Growing Community Through Farming

Access to infrastructure

Farm Campus addresses the obstacles faced by beginning farmers and food entrepreneurs by offering access to equipment and supplies to help them thrive. There are plans for tool and equipment sharing by farmers farming on the campus along with access to targeted equipment for farmers off the campus, similar to the existing Mobile Poultry Processing Program. A facility for cold and dry storage, processing space, and commercial kitchen access for value added production (i.e.turning tomatoes into salsa) is part of the larger vision for the Farm Campus.

“Farm Campus has the potential to close some equity gaps by enabling access to land, infrastructure, and information all in one spot.” — Nicole Connelly, Toad Hill  Farm

Incubator Farms

An incubator farm will train and support the next generation of sustainable urban farmers by providing land, access to equipment, and education for multiple new and beginning farmers at Farm Campus. The incubator farm will have areas for on-farm demonstrations of small and urban-scale agriculture techniques, sustainable intensification and diversification, regenerative agriculture practices, and controlled-environment and precision agriculture.

Post Harvest Education

A post-harvest food education facility will serve incubator farmers on farm campus and potentially other local farmers. The facility will offer cold storage and aggregation space to facilitate aggregation, storage, processing, distribution, and marketing, The facility would address documented shortages of cold storage and aggregation space in our area. 

Shared Kitchen and Meeting Space

A value-added production facility will provide a shared kitchen/commissary and meeting space to enable producers, entrepreneurs, and community members to develop skills in value-added agricultural production, such as turning bruised tomatos into salsa with a longer shelf life for sales.

It is hoped that the facility willplans to include multiple commercial kitchens to help address the shortage of commercial kitchen access in our region and could serve food entrepreneurs as well as farmers.

Healing Garden

A healing garden will provide Durham residents with opportunities to connect with the land – and the plants and animals that live on it. Opportunities for therapeutic horticulture will be offered, in addition to offering a space for environmental and ecological education. This space will be open to all in Durham county, not just those involved in the farm campus, and will have an emphasis on flowers for pollinators, culinary and medicinal herbs, and ornamental plants.

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