| Urban Conservation Corps, two paid interns for one year | $55,421.87 |
| Building the farm: beds, trees, irrigation, greywater, rainwater, compost bins | $30,000.00 |
| Community outreach and education | $10,000.00 |
| Operations: licences, insurance, utilities, professional services | $15,000.00 |
| Grant administration at 12.5% | $24,427.73 |
| Total | $219,849.60 |
Roughly two thirds of the award went to paying people. That was the point. The farm is the method, but the money was for wages, in a valley where the work disappears for half the year.
What the grant delivered here
| Raised beds installed | 26 |
| Fruit trees planted, across 16 or more varieties | 26 |
| People formally trained, hands on | 12+ |
| People reached through workshops, senior centers, community events and school sessions | 500+ |
Those are the grant reporting figures. Our own site records total 109,615 pounds composted on this lot since March 2024. Before those records began, roughly ten truckloads of mulch went down as the base, and none of that is counted.
The proposal promised twenty fruit trees. Twenty six went in.
And across everything we have built since 2021
Beyond this farm, working with partner organizations at sites across the Coachella Valley and Inland Empire, PP&C has diverted more than 700,000 pounds of food and yard waste from landfill, and trained more than 700 people since 2021.
What is here now
- Twenty six raised beds on the property
- Twenty six fruit trees planted, across sixteen or more varieties
- A greywater system converted from the laundry unit
- Rainwater harvesting, roof gutters running to a swale in the garden
- Drip irrigation throughout the growing areas
- An active composting operation processing food scraps and tree trimmings
- Hands on training delivered with the Urban Conservation Corps
How we take care of natural resources
Soil
No synthetic fertilizers. No pesticides. No herbicides. We work with compost, and where the soil needs more, we add nutrients in natural forms.
Water
We slow it, sink it and spread it.
Drip irrigation runs throughout the growing areas, so water goes to roots rather than to air. Rainwater harvesting does the slowing, the sinking and the spreading: gutters carry roof water down into a swale in the garden, where it soaks in instead of running off. And the laundry unit now waters the thirstiest fruit trees, the bananas among them, so household water is used twice before it leaves the property.
What you can do here
Visit. Visits are by appointment. See composting, soil building, greywater and food production working together on a residential lot.
Learn. Classes run at the farm and at client sites, covering composting, desert soil building, SB 1383 compliance and community composting site operations.
Read the funded application
The Thrive Catalyst Fund application that paid for this work is available to read in full. It lists what we proposed to build, what each part cost, and where the money went. If you are writing a grant of your own, or you want to see what a working budget for a small urban farm looks like, this is the whole document.
Front yards are not decoration
They are the most underused economic opportunity most households own. UFO Palm Springs exists to prove that, on one ordinary lot, in a desert, with material everyone else throws away.