Asheville’s Southside Community Farm
This week, we’re sharing a recent interview with Chloe Moore, a steward, farmer and educator at the Southside Community Farm, in the historically Black neighborhood of Southside in Asheville, NC. The farm has been serving the neighborhood and the region with free and inexpensive, fresh produce for a decade, providing educational opportunities, grocery deliveries, an herb garden and a BIPOC farmers market. The farm sits on land owned by the public Housing Authority of the City of Asheville (HACA) and there is currently a threat that HACA will destroy the farm. For the hour we talk about the work of the farm, the legacy of a community farm in the wake of government policies that destroy Black communities, and ways that community members can support the SCF and help it thrive.
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Featured Track:
- Rise Above by Ibeyi from Spell 31
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Transcription
TFSR: Would you please introduce yourself with your name, your gender pronouns, and any affiliations you want to share for this conversation?
Chloe Moore: My name is Chloe Moore. I use she and he pronouns interchangeably, and I am a farmer and manager of Southside Community Farm in Asheville.
TFSR: So could you introduce us to the Southside Community, some of its history and significance of black Asheville in particular, but Asheville more widely?
CM: Yes. So Southside is a neighborhood in South Central Asheville, and it is a predominantly Black neighborhood. It is a historically segregated Black neighborhood in Asheville. It was known as East Riverside neighborhood historically, and that includes what is now Southside and much of what is now the River Arts District. The East Riverside neighborhood was a Black business district in Asheville, included a lot of Black owned businesses as well as Black owned homes. That neighborhood was, of course, oppressed and segregated, but that neighborhood was also a source of Black power in Asheville, and it was very intentionally destroyed by the city of Asheville through the Asheville urban renewal project in the 1960s and ‘70s
During that time this neighborhood was targeted by the city with federal funds for urban renewal. Urban renewal projects were happening all over the nation, but Asheville’s urban renewal project was the largest in the southeast, and it included destruction of many, many Black owned homes and businesses in what is now Southside and what is now the river Arts District. People’s homes and businesses were forcibly purchased through eminent domain for as little as $600. A lot was lost and never restored.
What is now in place of that is the River Arts District, which is a thriving business sector but not for Black people in Asheville. Southside is still a predominantly Black neighborhood. It’s about 55% Black at this time. It does not have a lot of businesses, and it has some home ownership, but a lot of home ownership has been replaced by low income public housing.
Of course, you have to have a balance, right? We need low income public housing, we want everyone to have affordable access to homes and to a place to live. When we look at it historically, we have to recognize that public housing and being a tenant has replaced home ownership for many Black people in the Southside neighborhood.
Currently, there are no grocery stores in Southside. The neighborhood is in food apartheid. Really, the only place to purchase food in the neighborhood is a gas station mini mart. So not a lot of healthy options, not a lot of fresh options, and for many people vehicle access can be challenging in the neighborhood and there’s also not an easy direct bus route to a grocery store. So if you don’t have easy vehicle access and you need to get groceries in Southside, you may have to transfer buses. Then of course, how many groceries can you really carry if you’re transferring buses? Especially because there’s a lot of elders in the neighborhood. There’s a lot of families with young kids in the neighborhood. That puts a lot of barriers on food access when it’s a neighborhood that used to have 14 small grocery markets, Mom and Pop little owned grocery markets, not a big grocery store like we think of now, but before the urban renewal project started in the 60s, there were up to 14 small grocery markets that have been replaced with nothing at this point.
TFSR: A lot of what you said evoked a lot of thoughts for me, but particularly, if you could dig a little deeper into the role of eminent domain and forcibly purchasing, as you said, for as low as $600 for a house, and that government application of full ownership of the land base and the government, particularly at this time, being the 1960s, was seated in white ownership and white rule, not to say that that has changed significantly. So, can you talk a bit about some of the path towards the tenant relationships in the neighborhood for folks that did stay around, because of home ownership being a really important multi-generational way emulating wealth, not only within a family unit, but also within a community?
