Deep Roots Farm – Cherie Jzar

0:00:22	Size of farm
0:00:36	How Deep Roots Community Planning Solutions (CPS) Farm started
0:04:23	Homesteading and values
0:06:24	Type of crops and animals on the farm
0:07:23	A typical day on the farm
0:08:08	Managing a school farm
0:09:32	Farm to School program
0:11:35	Regenerative farming
0:13:27	Effects of climate change
0:14:49	Visibility of Black urban farmers
0:17:29	Community events at the farm
0:19:36	Grower’s Network
0:20:49	Noninsured Crop Disaster Assistance Program (NAP)
0:21:58	USDA Good Agriculture Practices (GAP) Program
0:24:15	Labor
0:26:29	Family involved on the farm
0:28:14	Growing as heritage
0:29:53	Finding her passion
0:31:55	Wanting to share with her community
0:33:36	The joy of seeing others connect to the farm
0:34:22	Summer camp students
0:36:19	Food equity and access to healthy food
0:39:50	Community Planning Solutions
0:42:06	Development and food access
0:44:10	Younger people interested in growing
0:45:42	Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) program
0:46:52	Inspired by Booker T. Whatley
0:49:06	Partnering with Carolina Farms Fund to purchase a 44-acre farm in Monroe
0:50:36	Advice for young farmers

Sekiya Billman
Okay. This is Sekiya Billman interviewing Cherie Jzar, born in 1976. It is November 13, 2024 and we are at Deep Roots CPS Farm in Charlotte, North Carolina. Today we will explore working on an urban farm. How large is your farm?

Cherie Jzar
So this current site is seven acres. Well, a little shy of seven acres, but we just say seven acres. Yeah.

Sekiya Billman
And what is the history of this farm?

Cherie Jzar
So, Deep Roots, CPS Farm. CPS stands for Community Planning Solutions. We formalized our farm in 2019 in October, actually October the third, I remember, our farm business. We first started, before formalizing the business, as a homestead. We were homesteaders. We lived about fifteen minutes away from where this current farm site is, and what we would call a starter home community in Charlotte, we lived on less than an eighth of an acre, and we started growing our own food, meaning vegetables and fruits, and we had some chickens and bees for our family. We have five children. So, I’m married to Wisdom. We have five children. So, we started growing our own food for our family, and that started in probably around 2005, and we got really good with growing. And so, we were growing in such abundance that we were learning skills like canning and preserving and drying, and we were sharing with our community. And then we started to think, man, we’re so good with doing this. Perhaps there’s a business opportunity here. So, we started to explore and checking out area farms, and in 2017 we got really serious about, yeah, we want to do this. And so, we started to think about what it would even look like, and how we would sell our produce and then in 2019 we formalized. But when we did formalize our business, we noticed really quickly we needed more space in which to grow. We needed more land. And so, instead of finding one plot of land, because Charlotte’s market is really hot in terms of real estate cost, we reached out to our social network, our friends, connections, to say, hey, you got any space that’s just, you know, not being properly utilized or not utilized for growing, and that we could and so our network responded really greatly, like more than we anticipated. And so, we had five different plots that we were farming throughout the city of Charlotte, starting in 2019 to the beginning, or the, yeah, the end of 2021, so that’s like two years or so. And it was one in South Charlotte and East Charlotte and Northwest Charlotte. And what happened was, we discovered that development pressure was even changing the minds of our network, and I might sell that little piece of land. So, we kind of felt threatened that we were building this farm business off leased and borrowed land that could be gone in an instant, and we were dedicating our resources and investment and making the soil, cultivating it as much as possible. And so, we decided, no, this is not, it’s not going to work. And so, we said, we need to find a plot of land that we have agency over, that we can build and establish our business. And so that’s how we found this land, which was really great, I mean, a blessing. We found this land and we started farming it in 2022, so that’s sort of like the history (laughs) of how we started in terms of our passion and desire up until now.

Sekiya Billman 04:18
What got you interested in homesteading and then farming?

