Growing Community

River Johnson | Breaking Barriers

River Johnson was born into a military family. When she was 12 years old, her family moved to Mad River Township, outside of Dayton. It was there that Johnson developed an appreciation for nature, roaming the countryside near her home as a child.

She recalls that her family was one of the first Black families to integrate the community.

“I remember moving there and being confronted with racism,” Johnson says. “When we moved there, they actually shot out our window.”

In the face of that racism, Johnson’s family stayed in the community, and her mother grew a vegetable garden, not so much because she loved to garden, but because she loved to cook.

Johnson herself worked in the corporate sector before finding her calling in working with the earth. While getting her master’s degree at Antioch University Midwest, she studied different types of food systems, such as market gardens, permaculture, and those using biodynamic frameworks and organic farming methods.

“I started working with several community gardens and community centers, helping to establish perma-culture gardening, Indigenous gardening methods, and teaching and doing little workshops,” Johnson says.

BIPOC farmers in particular, she says, face a lack of money and safety, making it challenging to grow in the regenerative farming space. Today Johnson is developing a garden in a historically underserved community in West Dayton. There, she grows primarily native plants, trees and shrubs. She uses gourds she grows as canvases to paint on. And she collects seeds from and propagates more than 20 species of native plants—the beginnings of her dream of a future native plant nursery.

“I want to have my business there,” Johnson says. “I want it to be a demonstration of what a pollinator garden looks like, what wildlife habitat looks like, and what a regenerative household can look like in an urban environment.”

Patty Allen | Growing a Network

Patty Allen’s connection to farming and advocacy goes back several generations. Allen, the program manager of the BIPOC Food and Farming Network, grew up in Dayton, about 230 miles from an all-Black farming settlement called Stringtown. In the 1860s, her great, great, great grandparents were part of a group of four or five families that co-founded Stringtown in Champaign County, Illinois. By 1905, other Black farmers and businessmen had created a “colored business cooperative,” focused on selling groceries.

Allen remembers receiving her first garden plot when she was about 10 years old, launching a lifelong interest in growing food and, later, food justice. She took a break from a career in journalism and public relations to travel to Europe, where she learned about organic farming in Oxfordshire, England. In 2018, she took a farm apprenticeship in Brewster, New York, where she worked hands on raising goats, chickens and vegetable crops alongside a group of nuns.

“I wanted to do something that was growing, nurturing, making a difference in the world,” Allen says.

In 2022 she returned to Ohio to run what was then known as the BIPOC Farming Network as a program under a local environmental organization called Agraria Center for Regenerative Practice. When that organization developed financial issues in 2023, she took the program independent, determined that it should continue, and later changed the name to reflect its broader mission.

Today the BIPOC Food and Farming Network is supported by grants from several organizations, including Hall Hunger Initiative, The Nature Conservancy, Central State University Extension, the Sustainable Agricultural Research and Education program, and its key sponsor, The 365 Project—a local community organization that promotes African American heritage, Black culture and racial equity.

Among its initiatives is an annual Black farming conference as well as regular meetings on farming topics and events attended by alumni of a former fellowship program under Agraria that was focused on regenerative farming. In 2023 the group launched a policy fellowship designed to educate farmers about agricultural laws and policies at the local, state and federal levels.

Sharifa Tomlinson | Creating a Legacy

“I never knew I could be a farmer,” says Sharifa Tomlinson. Born in 1960 and raised by two schoolteachers in Massachusetts, Tomlinson never saw agriculture as an option. “At that time, at my age, Black women—we could be nurses, we could be teachers, we could be social workers. If we were really good, we could be doctors, lawyers. No one ever said there were other things, too.”

Today, she describes herself as a “woods womyn,” as well as a registered nurse, doula and community educator. She helped run the 2023 Black Farming Conference after previously participating in the Regenerative Farmer Fellowship, where she learned regenerative agriculture techniques.