CM: For sure, yeah, land ownership has always been a path to wealth. That’s why it is specifically in this nation targeted towards white people. For Black people in our history, land ownership has always been, or land access in different ways, has always been a source of power that is continuously damaged by white supremacy. Of course, that started much earlier than this, but through the 20th century, that included red-lining. A lot of Black neighborhoods in Asheville were red-lined as a way to eliminate land access and home access from Black communities. So that was the start of it.
Then urban renewal was kind of another wave of prevention and destruction of Black community wealth. When we look at the historical documents of urban renewal, a lot of what the documents were talking about at the time was preventing blight. They’re talking about the Black neighborhoods with the same words as diseases. They’re talking about preventing the spread of blight, preventing the spread of poverty in these ways. We really know what they’re talking about is Black power, in many ways. So at the time, the language that was being used in urban renewal is very fear mongering and very anti-Black.
There are still people who live in the Southside neighborhood who remember this. This was not very long ago. I know, a woman in Southside and her grandparents owned a home that was demolished during urban renewal. There’s actually nothing in the site where her grandparents home was. It’s grass right now. It’s part of Choctaw Park, which is a city park, but there’s nothing there. There’s nothing really to benefit the community. It’s not widely utilized. So this woman and her family lives in this neighborhood and sees this place where her family had had landownership, had home access, but there’s nothing now. What does that do when, you know, that home could have been the place that her grandparents lived out the rest of their lives, that could have been a place that she would own now that now she doesn’t have access to that inter-generational wealth? That affects, of course, not only an individual or a family line, but a whole community when it comes to the wealth that’s been lost.
TFSR: Cool, thank you for responding to that thing that was not in the questions.
CM: Of course.
You know, currently, that continues. Gentrification is kind of the new urban renewal. Urban removal. A lot of people call “urban renewal” “urban removal” in the Southside neighborhood. Gentrification is just the next step in that in reducing Black power and access to wealth. The Southside neighborhood actually has the highest property taxes in Buncombe County of any neighborhood. That’s just another way where people are prevented from accessing homes. People who are in their homes, elders who are in their homes who are on a fixed income are paying an exorbitant amount of money for just their property taxes, and it prevents inter-generational wealth and inter-generational home ownership.
TFSR: I did not know that. That’s so hard. So central to the Southside Community Farm, according to the story on the project’s webpage, is the struggle for health and accessible food at the intersection of race and class in a small southern Appalachian town. You’ve already talked about some of the barriers that folks on fixed incomes or lower incomes who are obviously working a lot of the time or don’t have a vehicle of their own on a regular basis would have difficulty getting out to a grocery store. But can you talk a bit about how the city has developed the neighborhood in terms of things like access to food and how the community farm was formed?
CM: So Southside Community Farm was created by a group of Black community residents in Southside because there is no grocery store, because the neighborhood is in food apartheid. 10 years ago, or maybe a little more—11-ish years ago—when folks in the neighborhood started talking about this project, the original goal was to create a grocery market because that doesn’t exist in the neighborhood and because all of the grocery markets have been destroyed in the neighborhood.
The original thought for residents who are trying to solve this problem was to create something like that. But because of systemic oppression, because of lack of land ownership, lack of wealth, the folks involved did not have the time, resources, etc, to be able to make a grocery market happen. What they were able to do was start a community garden that had the goal of making food accessible and connecting people with food and with land in a different way than people maybe had access to. That’s kind of the start.
The Southside Community Farm was founded in 2014. It is on land that is owned by the Housing Authority of the city of Asheville. Historically, the land that we’re on was the playground of the Livingston Street School. So the Livingston Street School was the segregated Black elementary School of the neighborhood until that ended in 1970 with the desegregation order. So that school was closed in 1970 through the desegregation order. After that, it kind of sat. There was playground equipment for a while that slowly deteriorated. Then shortly before the farm started, the Housing Authority of the city of Asheville got access to that land and the school building from the city. It was around that same time that when folks were looking for land that that became available. So that’s how the farm was started.