Cherie Jzar
Yeah, so homesteading was like, it was a deep – we created as a couple. Wisdom and I created value system that we wanted to ensure that we lived and modeled for our children and community. And one of those value systems is to realize that we’re deeply connected to systems right? Systems (laughs) that, good and bad, have an impact on our lives. And one of the basic systems is the food system, so where we were getting our food from and the nutritional value of food, that mattered a lot to us, and (laughs) our local grocery stores weren’t doing it. And then we valued our environment as well, and living in a home and Fescue grass or Bermuda grass and Bradford Pear trees and maintaining that – this just didn’t feel right. It didn’t feel like we were honoring our environment. And so we felt like we wanted more control of where our food came from, and then we wanted to be in harmony, loving on the earth. And so that was a great marriage, and especially for a family of, we have five children, are outside of our home as well as inside of our home, but more mostly the outside, our backyard and front yard became like a biology (laughs) lab or ecology lab, like we were able to grow and learn together with our children in a way that I don’t think we would have been able to do it if we were just in taking, mowing the lawn every three days in the summer or whatever we were doing before, and taking care of Bradford Pear trees. So that’s where it came from.

Sekiya Billman 06:18
What kind of crops do you grow, and I know you have animals on your farm too. Can you tell me about all of that?

Cherie Jzar
Yes. So, we have what we call diverse, diversity of vegetables here. So, we grow root crops like carrots and radishes and potatoes. We also grow leafy greens. So seasonal, seasonally, what’s right now in season and fall is like collard greens and mustard greens, and four different varieties of kale and lettuces. We also do culinary herbs and medicinal herbs. We also raise goat. We raise chicken for eggs and meat, and then we have five hives where we have honey that we extract in the spring and the fall. But bigger than that, the bee, the honeybees, are here to help with pollination.

Sekiya Billman
Can you describe a typical day on the farm for you?

Cherie Jzar
(Laughs) Yeah. So, we start our day by caring for the animals first, making sure everything was okay during the night. And so, we make sure their water is filled. They are rotated on pastures. That’s what we’re doing, pasturing them. And sometimes we give our horse we have, oh, I forgot to say that – we have two horses. We give our horse horses hay, and, you know, make sure all the animals have what they need. And then we’re off to maintaining our fields, meaning we’re either harvesting or planting or we’re doing some general maintenance of the crops that we grow.

Sekiya Billman
What are your farming operations?

Cherie Jzar 08:08
So, you know, Deep Root CPS Farm is not just a farm. It’s an urban agriculture business. So that’s at the so sort of center of what we do, and everything is like an offspring, if you can think about a wheel, and there’s spokes on a wheel. So for our cultivation of agriculture and urban spaces, we do farm management. So right now we are managing a wonderful farm in Gaston County. It’s a Farm to School initiative where the school system wants to have fresh local produce served in the cafeterias in schools in Gaston County, and we, as farmers, farm the land for which they we harvest the produce. Like their thing is they want to have a salad a week, and then they want to have like sides of some sort of vegetable during the week, but to have a salad available to the students, they need to have lettuce and tomatoes and cucumbers and carrots and radishes. So we grow that in spring. We do some cultivation in summer of the tomatoes and cucumbers, but not as much, because students aren’t in school, in spring and then fall, we grow all the leafy greens as well.

Sekiya Billman
Do the students help out?

Cherie Jzar
No. So, what most Farm to School programs have found is, if at the rate that they need the produce they are going then they can’t have it as a purely a, not necessarily education and demonstration, but they can’t have it – they need to have a professional farmer growing the food so that it is actually for increased production, so that it can go into the school’s cafeteria. But however, we just planted a strawberry patch, and that strawberry patch, we put in like 2,000 plants, so there will be a lot of strawberries in spring, and we’re trying to encourage the school system to get the teachers to write curriculum around it. Because if you could think about the students’ likelihood of appreciating a farm is that they not only have to be able to eat the food, but they have to see it grown, and maybe have a chance to plant it or harvest it themselves. So it’s like a triangle, and once they do, then they kind of get a deeper appreciation. But if teachers can do what they do best, and that’s educate, so write a curriculum around maybe strawberries, and then have the students interact with that strawberry, and then when they see it in their meal at lunch, they will – it sort of reinforces the learning that way. So, while we’re the main farmers, and that’s our job as farmers. And it’s, it’s grand that the school system recognizes to be successful, you know, to have, as I think they want to have a thousand pounds of lettuce every week. That’s hard for students to do, (laughs) you know, in addition to all the rest of the things they do. So, but that would be a little bit easier for a farmer to do with the skills of crop planting and then cultivation and harvest. So.

Sekiya Billman 11:32
Do you use regenerative farming techniques here?

