Rocky Ridge Farm owners Steve and Elke McCalla | Photo by Jade Wilson
Steve McCalla always dreamed of farming. As a kid growing up in New York City, he maintained a vegetable garden with peppers, tomatoes, and other crops in his Queens backyard. “I always wanted to be a farmer, ever since I could remember,” McCalla recalls.
But his career in the ’70s leaned towards computers, and later, telecommunications. When his longtime employer offered employees buyout packages amid a round of layoffs, McCalla saw an opportunity.
His parents and brother had already moved to North Carolina, and a few years earlier, he’d bought land. “Really then it was just a matter of shifting down,” he says. He took the package, and in 2003 started Rocky Ridge Farm in Louisburg, about 40 minutes northeast of downtown Raleigh.
The career shift made him one of only a few Black farmers in the nation—about two percent of farmers in the U.S. are Black, and of those, only about 2,000 Black farmers call North Carolina home, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Census data shows the average NC farmer runs a 168-acre farm whose market value exceeds $250,000 per year; for African American farmers, the average is 95 acres.
Jarred White runs into this issue constantly in his role at the Pittsboro-based Rural Advancement Foundation International-USA (RAFI-USA).
“When I started at RAFI in late 2019, I kept encountering this problem of Black land loss,” White says, before listing off a variety of contributing factors including policies rooted in the Reconstruction-era and USDA discrimination. “The rate at which Black farmers specifically were losing land was immense.”
Congress is currently considering federal action to address this historic and ongoing discrimination in the form of the Justice for Black Farmers Act. In early March, Congress also passed the COVID-19 relief bill, which included the Emergency Relief for Farmers of Color Act, a $5 billion provision introduced by Sen. Ralph Warnock of Georgia that will go toward forgiving the debts of farmers of color.
On a more micro and localized scale, White realized that part of the solution might lie in partnering farmers like McCalla with RAFI’s strong network of faith communities affiliated with the organization. His idea: convince a group of church members to buy CSA shares directly from local Black farmers.
Now, RAFI is piloting the project in Wake County, with more than 120 people joining from across eight participating churches and sourcing a plethora of fresh food from three Black-owned local farms. Dubbed the Faith and Farms Partnership Project, the effort will bring in about $20,000 total for its initial eight-week run. That’s huge for McCalla. He relied on selling his haul at the Wake Forest Farmers Market in the past, but he’s been refraining during the pandemic.
“I’m 68, I’m Black, and I’ve had heart trouble,” he says, adding that he previously underwent a quadruple bypass. “That put me right in the crosshairs of COVID-19.”
The CSA model offers stability—it’s easier to know how much to plant, offers a reliable cash flow, and frees him up to plan for the future, McCalla says. His partner Elke McCalla, who joined the organic farm several years after it launched, called the new partnership project “a real blessing.”
“To even get to the point on our own where we’d be able to have a 30-person CSA would’ve taken us years to get that level,” she says. “When the help from Jarred and [RAFI], they pretty much gift-wrapped this up and put this in our lap overnight. We couldn’t have done this on our own at all.”
This model is also more effective than a farmer’s market, Elke adds, pointing out that it simplifies their workflow and cuts down on time and food waste. With the CSA, there’s a set number of weekly shares, so they know exactly how much to harvest, take it to one church drop site, and any boxes that participants forget to pick up are donated directly to local food banks by the churches.
Participants receive a wide range of food from the McCallas—right now, that means potatoes, beets, spinach, radishes, arugula, mustard greens, and swiss chard, to name a few selections. Those who sign up again in the summer will get cantaloupes, corn, tomatoes, sweet potatoes, watermelon, and peppers, among other fresh and organic crops. Church members are also getting goods from the Black Farmers’ Hub in Raleigh and Singing Stream Farm in Creedmoor, White says.
There are already a couple Triangle organizations designed to support Black farmers, such as Tall Grass Food Box and the Black Farmers Market. What sets the Faith and Farms Partnership Project apart is the relationship with various religious communities rather than a more one-on-one connection with individual consumers.
So far, a range of churches including Unitarian, Baptist, and Lutheran churches, are involved across Wake County, but White would like to expand to other faith communities as well. If the model proves successful—and as far as the McCallas consider, it already has—he wants to replicate it around the state, drawing in more Black farmers and farmers of color more broadly.
“The main thing we want people to understand is that the goal is to work against injustices in the food system that marginalize farmers of color and rural communities of color,” White says. “We know that farmers of color in the U.S. continue to endure systemic racism within the food system, which causes consistent social, economic, and political harm. We’re attempting to build partnerships to counteract a lot of the effects of that injustice.”
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