It was started on land that had just become Housing Authority of the city of Asheville’s land. The playground, because that was no longer a playground, a playground was created down the street at Herb Watts Park. By the time the farm started, I think there was some rusty old springs and things like that. So at that time, plans were made to create another playground really close by and to transition that land into food access.
So the farm has existed for 10 years. It has expanded during that time. We currently steward that original farm plot, we have a small herbal medicine garden very close by right behind the same building, and then across the street, we have an orchard plot which is right in Erskine, which is one of the public housing developments that is in the neighborhood.
TFSR: Cool. Could you talk a bit about some of the other programs? Like you mentioned the orchard, the herb farm, the food generally. But some of the other programs that are operated under the auspices of the Southside Community Farm and what community members from which communities are served by that?
CM: So our biggest program is the free grocery program. That was the goal. The goal is food access. That is where three quarters of the food we’re growing… The most amount of our time and labor goes into growing food, right? We’re stewarding land, we’re taking care of land in healthy ways, and ecologically mindful ways, and we’re growing food and giving it away for free. So the free grocery program encompasses a lot of that.
Three quarters of the food we grow, or a little bit more than that typically, is distributed freely. So most of that goes to the free grocery program, which predominantly is distributed through outdoor refrigerators in the neighborhood. There are two outdoor refrigerators in the Southside neighborhood, and three outdoor pantries, and those are open and available 24/7. So, yes, they are in the Southside neighborhood. They are within walking distance of multiple low income public housing developments in the neighborhood. So certainly that is a focus. But they’re open and available to anyone and everyone. And that’s important to us.
It’s important that we aren’t putting up more barriers. There’s a lot of barriers to food access. There’s a lot of stigma around free food access, and we want to break those barriers and stigmas down as much as possible through our free grocery program. Anyone can access them. They’re open 24/7, and we don’t record information about the people who are getting food from these things. We don’t even necessarily know everyone who’s getting it. People can access food at two in the morning if they want to and there’s not going to be anyone there necessarily. Yes, I know a lot of folks in the neighborhood, including people who live in public housing, who access the free fridges, of course, because they live right next to it and it’s easily accessible.
I also know that there are people from outside of the Southside neighborhood. There’s people from Shiloh, which is another Black neighborhood very close by who utilize it. There’s people from outside of either of those. There’s people who drive. I’ve heard I’ve talked to a few people who drive to the fridge to access food from the greater Asheville area, coming in from a distance because there are very few food resources that are open after work hours for people who have a nine to five and may be experiencing food insecurity. There’s not a lot of resources in western North Carolina in general. So that program is really important and expansive. Of course we’re focusing on this neighborhood, but we’re focusing on everyone to honor all our collective well-being.
I did say that a little over 75% of the food that we grow is free, which means of course that almost 25% is not. One place we sell at are farmers markets. So in 2021 we started a farmers market in the Southside neighborhood as another way to inject food access into the neighborhood. So, we have a BIPOC Farmers Market. It’s currently once a month in Southside. That’s where we sell food. We also invite other BIPOC vendors. All vendors are local business owners of color in the area. That is EBT accessible.
We’re part of two additional EBT related programs. One is the Double Dollar. So if you spend $20 of your EBT, you get another $20 specifically for fresh fruits and vegetables to spend at the farmers market. We’re also part of a prescription program where people can be prescribed fresh fruits and vegetables from their doctor and then come to our farmers market and access that for free. So while we’re saying that this is how we sell produce, it’s also included in that approximately 25% of the food that we’re selling, that includes a lot of free food access as well. That’s kind of one of our most public programs.
We encourage everyone from all over the Asheville area to come and support the market and buy from us and from other BIPOC vendors. It’s really fun. The farmers market is really fun. It feels like a family reunion in many ways. Because it’s all BIPOC vendors, it has a very different feel and vibe than other farmers markets in the area, which are very predominantly white.