Cherie Jzar
Yes, I do, and I should have said that. So yes, we are proud to say that we are a regenerative farm and that we try our best, and I don’t believe that it would work any other way if we didn’t create systems on our farm that supported one another. So, you know, we use all of the bedding that the horses have (laughs) been in in our barn stalls and put that, take that out when we clean our barn stalls, and put that in our compost pile so that we can create fertilization for our fields, right? Any clippings from the fields that don’t make it to market because maybe it’s got a little yellow on it, or too much bitings from the bugs. We actually feed that to our chickens so that they can have some nourishment. So, we try to always have systems in place to sort of support one another, so that we don’t have to bring in external inputs to support the farm. Keeps costs down. It’s just better for the environment that things work in a circular way, and then it’s better for us (laughs) that we can spend more time on farm than off farm, [getting] supplies. We do have feed that we feed our chickens, our meat chickens, just the level of feed that we need and some to our laying hens, but for the most part, things are in a cycle, and we don’t use any chemical herbicides or pesticides. We focus on soil health to ensure that we have the most nutritious and healthiest crop possible.

Sekiya Billman
What changes have you observed in the people involved in agriculture or in the crops themselves?

Cherie Jzar 13:27
So of course, climate change (laughs) is a huge impact. We have high tunnels on our farm, so we grow in field, meaning just exposed, and then we use high tunnels. And I don’t think we would be successful without the high tunnels. It helps us to control the environment, for the for the crops, so we can extend our season. We can start our season earlier. Heavy rain isn’t as impactful to eroding the soil, and we are contemplating right now how many more we want to incorporate in next year’s growing because of how hard it was. Where you have an explosion of pests that come after heavy rains, and, you know, seasonal storms that drop six inches in two minutes. It’s really tough on us. So you know, that’s one of the impacts that we’ve seen and tried to – you know, farmers are really good with being flexible and nimble and trying to figure out, but when it happens over and over again, it can be exhausting. So that’s one of the biggest things in terms of farming as a, in our community, I think seeing a person like me, a woman that’s Black (laughs) that or a family like ours that are a Black family growing and being a for profit business, as we intentionally did that, because we feel like farming is a noble profession. It’s a business that many in our community could possibly be in, right? And we wanted to be that sort of example that you can have a for profit farm that does the right thing by people and the earth, and have the value system that sometimes we are more attracted to a nonprofit for right? So at the center of what we do are people like right? People first. Without people, we wouldn’t have anybody to eat our food (laughs) that we grow right? And so we entered this space because we also knew how important it is to have people who care about you, growing food for the community. And we want to see more people who look like us, who have the same values as us, whether they look like us or not, in this space, because we need more we need more farms in urban spaces. That’s important. It’s important because it makes the community more resilient, and we saw that mostly during the COVID pandemic, where local grocery stores reduced hours and then some weren’t open at all. You know, transportation was shut down and impacted so where our food was coming from, many, many miles away, when those networks didn’t work as they were before, food shortages were there. We were, I think, spending a lot of time answering calls and emails and texts about, do we have eggs and can we provide food for a daycare? Because people just were like, not knowing where they were going to get their food from, but if we had more local, maybe we weren’t one of ten or eleven farms in Mecklenburg County. I’m not exactly sure how many there are that are that are growing food. Then our community can be stronger and more resilient and not dependent on the outside global market to supply the basic thing that we all need is, which is food.

Sekiya Billman 17:24
Can you tell me about all the different ways you involve and invite community to your farm?

Cherie Jzar
So one of the things that was like, the thing that recharged us this year was we offered our first summer camp for youth, ages eight to eighteen, and that was a week-long camp where children came and they learned everything there is about farming, and they got in tune with the environment. And it was very awesome. So we did that, and inviting the youth to come at the very end, the last day of camp, we invited them to host tours with their family. So that was awesome. They actually got a chance to decide who they invited to their special day, the end of camp, and then they toured their own groups around the farm, trying to remember (laughs) all the different systems and the importance and all that. And they did really good. And then we had a meal together, right? So, we had about thirty students, and at that last day, I think I counted something like 125 people. So that was pretty awesome. So we have a camp. We also do farm events. We do our annual or annual farm fest event. So it’s like an open farm day, where we have chef demonstrations, cooking things, cooking meals, or demonstrating how to cook meals from the things that we grow. We do horse rides and have little games, and it’s just a nice, fun time for families and individuals. Then we do farm to table dinners here. We partner with local chefs to host three farm to table dinners during the year, and that gives people a chance to hear about, like our farm. They get to experience the chef talking about how they were motivated or inspired to cook whatever dish they did from the field, and then it gives them a chance to network with one another. Another thing that we do, which I think is important, which is not necessarily bringing people who are customers, but it brings growers together. We have a growers network that we established, and this network is of people who are backyard gardeners, anybody that’s trying to produce and grow something, to very experienced farmers that we meet once a month, the last Sunday of the month. Yeah, and we network and we share and we talk about, you know, our hopes, dreams and aspirations and even troubles that we might have. And then we kind of sort of just build off of each other. And sometimes we have special workshops, like we’re going to have a workshop on Sunday to learn about a Korean farming practice. We have a host educator that’s going to help do that, and that’s going to be at Johnson C Smith. So, I think I covered everything. And also,(laughs) what was I going to say? There was another one. It’ll come back to me.

