NEWS

Farmer finds niche serving Louisville food deserts

Jere Downs
The Courier-Journal

While snow melts from the knobs surrounding his Hart County farm, Andre Barbour is growing greenhouse collards, kale, cabbage, lettuce, radishes, chard and other cold crops that he soon will truck to churches in Shawnee and Old Louisville.

Near Barbour's tin-roofed brick ranch, 700 chickens will become poultry products custom-ordered by subscribers in Shively and Okolona — one third of them on food stamps.

In a deal that addresses both the scarcity of healthy, affordable produce and meat in Louisville "food deserts" and helps save a family farm in a rural Kentucky community founded by former slaves, the bulk of Barbour's 2014 harvest is reserved by an estimated 250 subscribers in those "desert" communities.

The subscribers are mostly low-income residents in west and southern Louisville, who pay between $12 and $50 each month to New Roots Inc., a nonprofit organizer of Fresh Stop, a local Community Supported Agriculture program specifically targeted at food deserts — defined by the U.S. Department of Agriculture as areas "with a substantial share of (low-income) residents who ... have low levels of access to a grocery store or healthy, affordable food retail outlet."

As often as once a week, from May through October, Barbour will truck seasonal crops to the Louisville schools and churches serving as temporary depots for vegetables, eggs, chicken, beef and brats.

Last year, Louisville's Fresh Stop network — part of a burgeoning local food movement that also helps small Kentucky farmers diversify their crops from historic dependence on tobacco — served 550 households and shipped 40,000 pounds of produce, said New Roots founder and executive director Karyn Moskowitz.

Shawnee homeowners Marry and James Cross, who joined the Shawnee Fresh Stop last fall, say the need is great. In their neighborhood near 40th and Broadway, there is easy access to fast food and liquor stores. But grocery stores? Not so easy.

"I am into the whole sustainable community thing. I want to eat healthy," said Cross, a U of L administrative assistant, who pays $25 every two weeks to load a Fresh Stop box with an average 13 to 14 pounds of food. Cross said likes even more that she has come to know Barbour, and wants to support his family farm. "I like the idea that you meet the people who grow the food."

West Louisville has just one full service grocery per 25,000 residents, compared to the Jefferson County average overall of one grocery for every 12,500 residents, according to "The Louisville Health Equity Report," a 2011 study by the Louisville Metro Department of Health and Wellness. As a result, the mostly African American community is more "likely to spend more for healthy food and to have the least access to high quality foods,"

Scarcity of supermarkets directly impacts health, the report added, adding that Louisville's poorest communities are more likely to suffer from diet-related disease like diabetes, heart ailments and obesity, and die prematurely as a result.

Big box grocery retailers' failure to serve low income, minority communities is a part of "structural racism," the study said, adding that in Jefferson County, "the neighborhood in which one lives can serve as a predictor of life expectancy. Neighborhoods that have the lowest life expectancies are the same neighborhoods with high levels of poverty, crime, vacancies, payday lenders, and fast food retailers."

Amber Burns, 25, encountered New Roots as a VISTA volunteer working as a community organizer in west Louisville. Burns teaches families and their children about "food justice," in New Roots classes covering nutrition, cooking, and how to access healthy food. To have Barbour as the grower for New Roots feels right, she said.

"Growing up, I did not associate farming with black people. It is so important to see farmers who look like this," Burns, a West End native, said before a New Roots community meeting last month at Shawnee Presbyterian Church on 44th Street near Market.

New Roots relies on volunteers, grants and donations to help offset costs for the poorest customers, Moskowitz said. The program accepts food stamps, and residents who depend on them, as well as low-income mothers who receive food help via the WIC system that pay as little as $6 per delivery, also known as a "share."

"Demand is more than we can handle," Moskowitz said, adding the tiny nonprofit is hosting an April fundraiser to raise the estimated $30,000 required to start a fifth Fresh Stop at Shawnee Presbyterian Church on 44th Street near Market on the border of the Portland neighborhood.