Another one of our programs that our food goes to is the veggie box program, which is free food delivery. So as I was talking about that vehicle access can be a barrier to food access, ability can also be an a barrier, right? If we have many elders in the neighborhood, if we have disabled folks, it’s another barrier to food access, as well as time access. That is a barrier. So for families, especially families with young kids and all that. So one of the things that we do is our veggie box program, it runs for 20 weeks of the year. And that’s through our busiest growing season, through spring, summer, and early fall. That is essentially a free CSA box that is being delivered to BIPOC households.
Last year, we did 50 boxes a week. So 50 boxes a week are getting delivered to BIPOC families. We focused that on the Southside neighborhood, though we do have some folks who live in public housing not in Southside. We do have some BIPOC folks who live outside of Southside. Many of the folks we are focused on is providing food in Southside. But again, we are expansive in that in trying to make sure that everyone has food access, because everyone deserves food access.
Then on the farm, we do education and different ways to connect with people. In addition to being about food access, we focus on community healing and community connection. So many of us as Black and brown people have had our relationships with land severely damaged by colonization in many different ways. We believe in connecting with the land and healing with the land.
So there’s many different ways that we do that. We have monthly community potlucks where anyone can come and just hang out.
That’s the fourth Sunday of every month, we just have a community meal. And that’s on the farm. That’s where we’ll be harvesting some food and cooking something but also just coming together. Our BIPOC-only workshop series and garden days and that’s for people of all ages. It’s very intergenerational. We’ve had teenagers and kids all the way through elders. That’s specifically for people of color. That’s just a time to come together heal, relax, experience joy.
In that space, we also have workshops. We’ve done a series of herbal medicine making workshops with Ember who is one of our leadership team members. She’s a Black and indigenous herbalist and healer. And she’s very, very experienced, and she’s led a really beautiful series and she will continue to lead a very beautiful series of workshops using herbs from our farm. Things like herb identification walks, salve making, we did a fire cider are making class and. We want to do soap making and other things. Incense making is one we did last year. So a whole variety of things, both in terms of physical wellness and spiritual and emotional wellness.
Of course, we also do youth education. It’s really important that we’re connecting with young people. That has looked at a ton of different ways. That can be anything from tours, just giving a tour to a youth group, to having multi week programming for kids that are in youth programs in the neighborhood. We’re also right next door to a preschool. There’s a chain link fence that separates us from a preschool playground. That’s typically age three to five, and they are seeing the farm and interacting with us as the farmers every day. My wash station is right up against their fence, so they’re always there asking what I’m doing and I’m showing them different vegetables as I’m washing them for the free fridge and talking to them about different insects that we’re seeing or different things that are in season. They come over to the farm too and do taste tours and different things that like three to five year olds have the attention span for. That’s really fun and plenty of those families also access the free fridge because they’re coming to pick up their kids and it’s a great time to just pick up some fresh greens or whatever from our free fridge that’s on the farm.
We’ve also done youth programs through high school. We have involvement with the Grant Center, which is a community center right down the street. We’ve also been involved with the Eddington Center, which is the Housing Authority-owned center that’s right next to the farm. So through those we’ve been involved with after school programs and summer programs there teaching kids about how to harvest fruit, how to plant food, how to cook foods that we’re growing, and teaching about environmental science and nutrition, all kinds of things. Working with kids is really fun and chaotic and it’s really, really important to us.
That’s been something that I have done a lot of, but as the main farmer and land steward of that plot, it’s something that, as our production has increased over the last few years, I haven’t been able to do as much of as I want. It’s something that we’re actually hiring another position for this year. We’ve identified another Black farmer, herbalist, and educator who is going to be taking on even more youth education, because that’s really important to us and it’s really important to the community as well.
TFSR: Yeah, that’s awesome. There’s so much there.
I have a couple of follow up questions. First up when you’re using the term BIPOC, there might be a lot of people who don’t know that term, and it’s also used by different people differently. So you could give a working definition that’d be helpful.