Sekiya Billman 20:35
I’m going to go back to, like, (laughs) operations on the farm. Do you have any like local government and community support to subsidize or mitigate losses?

Cherie Jzar
So we have a NAP insurance [Noninsured Crop Disaster Assistance Program], and that is like the basic free insurance that the USDA [US Department of Agriculture] offers, and it’s free for underserved or socially disadvantaged farmers. That’s offered from the USDA and that covers you if you have more than a 50% loss in your crop or things you’re producing that was a result of some event, whether it was some disease, pest or natural disaster. Then we have private insurance, and which pays for any kind of, you know, most businesses have, you know, insurance, and that’s, that’s about it, in terms of that. We have gotten support through the USDA and Farm Service Agency for helping with cost for certifications. We are GAP certified, which is Good Agricultural Practices. It’s the certification required to sell your produce to or provide produce to like, institutions like hospitals or daycares, schools, you know, which is what motivated us, because we’re providing it to Gaston County Schools. Some restaurants require that. It’s just showing that you have food safety standards on your farm that’s not going to lead to anybody getting some sort of illness whenever it’s passed on to whomever is going to use it to create meals with it.

Sekiya Billman
And how does the GAP certification process work?

Cherie Jzar 22:35
So, you have to develop a food safety plan of action so making sure the standards that the USDA has set that you implement them on their, your farm, and then put it together this huge manual, train your team, of course, you do the practices, and then an auditor comes. You pay for an auditor. (laughs) Their time, they come, and then they audit your harvesting, your processing, all the practices you have on your farm. And their audit is then sent to the USDA for evaluation, and they decide if you pass and if you pass you get your certification. And then they come and do periodic checks to make sure you’re doing the practices. And that wasn’t just something you were doing that one day when the auditor came (laughs), like surprise visit. We also have a poultry handling license that’s issued through the North Carolina Department of Agriculture. Any producer who processes their own poultry, between 1,000 to 20,000 can do their own processing, out on their farm, without having to take their poultry to a USDA certified processor. So we just have to demonstrate that our water quality is at a standard that they set and that we have the practices in place to ensure that, you know, E-coli isn’t present and that kind of stuff.

Sekiya Billman
What are your largest expenses?

Cherie Jzar
Labor. Yeah, we have a team of five, and labor is the largest expense. In this market, you know, we can’t pay our farm hand or farm assistant anything less than $16 an hour, and the number of hours we would need them to work in the length of a season, that’s pretty expensive for us in terms of all the things we do here. Labor, it’s the most expensive.

Sekiya Billman
And do your workers work here all year round? (Cherie nods head.) Oh, wow.

Cherie Jzar 24:49
We try to. I mean, otherwise, you know, they’d probably find another job and won’t come back here. And you know, many farmers do – we do have a volunteer program, first of all, on our farm, but we try to use volunteers for specific tasks that are not necessarily always consistent. We haven’t worked in, where we are having our volunteers to do seeding or planting, just because we have that GAP certification. We want to make sure the practices are there, and that, to me, would require volunteer coordinator, and we don’t have funding to do that. So we utilize our volunteers to do like once in a blue moon or some things like spreading mulch and weeding and that kind of stuff on occasion. But our labor, the people farm hands who work here, we teach them the systems that we have, and it’s a 12-month operation (laughs) with our systems, and we want to keep them employed as much as possible and pay them a fair wage. And so seasonal is not, for most of the people who work here, we do have two people who come. We had an intern this summer, and that we paid through a grant that we had a partnership with, Mecklenburg County Soil and Water. So the intern was able to do engagement and outreach, because that’s something we do as our business. But they also worked on the farm.

Sekiya Billman
How do you involve family on the farm?