Barbour's farm is just one of 437 African-American-owned in Kentucky, out of 77,000 farms in the state, according to Census 2012 agricultural figures released in February.

Barbour's relationship with New Roots began last summer, when the nonprofit's former farmer withdrew to pursue a more lucrative grocery store contract, Moskowitz said.

At that time, Barbour was struggling for a reliable customers for the family's 141-acre farm. He experimented with farmers markets in Nashville and Louisville, and secured some business with the Whole Foods in Lexington and a Louisville restaurant or two. He jumped at New Roots' offer for the guaranteed market for his product.

"We are putting our eggs in the basket with him and his consortium because we believe in small farms and minority farmers in particular. We want to grow with them," Moskowitz said of the alliance struck with Barbour's farm in Canmer, Ky., farm last fall.

Barbour, for his part, envisions a future for his long-time family farm, secured by serving mostly African American consumers like him.

"All we are doing is keeping the middle man out and keeping the money," Barbour said. Small farmers in general have to search out niche markets to survive. "The black farmer has to keep a step ahead. As long as I can feed people on this side of Louisville, I am good to go."

Barbour also supplies the chicken for fried chicken and waffles at Dasha's Southern Bistro, a new Buechel restaurant he encouraged his brother, Aaron, to open last December. Aaron Barbour said running a business serving his family's collard greens, sweet potatoes and pork chops is a new dream he conceived after seeing the farm's vegetables go to waste when not sold at farmer's markets.

"I wanted to go back to the farm, but I see how hard it is, " Barbour, 32, said, adding that the new restaurant is integral to the farm's survival strategy. Farming, he said, "can be so discouraging. We just have to go and get it and build our own economy around the farm."

William M. Snell, a professor in the University of Kentucky's Department of Agricultural Economics, agreed, noting that the Barbours are smart to have developed a niche strategy — with a Fresh Stops basis of 250 customers, combined with the restaurant supply.

"That sounds phenomenal," Snell said. "The local food movement is a niche market that is providing some opportunities for small farms. Anymore in farming, you've got to find a small niche, or get big."

Sarah Fritschner, the coordinator of Louisville Metro's Farm To Table program, which seeks to expand the supply of local food to schools, retailers, and institutions, praised Fresh Stops for its dual outreach — to the small farmer, and west Louisville customers.

"There have been several attempts to bring good, fresh food west of Ninth Street," said Fritschner, who is also a contributor to Edible Louisville magazine. "I think that Karyn (Moskowitz) just has the vision to make it work, and the passion and the understanding that other people have not had."

On March 22, New Roots organizers and customers enrolled in the current series of food justice classes will climb into a van for a field trip to Barbour's farm, 80 miles away.

Douglas Barbour, the family patriarch, raised eight children there on steady revenue from tobacco farming, supplemented with a three-cow, unheated milk parlor and a small herd of beef cattle.

The farm is one of a handful remaining among an estimated 150 black farm families that belonged to Mount Gilboa Baptist Church at the middle of the last century, said Douglas Barbour, 67. Mount Gilboa stands on land donated at the end of the Civil War to newly freed slaves, he added.

Since Civil War times, the Barbour family sharecropped the land, an arrangement "on the half," whereby half the harvest went to the landowner, Douglas Barbour said. But in 1957, Douglas Barbour's father bought the operation.

"None of it came easy by no means," said Douglas Barbour, who is also a Baptist preacher, adding that he hopes new Louisville markets can save the farm. "I hope it can stay in the family."

Jere Downs can be reached at (502) 582-4669, Jere Downs on Facebook and Jeredowns on Twitter.

COMMUNITY SUPPORTED AGRICULTURE

To find out more about purchasing shares in a Fresh Stop, or starting your own neighborhood Fresh Stop CSA, contact New Roots, Inc. at (502) 509-6770, info@newrootsproduce.org or www.newrootsproduce.org To find out more about CSAs available elsewhere in Louisville, check out Local Harvest at www.localharvest.org