Why this farm.

I'm an accidental farmer. I'm not accidental about my community.

Two decades in schools, and five acres was never the plan. But the land was sitting right there behind Luther J. Price Middle School, and it turns out the questions I'd been carrying around in classrooms don't stop at the edge of a field. (I also now know an unreasonable amount about okra. Nobody warned me.)

So here's the question I keep asking: what does it actually take for a neighborhood to be well?

Not fed. Well.

People call this a food desert. A desert is something that just happens, and this did not just happen. I-85 and I-75 come together and run straight through two of the oldest Black neighborhoods in Atlanta. Every time the city has needed room, it has come and taken it from here. That isn't weather. That's a choice somebody made, and choices can get made differently.

When folks show up in a neighborhood like this one, they mostly show up talking about what's missing. I'd rather ask what's already here; who's already doing this well; what's worth building on.

That's a big part of why this is a farm and not a program. Programs leave. And when a program leaves, everybody's standing around waiting on the next one. Land doesn't do that.

Food changes how a kid grows, and a kid who misses a window early spends years trying to catch it back up; it isn't addition, it's multiplication. Money works the same way. Dollars that leave a neighborhood don't wander back on their own. Both of those things stack, over a childhood, and then over a whole generation.

A farm that stays put for decades is standing in both of those currents at once. Same food, same kids, year after year. Same dollars moving down the same blocks instead of out of them. That's a keystone in the generational health and wealth of a community.

So we decided to build that keystone.

The farm can be more than what comes out of the ground. It could be a space where neighbors show up to connect, be outside, learn, grow, and just be.

This farm is years of work by a lot of hands, and most of those hands got here before I did. Soil isn't good by accident.

My grandmother used to say leave it better than ya got it. My hope is that's what I'll do.

Mark Boswell
Founder, South Atlanta Farms

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