Cherie Jzar 26:29
Oh, man, it’s a way of life, you know, because we started as a homestead, everybody has a chore. I don’t even know if you want to call it a chore. Everybody has a duty to do something, you know, we have five children. Our oldest daughter no longer lives here. She is actually working for the USDA. She lives in Guam and she’s a soil conservationist. If she was here, she’d be working on the farm (laughs), but anyway, she gives us advice. So, she is involved in the farm. And then we have a 21-year-old. She’s a college student at Howard University in DC, so she comes back when she’s not in school. And then we have – I’m just telling y’all about all the children. And then my 19-year-old, he actually works here full time. He’s one of our full-time staff members here, and he’s more responsible for the livestock that we have. That’s his thing. And then I have a 13-year-old, her duty is, man, to collect the eggs, process the eggs, and package the eggs. So, every day, she’s checking the chicken coop and she’s collecting eggs, and she, we have a system for her. By the end of the week, Friday, all eggs should be packaged and ready for market. That’s her duty. Then we have a seven-year-old, (laughs) I know! Kind of, she sort of gets in where she fits in. She does whatever she wants, mainly feeding the animals. She loves doing that. (laughs) And she helps me, also collecting herbs. I’m going to try to cultivate that love of herbs with her. So, she’s really good with like, identifying them, clipping them, and then I occasionally let her write the name of them on the packages. (laughs) But, yeah, it’s a way of life, right? We have, if you saw on the front of the – we have that family garden. That was the first area in which we started to cultivate crops on this land, because it was the flattest area, and we sort of have done this bootstrapped, in terms of our resources and money. And so, we had to get going there. And we did it in homage to our ancestry, right? And most Americans had some sort of garden, a family garden, in which you got your sustenance from that, right? And you know, in my history, my family history, everybody had some sort of plot of something that you grew something on, right? And you may have exchanged, you may have just done tomatoes and cucumbers, but your cousin did something else, and you exchanged with him. So that family garden is where we get most of the stuff that we consume from the farm, and then everything else back here is like for market, but we’re always going to the family garden. I want a smoothie in the morning. The children want a smoothie in the morning. They go out there and get the kale. (laughs) We want to make some tea. We go out there and get the mint. And, you know, we make our tea with the Tulsi basil in the mint. To make tea. Yeah, we want to make have collard greens, or some sort of mix of green sauté. We go out there and do it. Yeah.

Sekiya Billman 29:40
It feels like you have a deep connection to, you know, the earth, to cultivating, even as part of your heritage.

Cherie Jzar
Yeah.

Sekiya Billman
Did you grow up in the Charlotte area?

Cherie Jzar
No, I did not. Yes. I am originally from Savannah, Georgia, so there’s a Sea Island girl sitting before you that actually farms, which is so interesting. And then Wisdom. He was born in Oakland, California. We met as teenagers. Our parents were business partners, which is such an interesting thing, because (laughs) we both have big families, and he has four sisters and one brother. I have four brothers and one sister, and out of all of those, the only people who hooked up from our parents’ business relationship was Wisdom and I. Yeah, so we didn’t come from a farming family. We don’t come from a farming family, maybe people who garden, but not farm. But the more we got into it, it just, I remember him, and I say, “Man, this is this is our thing.” You know, like when you’re in school, I think there’s a sort of a corralling students to try certain things in terms of what do you want to be when you grow up. But what do you want to be when you grow up is like what you see happening in your community. You know, you see dentists, or you see doctors and lawyers, you know, those traditional things, you see that, and you may want to make that choice. And I never saw farmers in my community. Everybody fished. I grew up in Savannah, so everybody fished, and they did crabbing and shrimping, and there was rice growing, but not farming in the way that we’re doing it now. So, whenever we started to grow our own food and found joy, and quite frankly, I find stress relief in it, like there is something about like having a busy day and then just going and putting your hands in the soil and doing something on the farm. And I just, I could get lost in it for hours, and so can he. And so, I think it’s just in us. It’s in me to want to connect with the land. I think, I’m sure it’s in other people too, but they just don’t have that experience. They don’t have the, the opportunity or access, and that’s why we created the farm we did the way we did, and located it where we located it, Northwest Charlotte, close to the heart of the community that we care about who has been underserved and not sort of prioritized, so that the community can have access to the same thing that gives us joy. We started our Sunday market understanding people work throughout the week, right? Some people work on Saturdays and can’t come to the farmer’s market. So, we were like, what do we do? So, we started a Sunday market that could be after people’s church time, right? So, it starts at twelve and it goes to three, and it’s not just a Sunday market with a produce stand on our farm. We offer horse rides, and if you want a tour, we can arrange a tour of the farm. And that brings families out, you know? That brings a community that lives around here out to the farm, and it’s amazing to see somebody who says, “I’ve lived for thirty-eight years, and I never stepped foot on the farm,” or “I’ve never seen okra grow in that way. I didn’t know that.” You know, it’s like you’re introducing them to like this food is basic to our lives, but people do not have that connection, and that’s sort of why we even started to do what we did. We saw how important it was for our family. We want that for everybody.