CM: Yes, BIPOC, being Black, indigenous, and people of color. We use it to include all people of color, but to highlight Black and indigenous people who have been most historically harmed by colonization in the United States, or in the so-called United States. I would say that the largest group of our community is Black people, because we are in a historically Black neighborhood and because we are black people who are the leaders of Southside Community Farm. So I would say that’s the largest group, but it’s a very diverse group of people who makes up our community, our BIPOC community.
TFSR: Thank you. The other question that I had is… So you’re talking about hiring someone for that educational position, as like an independent community project that’s not getting city funding. Is it just money coming from the farmers market? Are you able to get grants? Where’s that coming from?
CM: So we write grants and we also get funding from crowdsourcing. A significant chunk of the money that we make as a small independent project is just donations from everyday people. That’s a really, really important source of funding for us. Then we write grants. Currently, there’s only two employees. So myself and one other person. So we’re writing all our own grants. That’s not coming from the city. We have gotten some small grants like a $5,000 grant a year from the from Buncombe County, but that’s pretty much all of our public funding in that way. The vast majority of what we’re doing, we are writing grants from private foundations. So yeah, we’re very small, and we’re trying to do a lot, so donations really help. So much of what we do is just funded by the people.
TFSR: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
There’s obviously the material reasons that you talked about for having a farm in a food desert, and all the educational things that y’all are offering is also really awesome. Can you talk specifically about the cultural heritage of Black farming that the project taps into?
CM: Yeah, absolutely. As Black people, we’re connecting with our ancestral legacy as land stewards. For me, as a Black farmer, it’s really important to be recognizing and honoring our history as Black farmers and recognize that, yes, there’s a lot of harm and there’s a lot of people in our community as Black people who associate farming with oppression when it comes to the history of enslavement and sharecropping that we’ve experienced. But it’s so important for us to honor and know that our history as farmers and land stewards goes far, far, far beyond that, that our ancestors or that our African ancestors were brilliant agricultural scientists, were brilliant environmentalists, and were extremely skilled farmers.
That’s why our ancestors were colonized and enslaved by white people and brought to the Americas, because we had agricultural skills that the colonizers did not have. We had skills that they wanted to access, and that when many of our people and our ancestors accessed their freedom, when we got our own freedom from enslavement we did not push it away from the land. That in fact, Black land ownership increased wildly and that many Black people became farmers. The height of Black farmland ownership was between 1910 and 1920. Land has been a place of abundance for Black people, has been a place of wealth, and that is continuously damaged by modern colonization. That peak of Black land ownership and land stewardship has been intentionally destroyed by white supremacy and violence, by land access projects by the US government, such as red-lining and urban renewal and gentrification as it is today.
But because we are an ancestral people of the land, and we do have a really powerful history of land stewardship, we need to heal with the land. The land is also harmed by not having access to loving land stewards, the indigenous people of this land and Black people. It’s very important that we are healing ourselves and our relationships with land, as well as healing the land itself that has been so damaged by colonization. We’re honoring our ancestral ways, and we’re acknowledging that Black brilliance includes a lot of the agricultural history of the United States, everything from CSAs being created by Black people, the modern way that farmers do crop rotation and things like that has all been created by Black people.
That is our that is our legacy, and it’s very important for us to honor and continue that in the ways that we can. Because we are not land owners, because I am not a land owner, we at Southside are not landowners, because in general Black people… of course there are Black land owners—but Black people lack access to the wealth of land ownership in the way that white communities have access to that and more privileged communities have access to that. We have found creative ways to be land stewards. That’s just as important. Land ownership is created through colonization. That’s not our goal.
Our goal is to be land stewards. Our goal is to be in right relationship with the land for the long haul. That’s so important in our community. We are facing a climate crisis, and of course, that looks different in every community. But in south side, we are facing a lot of flooding. We’re right down hill from the largest hospital in western North Carolina, and all the water, because there’s no water filtration because of the massive amounts of concrete, much of that water ends up on Southside Community Farm directly. We have a small plot, but a massive amount of water ends up there. By stewarding soil in healthy ways, we are ensuring the safety of our entire community, because we’re focusing on water infiltration. We’re focusing on healthy ways to move water. That is a way to create climate resilience.
