The trust owns at least 150 acres, which serve as fertile training ground for future Black farmers

By Tiana Woodard

PETERSURG – Across from Pleasants Lane Elementary School, a gift for the city’s past, present, and future is sprouting for the season.

Farmer Tyrone Cherry III points out Mama Cherry’s Reading Garden, where kids can grab a book and a rosemary leaf to boost their memory. The Khulu Kev Medicine Maze includes the healing powers of mountain and sweet mint, tarragon, and sage. Papa Kelley’s Vegetable Garden offers collards, tomatoes, and Chinese cabbage, the latter of which leaves a fresh tinge on the tongue.

Here, Cherry said, “we’ve built an altar for our ancestors.”

These crops come from the Petersburg Oasis Youth Farm, a garden sprouting from the rustic Tri-Cities area. Quarter-acre farms like it are emerging across the region through the Central Virginia Agrarian Commons, or CVAAC, a land trust aimed at preserving acres for BIPOC farmers.

Formed in 2020, the CVAAC is part of a small but growing movement for BIPOC land tenure and stewardship across the country. 

So far, the trust owns roughly 150 acres: five in Petersburg; five in Richmond; 60 at a historic US Colored Troops battle site in Varina; and at least 80 in Amelia County, donated by trust secretary Callie Walker. The Petersburg and Richmond acres sit in USDA-designated food deserts, low-income census tracts where a large share of residents live far from a supermarket or large grocery store.

“We’re doing the work of not only increasing access to healthy food, but also creating space for beginning farmers to have access to land,” said Duron Chavis, chairperson of the CVAAC. “It’s ever evolving.”

Vocational agriculture opportunities can be hard to come by, in a market where land is expensive and developers often see more market value in building housing. This leaves many incoming farmers hopping between land parcels, hoping they won’t be bought out again. And in an industry already lacking diversity, these uncertainties make it hard to shepherd America’s future Black farmers.

“The only new farmers that I see getting farmland and then making a go of it are those coming in with other forms of wealth,” said CVAAC Treasurer Nikki D’Adamo-Damery. “This is an alternative, a permanently affordable structure for farming that removes cost” from the equation.

The CVAAC focuses on giving farmers stability, offering up to 99-year leases. Rent is negotiable, with some lessees providing services in lieu of payments. But above all, Chavis said, “we want to build a system that the community controls.”

For decades, land has been falling from Black farmers’ grasp at an alarming rate. Between 1910 and 1997, Black farmland ownership plummeted 90 percent due to a mix of factors: USDA loan discrimination, heirs’ property laws, and anti-Black violence, among others. According to one 2022 report, this collective loss cost the Black community $326 billion.

With so much land lost over time, Richmond resident Stacia Tarver and several others interviewed for this story said their intergenerational relationships to agriculture were severed. 

Tarver grew up in Portland, Oregon, the granddaughter of a Louisiana man who gave up his rural upbringing for West Coast opportunities.

Over time, the trauma her elders endured in the Deep South became too much to bear, she said. “Many of their kids and grandkids had to move to the city to make better lives.”

Since 1920, the number of Black farmers has dropped from just under a million to roughly 47,000. Black Virginian farmers make up just three percent of that number. 

The parcels the CVAAC owns not only hold space for Black farmers, but also incubator programs tailored at funneling more community members into the trade. Duron Chavis, the trust’s chairperson and founder of Happily Natural Day in Richmond, runs a 12-week Central Virginia Urban Farmer Fellowship from acres secured through the CVAAC.

Cherry, of the Petersburg Oasis Youth Farm, turned his front yard into 21 raised garden beds, and contributed his sowing skills at different community gardens around the city. But school administrators would lose interest. Or crops kept getting razed by new development.

“The land could’ve been used for the community’s growth, not just somebody’s economic growth,” Cherry said. 

But Cherry followed Chavis’s urban agriculture work closely and completed the 12-week fellowship. This opportunity opened the door to a farming assistant role on a five-acre farm at 535 Beech Street. But then, the land went up for sale. 

Through the combined efforts of Chavis and Cherry, the CVAAC purchased the farm. It’s now where Cherry operates the Petersburg Oasis Youth Farm today.

Cherry said the CVAAC’s stability allowed him to pursue farming full-time, all the while homeschooling four children. With security, Cherry said, he has taken his work to a whole other level.

“I’m not just willing to put my resources into the work,” Cherry said. “Now, I’m willing to put in my spirit, my soul.”

In Richmond, Stacia Tarver is currently in the farming fellowship and attends training twice a week at the Sankofa Community Orchard, which is also part of the CVAAC trust. She’s only a few weeks into the program, but she says she’s reaped benefits she hopes to apply to her community wellness brand, Bronzd Beauty. And more personally, Tarver believes the opportunity has allowed her to rebuild a relationship with nature, unaffected by the pain of the past.

“It’s very, very, very fertile ground for you to grow in every single way,” Tarver said. 

But there are still challenges that the trust must overcome. Sarah Morton, of Cattle Run Farm LLC in Ruckersville, runs a third-generation, Black-owned farm with her family. She supports the CVAAC’s vision, but cautioned that people managing these trusts must ensure they’re pairing long-term leases with pathways to farm ownership, along with financial literacy on estate planning and tax management for long-term stewardship.

“It’s a fine line,” Morton said. “We have to be mindful that we don’t become sharecroppers for another plantation.”

CVAAC board member Michael Carter Jr., of the Carter Farms in Unionville, acknowledged he’s not the biggest fan of trusts. But he knows that family circumstances like his – a fifth generation Black-operated farm – are rare in America. 

Trusts like CVAAC are a step in the right direction, he said, so incoming producers can get their hands dirty and gain skills to own acres elsewhere if they see fit.

“This is the future for young farmers who didn’t have the same privileges and opportunities as me, “ Carter said. 

Tarver agreed. For Black people who are interested in agriculture but have no idea how to start, she said, opportunities such as the CVAAC are sometimes
 the only option.

“When all the odds are stacked against you, this helps level the playing field,” Tarver said. “One person can reach their hand back, grab another person up, and help us get what was rightfully ours.”

As Cherry guided a reporter through the Petersburg farm, he was careful to use “we” rather than “I” when describing the space. “Bee steward” instead of “beekeeper.” Language that emphasized community over ego. 

That’s why community land trusts like the CVAAC resonate, he said. To Cherry, land is for everyone – and everything — to share. 

“We’re here to steward this land to serve the community that was here before us, the community that’s here now, and the community that will be here in the future,” Cherry said.

There are still 96 more years on the Petersburg Oasis Youth Farm’s lease. Ample time, Cherry said, to get the soil prepped for another aspiring farmer looking for somewhere to cultivate their dreams.