Sekiya Billman 33:28
And how did that make you feel, seeing somebody being able to connect to farming and the land, and…

Cherie Jzar
It’s a joy. It’s a pure joy, like it makes me feel like we’re doing the right thing. One of the values that we live is to do our best in the world with the skills and talents that we were given, to hopefully make our mark on the world and make it better than which we inherited it. And so, doing that, like it took work to do this right? And then to share it with somebody else, and then see their connection to it that way. And that’s just like, it’s a little bit indescribable. I talk about the summer camp, and I talk about the end of the summer camp, but I’m going to tell you – those students who came. They were – those students who came were from the city, so they grew up in the city, in the city of Charlotte, right here in the heart of the alphabet is for road corridor Northwest Charlotte. And the first day of camp, it was like we were telling them, “We’re going to introduce ourselves by our name and we’re going to pick our favorite food that starts with the same letter that our first name starts. So, my name’s Cherie, and I like cherries,” you know. And we pass this little bean bag around so they can do that. And they were like, “I can’t do that”, you know. And so, we changed the game to say, “Hey, whatever you like, just say that.” So, they were like, you know, “I like, you know, Fortnite game,” or “I like this shoe, I like that.” It was hard for them to say they like their food. By the third day, every one of those students had decided, from what they were seeing growing on this farm that they could not – we did the same thing, trying to like learn names, because for us, names are important. By the third day, they all went from Nikes and Fortnite to, you know, “I’m Corey and I like cantaloupe,” because you had a cantaloupe for lunch on the day. You know what I’m saying? It was like a it was a light that came on with them. And, you know, we didn’t – no cell phones were allowed. You had to connect with her. And they wanted to do basic things. We had a whole program set up. But they were like, “Okay, is it nature walk time? I just want to take a nature walk,” you know, like that, right? There is why we do this. Yeah.

Sekiya Billman 36:10
Can you talk about food equity? Yes, please.

Cherie Jzar
So, yeah, that’s a that’s a big one, right? So, there’s a whole debate, and I say this quite frequently, about communities that are underserved, that there is access to food, right? Because if you ride up Beattie’s Ford Road or some other West, West Boulevard, you’re going to see some McDonald’s and Burger King and some American food delis. And not to speak negatively to them as a whole, but they can’t be the only food option that communities have, right? And so that, and that’s a disservice, that’s unjust to me to have it be absent of nutritious, healthy food as an option. And most communities of color in Charlotte have what they call food deserts. They don’t have access to healthy, affordable food within a certain distance of their home, and we should be doing our best to try to reverse that. I call them food swamps because they have food, but it’s not healthy, and some people don’t like that, because swamp is a natural occurrence. Food deserts, deserts are a natural occurrence, but that’s the only way I like to describe – food apartheid is also a word because it says that it was by design, right? The disinvestment in the communities that don’t have access to food is not by chance. It actually is by design. So, we do our best to connect with organizations like the Historic West End partners. We sell at the Beattie’s, not Beattie’s for Rosa Parks Farmers Market in the summertime, on Tuesdays, on Beattie’s Ford Road, because we want to provide access to food from the farm, fresh food from the farm, to communities who need it most. We also have partnered with Aetna health insurance company to do education around healthy eating choices and the community, just because we feel like that’s a part of it. We can’t do what we do and not educate. If you only have access to fried foods or salty foods or food that is absent of like nutritional density and value, that’s what you’re going to eat, right? That’s what you’re going to choose for many reasons. And it’s not a choice because you don’t care about your health. It’s a choice that is made out of many reasons. Maybe you don’t have much money, you don’t have transportation to get other foods, you’re busy because you’re working two, three jobs or whatever. So, it’s not education to say, (laughs) to say that people are making bad choices, but it’s also education to try to mitigate that. “Well, you’re short on time. I get it, we’re all short on time. Let’s talk about how we can quickly make a kale wrap, right? Or we can make prep meals, if you have some time to prep your meals and get it out there.” So it’s basically us trying to help deal with the conditioning that we know a lot of our communities have because of just not having access to healthy food.