Similarly, because of concrete, because of the amount of concrete, we’re in a heat trap, that neighborhood, and that is something that affects many BIPOC communities and is only going to get worse with climate change because of rising temperatures. So having green spaces, having shaded orchard spaces like we steward and things like that are really important ways to decrease urban heat. We are building soil, and when we’re building soil, what that actually means is taking carbon out of the atmosphere and putting it in the ground.
Nationally, internationally, agriculture is a huge creator of climate change, but it is also one of the few industries that has the power to not only be carbon neutral, carbon zero, but a net negative into atmospheric carbon. And we have the power to take, through plants, take carbon out of the atmosphere and put it into the soil. And that’s an important part of what we’re doing. That creates healthy soil, healthy ecosystems, and healthy people. So this is an international movement of land stewardship, but in our little city, in our little neighborhood, we get to be a part of that. And that’s really important.
It’s really important for us to have that lens of ecological justice around that, that racial justice is so deeply tied with environmental justice, and through stewarding land, we get to be part of creating not only food access but access to healthy environments. We’re creating safety for our neighborhood, and we’re creating climate resilience.
TFSR: Great answer. I decided to reach out because I had been hearing about the project, that the Community Farm, was under danger of being displaced by the city of Asheville Housing Authority. Can you talk a little bit about what’s been happening and what pressures have been brought to bear?
CM: So in early April, we found out, as the farm, that there had been a resolution written by the Housing Authority of the city of Asheville to dismantle Southside Community Farm. It hasn’t been passed yet. The board of the Housing Authority is the entity that will vote on that. So they could vote on it. They could also choose to throw it out and not vote on it at all. But in early April, we learned that they had written this resolution. We were really surprised because they had never talked to us. There was never a conversation beforehand about asking us what are the benefits of the farm? What does the farm do? How does the farm interact with Housing Authority land and with public housing? There was no conversation, unfortunately, and a resolution was written by Monique Pierre who is the president and CEO of the Housing Authority of the city of Asheville.
As far as I know, I believe that Monique Pierre did visit the farm once about a year ago when she moved to Asheville. But we’ve not been in conversation. So it’s been super concerning for us. The resolution states that the farm does not significantly enough impact public housing or benefit public housing. It states that the farm has created a vermin problem for the next door building that the Housing Authority owns. And it states that the Housing Authority would like to replace the farm with a youth play area. So those are kind of the three things we have to go on.
Right off the bat, we know that there are significant impacts of this farm. That a ton of people access food there, but also that youth education is a big component and that that is something that many of the youth that are involved do live in public housing. We know that even indirectly, when I’m talking about climate resilience in terms of water and heat, we know that having this as a green space does affect everyone in the neighborhood. We know that people’s mental health is extremely benefited by having beautiful green spaces. We know that the farm is used as a public park space. So those are just a few of the many ways that we are significantly impacting the neighborhood, including public housing.
Then there’s the vermin problem, which is a little bit bizarre, because typically farms do not attract vermin like cockroaches or rats or anything like that. If they do, it’s typically because of animal feed. So it’s kind of a misconception that farms lead to rat problems, especially for us because we don’t have animals. We certainly have groundhogs that come to the farm, but those are not necessarily the kind of vermin that they’re talking about. Whereas we know that that food scraps and things like garbage do attract rats, and things and there are some large constantly open dumpsters right between the farm and the building that are maintained by the Housing Authority that are much more likely candidate for vermin problems than the farm itself. So I question the reality of that one.
Then in terms of creating a play space, that’s the housing authorities goal with this space. Of course, we’re not against kids having access to play spaces. Of course, we’re all for kids playing outside. That’s what we’re all about, right? We want people you including kids to be connecting with land and connecting with the outdoors. But it doesn’t make sense to eliminate one community resource to create that. Currently, there is a playground across the street at Herb Watts park that was created specifically after the playground that was behind the Eddington center was no longer functioning in any way. That was created specifically to replace that playground space. So there is a playground space that is very close by. It’s less than 0.2 miles, I can’t quite remember. But it’s right across the street. It’s a two minute walk.
