Bruno Luconi farms under powerlines Top Veg Farm Is a Vestige of the City's Bucolic Past Utility Company Rents Out 4,000 Acres to 400 Farmers Under Power Lines Short Commutes to Farmers Markets Compensate for Urban Woes High Costs Force Urban Farmers to Maximize Return Per Acre Rows of carrots on the MOA farm Just past a steel fabrication plant and not far from the immense ARCO refinery in Wilmington lies a large stretch of land neatly divided into rows of vegetables, herbs, greens and root crops. It is called Top Veg Farm. A chorus of barks announces the arrival of a visitor. Dusty, disheveled cats cast mildly curious glances, and laborers look up from their work in the fields.
Large trucks line the bumpy track alongside the fields.
At the helm of one of them sits Top Veg patriarch Frank Takahashi. But to the Takahashis it is simply the farm that three generations of family members have tended for 35 years. Top Veg Farm has dwindled from 200 to 35 acres in that period of time, as the once open fields of Carson have been transformed into an industrial adjunct of Long Beach. But the Takahashis fully intend to keep on working the fertile parcel that is left. Top Veg Farm is a vestige of a time at the turn of the century when the coastal plain south and west of Los Angeles was a breadbasket, producing exportable quantities of produce ranging from milk to cherimoyas.