Sekiya Billman 39:43
How did you decide to start your consultancy business?

Cherie Jzar
So my background in training is a planner. So, I have been trained actually, American Institute of Certified planners. I have a certification in planning. And so, I understand land use, and I understand, sort of like I was saying before, what makes communities resilient, and not everybody does, and I felt like that was something that I wanted to contribute to the community. You know, whether you’re an individual who just is like, “I want to stop mowing my lawn every three days,” “I want to build a garden,” or “I want to have some level of food or fruit trees,” then that’s not always something you can just turn to somebody in the community and call them up on the phone and do, and so I wanted to be able to do that. So then also, with institutions, we actually have helped chefs start culinary herb patio gardens, right? To understand, you know, best placement, what best type of container to put it in, if you want to put it out on a patio where your guests will be eating, and then how to care for it and put together plans for that. So basically, just having the skill and understanding is just what motivated me, and our goal is to see more agriculture in urban spaces. That should be, to me, that should be like normalized instead of what it is now. When new development happens in Charlotte, a house goes in, they’re thinking about grass and trees. None of those trees are fruit trees (laughs). And the spaces in which they’re creating doesn’t even have, in some cases, a thought that somebody may want to put in a four-by-four garden bed. So, I think those things should be, should be required, not required, or encouraged, through our land use and zoning regulations, and they’re not. So that’s just sort of my belief, and I advocate for such. Because if you don’t have that as a thought in the beginning, it’s harder to get it in once the development’s there.

Sekiya Billman
Have you seen any changes or progress?

Cherie Jzar 42:06
No, and you know, I don’t necessarily see it as a maliciousness in our community. I think Charlotte is struggling with a lot of things, and one of the things that is the biggest struggle right now is affordable housing. And so, Charlotte has it through their land use and their development standards focused on housing all kinds, from, you know (laughs), very, very unaffordable houses to affordable housing. And so, agriculture is not even something that’s in the thoughts or minds of them. It’s almost when you hear somebody talking about food in Charlotte, it’s connected with poor communities who do not have access, and so it’s not even normalized by middle class communities, not normalized, but it’s like, “Agriculture? Well, that’s something that happens in Eastern Carolina or Western Carolina, not in Mecklenburg County.” And the rate of farm loss is significant in Mecklenburg County, which means, once again, we’re going to be relying on getting our food from other places when we can have this bold move and a very healthy local food system, which is what we need. It creates a lot of opportunities in the in the economy. You know, many of the chefs who utilize our produce or produce from local farmers on their menu are some of the best chefs in Charlotte. People want to go to their restaurants. People want to know that they’re getting local food. And I think that should be accessible to any chef who wants to come to Charlotte, or baker or artisan, and it’s just not, you know, it’s more of a thing for those who can afford. And it shouldn’t be. It shouldn’t be.

Sekiya Billman
Have you noticed any changes within the community of growers themselves in the Charlotte area?

Cherie Jzar
Yes, yes. I’ve seen younger people who are interested and who are attempting to grow. I’ve seen people of color who, I mean, I can’t tell you how I’m often Wisdom and I get calls from people saying, “I got, I just got a house with two acres, and I’m interested in figuring out how to do…” So there’s a huge, huge interest, but there still are barriers, because if you did purchase a house with three acres or two acres, and you have no farming experience. Now, remember, we started as homesteaders. Before we started our business, we had many years of learning how to cultivate and grow things and raise up livestock, right? Even though it wasn’t on the scale it is now, we had some learning. If you just come into some land, you better understand that is not about putting the seed in the ground. You are developing that land to be able to grow food. So, there’s a resource that you’re going to need, which is education and technical assistance. And then on the other end, there are a lot of younger individuals who have, maybe, access to their backyard, and they’re growing, and they want to increase their growing, but they can’t get access to land because it’s very expensive. So, I think that’s the changes that I’m seeing.

Sekiya Billman 45:36
How did you decide to start a CSA program?