There are basketball courts in the building of the Eddington Center, which is where these youth programs are happening. There is a side yard that they use to play in. Of course, the farm is also a place of youth play and learning. We’ve partnered with youth groups in that center, historically, many times to bring youth education to those programs and to the kids who live in the neighborhood and who live in public housing. So it was really surprising for us to see that and to see the statement that we do not significantly enough support the neighborhood when that’s what we’ve been doing and we were created by Black community residents specifically for that purpose and have been doing it for 10 years.
So of course, when we saw this, the first thing that we did was reach out to the Housing Authority, to their board and CEO. When we did not hear back after a minute, we were sharing it. Of course, it was already public, this is a resolution. That’s something that’s public, and so people were finding out about it and we were letting our community know that this was potentially happening. We’ve received a massive amount of public support.
We had a petition online go up that has had 3,000 signatures in support of keeping the farm. We’ve had hundreds of people write letters of support for the farm and many organizations write letters of support. We had over 200 people show up to the last Housing Authority Board Meeting to speak and to be in support of Southside Community Farm. So as a community project that has existed for 10 years, we’ve done what we said we were doing in terms of building community. We do have a really beautiful and really powerful community of people who have been affected by Southside Community Farm and who love it and really value the space and want to see it continue.
We’re hoping to be in deeper communication with the Housing Authority. We have had a really hard time getting in contact with them. Our first time being in any communication face to face with most of them was at their last board meeting where we had over 200 people show up in support of the farm. But we will be able to meet with the CEO very soon. So I’m hoping that goes well. I’m hoping that we can save this really important space because the Southside neighborhood deserves access to more resources, right? This doesn’t have to be an either/or. Is there going to be a playground? Or is there going to be a farm? We need access to more things. Right? Of course, we want to keep the farm and of course we want more playground space for kids in the neighborhood. There’s room for both. I think that’s really, really important, that there’s room for both.
But, the piece of land that we have been stewarding for 10 years should not be removed, and a farm cannot be move, because a farm is the soil itself. As I’ve been talking about, soil building is really important. We’ve been building soil, we’ve been putting carbon into the soil, and building a healthy soil is something that takes many years to create. So we cannot simply move our farm to another plot. That’s starting over. That’s creating a new farm. The amount of wealth that we’ve created in both soil and in infrastructure on the farm is really, really important. It deserves to stay and be part of the Southside neighborhood.
TFSR: So if Resolution 2024-11, which is what the resolution that HACA is debating or discussing right now, if it passes… This is kind of a different spin on what I was going to ask, but with the way that the city has been going, there’s been really rapid development and redevelopment of neighborhoods, building of hotels, building of expensive apartment complexes—snd this is just asking for speculation. If you don’t want to [answer], that’s fine—but do you think that there’s any possibility that displacing the farm and building a park, could that open up the other play space or park space for development sale by HACA? There’s nothing that you’ve heard about, right?
CM: No, I don’t think so. I don’t think that there’s any plan for that specifically. But it is important to look at this in the context of our city, a city that is gentrifying, a city that continuously, historically and is currently continuing to displace Black community. So it’s really important to look at that and see Southside Community Farm as one of the places of resistance to that in some ways. It’s important to preserve that.
Asheville is also a city that at least has started to have conversations about what reparations looks like. How do we look at repair of past harms? Well, current harms are still happening, right? That should be the first thing is to stop current harms. Taking away a farm that provides access to food, provides access to land, and provides access to education, and could provide even more access to education. Right now we’re in the process of expanding and we want to continue growing and creating more access to education for youth and people of all ages. So taking that away, when that is something that is actually Black-led and community-led, would be such a shame in a community in a city that is having conversations and starting to kind of get an understanding of what reparations means.
