Alemany Farm ripples with life on a steep hillside in San Francisco. Rows of broccoli and collards, tomatillos, chiles and herbs, stands of cherry and plum trees — all this bounty is available free to the public. There’s even a tiny vineyard, a scruffy eight rows, the only one in the city.

With birds singing as volunteers harvest vegetables, it’s almost possible to ignore the constant whiz of traffic on Interstate 280, the highway that forms the 3.5-acre farm’s southern border, and the miasma of automotive fumes drifting over. Adjacent to the farm are 158 units of public housing. At the top of the hill is Bernal Heights, where homes typically sell for well over $1 million

When Christopher Renfro began volunteering here in 2018, taking on responsibility for the grapevines, which had largely been abandoned, he noticed something striking. People from the top of the hill and other parts of the city visited and took home the free produce. But very few came from the primarily Black housing project next door.

“The farm is one of the most privileged parts of the city,” he said. “Who has access to organic produce right from a farm? What is it like for people of color to have access but not use it?”

The disconnect gnawed at him. Mr. Renfro, the son of a sharecropper, had studied the work of George Washington Carver and Booker T. Whatley, an agriculture professor at Tuskegee University who helped develop community-supported agriculture in the 1960s.