Growing Community Through Farming

Opportunity

Farm Campus presents a potentially transformative opportunity for individuals to engage in agriculture and horticulture and build a business while addressing systemic barriers. By offering education aimed at fostering both self-reliance and community collaboration, the campus can work to expand opportunities for individuals and a community of growers who previously lacked access to farming or land ownership. There is a further opportunity to build generational wealth and bring newer people into the field of farming, particularly those who identify as black, indigenous, and people of color, along with veterans, immigrants and refugees, the formerly incarcerated, and others. The campus also facilitates access to fresh food within the community, addressing food insecurity while nurturing the local supply chain.

“What could be so powerful about a farm campus is enabling younger generations to have access; helping the younger generation to have examples is important to make sure that the sort of pipeline of folks who are genuinely interested in farming continues to be established.” — 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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