TFSR: So I guess, closing up, for folks that want to get involved in supporting the continued existence of the farm and helping it stay put, and maybe getting their hands dirty, so to speak—you’ve already mentioned that there’s been a petition that’s been going around that people at least from the community have shown up to the HACA meetings—but what ways are there that you would find helpful for different people in the community to show up?
CM: Sure, there’s many ways. So you can go to SouthsideCommunityGarden.org. That is our website. There you will find many ways. There is a petition, anyone can sign that to help preserve the farm. There’s guidelines for how to write a letter of support as a group or as an organization. Those can be very helpful. Of course, there’s donations. We are funded significantly by just everyday people. So if you go to our website, SouthsideCommunityGarden.org, send us a donation, send us $5 if that’s what you can give. That could be a meal for someone. That could be a meal that’s going into the free fridges.
There’s also options to volunteer. We have a volunteer signup form on our website. People can learn about how to actually physically get their hands dirty on the farm. A lot of our volunteers are not actually on the farm, but are part of the free grocery program. The place that we access the most volunteers is our free grocery program. So we need people to be checking on the free fridges and pantries, cleaning the free fridges and pantries, accessing food. We are a food hub, we’re not just a farm. So we have folks who are going to local bakeries and picking up bagels, let’s say, and bagging them up into individual portions and putting them in the fridge. That’s a really important way that we keep the farm functioning.
Right now, where my energy and much of the leadership of Southside Community Farm, a lot of our energy is going into preserving the farm and saving the farm. We do need more support than usual in terms of keeping up with our usual programming of free food access, of keeping a whole farm running, and all these things. So there’s lots of ways to get involved and all of those can be found on our website. We’re also on social media: @SouthsideCommunityFarm on Instagram and TikTok. There’s some ways that folks can plug in and get more information about what we do and what we need.
TFSR: I really hope this doesn’t happen, but if the decision, if the resolution gets passed, are you pursuing lawyers who could help with that sort of thing? Is that something you feel you already have access to and don’t want to respond to right now?
CM: I think that’s something that I don’t want to respond to necessarily. What I will say is that ultimately, what Southside Community Farm needs is permanent access to land. We’d like that to be the land that we’re on, that we’ve built, and that we’ve put so much wealth and energy into for 10 years. That is our need. If there’s someone who is ready to give land back, if there’s one who’s ready to give land as reparation, that’s something that we would be interested in too. We are ready to talk about that. We are ready to talk about reparations with the city in other ways, too. But ultimately, we are landless farmers who have put an immense amount of energy time and wealth into this piece of land, and we are in a precarious position because are, we as a Black community don’t have the same privilege and access to wealth as some other communities. Ultimately, what will solve that problem, at least for us, is getting access to permanent land.
TFSR: And specific land. If you want me to cut that question so that that conversation doesn’t even happen in here, that’s perfectly fine with me.
CM: Yeah, I think it’s fine. I think I’m okay with my answer. I’m just not going to talk about those strategies necessarily other than that.
TFSR: Well, thank you so much for having this conversation and for the work that you all do. I feel honored to learn about this project in town that I wasn’t all that familiar with. I had just heard about heard about it. But yeah, I hope that this can be helpful and I wish you luck.
CM: Yeah. Thank you so much. Thanks for having me. Thanks for like helping us share our story.
TFSR: Is there anything that I didn’t ask about that is occurring? Do you have any other statements you want to make at the end?
CM: I guess the other thing I would say is that I am really excited and hopeful for the future of Southside Community Farm. Before we learned about this resolution, we have been working on creating some really beautiful things for our community. We’ve been working on expanding our youth education, we’ve been building community as always, and we’ve also been in the process of development of a new program of a mobile farmers market to bring food to people more and make food even more accessible in the neighborhood. So yes, this is really a scary time for the farm and a time of a lot of uncertainty, but I also feel really hopeful for what we have created and what we’re going to create in the future.
TFSR: Cool. Thanks a lot.
CM: Yeah. Thank you.