Cherie Jzar
Everything we do sort of connects to our community (laughs), community focused values. And so we felt like building up our farm, we wanted to have people connected to that. And so, Community Supported Agriculture, people pre-purchase, so they can make a commitment to purchase parts of your harvest before it even gets there. And so, to me, that was a chance for us to build community with people, to tell the stories about like, what’s going good, what’s not going good, to surprise them with things that they have never had before. That’s also a joy. You know, “What’s this?” “Oh, this is arugula flowers.” “Arugula flowers?” “Yes, you can put that in your salad.” So that was the reason why. We started at small. We only had twenty members in our CSA. And I think we want, not we want to grow it, but not grow it to be hundreds and hundreds of members we want small so that we can be in community with the families that grow. And that’s just one aspect of our business, is our CSA. Yeah. Also, just got to put this in here. when I learned about Booker T. Whatley, who was the father of CSAs and at the time that he rolled out this idea about letting some people come onto your land to harvest their own – do U-picks and do shares? It was like, No, that’s not how agriculture works. And he wrote a whole book about how to make, I think the title is How to make $100,000 on a 10-acre farm. This was like in the early 80s or six, late, late 70s. And he was going around shopping this idea because he saw how small farms were dwindling in the United States. And he was saying, “No, we can make it if we just change up our model, because we can’t compete with the big farmers.” And just reading the history and how, like, tenacious he was with putting that as a model out there. And then I was, like, searching for his book, and couldn’t find it anywhere. And, like, it was like, for going for, that same book he wrote was like $1,000, an old book, and I found one (laughs) on eBay, and I bought it, and I read it cover to cover. And boy, was he before his time. But every farmer, who’s a small farmer, is doing the model that he mapped out. U-picks? That was him. He said, “Every city dweller wants to be on the farm. You have something special. Share it with the community.” That’s a U-pick. You know, “Every city dweller wants access to food. That’s basic, if you can provide them the convenience of having not to go to the grocery store and healthy produce that last much longer than it’s going to last if they get it from the grocery store, you win.” I mean, he had these models of, like, making the community feel like they’re special. They’re special because they have a share in this wonderful farm that you built. You’re always going to have a customer. Yeah.

Sekiya Billman 49:00
Now I know you’re going to be expanding the farm. What are your future plans and what do you see as your vision for the farm?

Cherie Jzar
Oh yeah. So, we partnered with the Carolina Working Farms Fund to farm an additional forty-four acres, forty-four acres in Monroe, and basically, was a working farm. Was a working land, and the farmer no longer wanted to farm, and now we’re going to have the opportunity to farm that land, and we are just looking to scale up our business tenfold. We want to do more agritourism to bring the community to the farm. I think that’s important. We also want to diversify our markets a lot more. Right now, we’re selling mainly our produce at farmers markets. We want to support the food hubs that are being developed in Charlotte, the West Boulevard, Three Sisters Market is doing a food co-op. We want to support them. We want to support the Historic West End Partners and the work they’re doing and that food hub that’s there. So, we just started looking with this expansion, to expand our markets and then do more on a larger scale with agritourism, to bring the community into the farm to experience farm life.

Sekiya Billman
What advice would you give for people who have just been starting to farm for a few years or just starting? How do you sustain something like this for the long run?

Cherie Jzar
Find the local growers community. That’s number one, because it could be very challenging getting access to resources and technical support. But farmers help farmers, or growers help growers. And if it’s something you really want to do, just don’t give up on it. Find your niche in it, whether that’s producing flowers and your love and passion for it, and just connect with others. I think that’s that. But also, I think you got to be a little like, it’s got to be in your blood a little bit to keep it going, you know, because it’s challenging, because one of your biggest business partners, the silent business partner, not really silent, is Mother Nature. (laughs) And you can’t negotiate with Mother Nature sometimes. You have to really, that is the business partner. Like, that’s the top of it all. So, you know, you can want to give up when it gets challenging, but no, there’ll be another season. You know, there will be another season. And that’s one of the things we’re working towards, like we’re working to really help organizations who are designed to support farmers, like the Extension, the North Carolina Cooperative Extension, Mecklenburg County, who’s passed a farm preservation plan, to really be in community with farmers, to really understand some of the successes and challenges, so that when they are designing policy or resource programs, it really can work for the farmer. Oftentimes, you know, we think we understand what will work, but if you aren’t in community with, and that’s hard, because as a small business owner, you don’t have time to come out of your business to go and be on committees or talk to others, but we make that a priority, because we won’t have more farmers coming behind us if people don’t understand from the farmer what they need.

Sekiya Billman
Well, I think that is it. Thank you so much. That was fantastic.