In 2017, Tomlinson founded a 12-acre urban sanctuary near Dayton that she calls ARROWROCK FARM, becoming a full-time farmer in 2023. She’s building it into a cooperative urban market for farmers of color and a demonstration farm, complete with housing for those learning about regenerative farming on the property. She recently expanded her poultry farming operations, rapidly growing from 30 chickens to 1,000.

She sells her produce and butchered chickens to an Ohio program that distributes them to food banks and pantries. “That’s a big deal to me. I’m able to give out sustainable food that’s locally sourced,” Tomlinson says. “It’s right from here, and it’s going to our community in the Miami Valley.”

Tomlinson wants to encourage people in her generation to grow wealth generationally—through passing land to family, or to fellow BIPOC growers—“to make sure that people in my generation know to attempt to leave their land to people in the future generation that will keep on farming it.

“If you are a farmer now, or if you have land acreage and want to do something with it, don’t always look at your family,” she says. “Yes, give something to your family, but look at other BIPOC farmers that might want to carry that legacy on, even if they don’t carry your name.”

Gregory Muhammad | Feeding a Community

Gregory Muhammad grew up gardening.

“My father used to always have a garden in our yard,” says Muhammad, who was raised in Dayton. “And I always planted something myself, even growing up, at five, six, seven—I don’t know how old [I was when] I started.”

By the time he became a student at Tuskegee University in the 1970s, Muhammad was already interested in farming. Today the university is one of 107 remaining historically Black colleges and universities in the United States. “I started learning about health and nutrition as well as Black history” there, he says.

A longtime educator, Muhammad has taught people how to garden and has provided fresh food to people living in food deserts. He operates a 4-acre farm in Dayton called Oasis.

“This year we had corn, okra, green beans, red potatoes, lettuce," he says. "I planted some raspberry bushes last year, so we got quite a few raspberries. I had some watermelon and yellow squash.”

Muhammad sells the crops he grows at local farmers markets and festivals. He also works as the garden manager for the Dayton men’s shelter St. Vincent de Paul, and the produce grown there is used in the homeless shelter’s food kitchen.

Muhammad’s connections through the BIPOC Food and Farming Network have helped him feel less alone as a Black farmer. It’s been encouraging, he says, “just to know there are other people who want to farm or garden or recognize the need for healthy organically grown foods and vegetables, to know that they are there.”

Anita Armstead | Reconnecting to Heritage

“I’ve been able to reconnect with the land and my heritage in a way I could not have imagined even just two short years earlier,” says Anita Armstead.

Armstead, a single mother of three children, including a niece and nephew, gravitated to farming through “happenstance,” she says. “I attended a lecture on food sovereignty, and the need for that in the Black community, the need for Black farms. I prayed and asked God how I could help.” In 2021 a community member who wanted to see their land used to grow food allowed Armstead to begin farming their 3.5-acre plot of land in a quiet neighborhood of Dayton. Two years later, Armstead bought the land outright. She named it Eden’s Harvest.

Farming is a part of Armstead’s ministry. “I feel that the land is a gift for us. It’s an opportunity for us to not only connect with our maker, but to actually connect with ourselves.” Armstead grows zucchini, squash, beets, cabbage, broccolini, lettuce, tomatoes and peppers, in addition to amaranth, wildflowers and sunflowers.

People in her neighborhood are able not only to gather food from her farm, she says, “but they can also learn how to grow food themselves.

“In the future, our goal is to grow more culturally appropriate foods that really hold space for the cultural practices of our community as BIPOC people,” Armstead says. “Foods like collard greens, and dark leafy greens, and okra, potatoes, beans and watermelon.”

She works with a Dayton-based food truck called Food for the Journey, which prepares hot meals for the community. “As we expand, we are definitely looking for other ways to distribute and partner with work that’s already being done in the community to increase food access,” says Armstead.

Now, Armstead wants to do even more. In 2023 she joined the BIPOC Food and Farming Network’s policy fellowship to learn about agricultural laws and how to advocate for policy change.

The network, she says, has also connected her with people of many different experience levels who are all working to change the food system in some meaningful way.

“For me, that has been beneficial because not only do I get to see through others where I can go, but it also allows me to see where I’ve been,” she says.