Tall Grass — Meal Magazine

Responding to Coronavirus, New Project Bolsters North Carolina’s Black Farmers

Words and Photos by Eric Ginsburg

Curtis Mayfield’s “Move On Up” pumps relentless positivity from inside a white pickup truck, and the doors on the U-Haul trailer behind it are flung open. Inside, stacks of cardboard boxes reading “GREENS” along their sides are visible. Gabrielle E. W. Carter stands nearby, striking names on an oversized piece of paper taped to the trailer’s doors as friends and acquaintances drop by. There’s a yellow fanny pack slung over her jean jacket and blue medical gloves on her hands, but you can tell by her eyes that she’s smiling beneath her mask.

In fact, without the homemade face masks and physical distancing, this would almost feel like the early stages of a block party.

Carter, Gerald C. Harris, and Derrick Beasley won’t be parked here—alongside NorthStar Church of the Arts on the outskirts of downtown Durham, North Carolina—for very long. They need to head to neighboring Raleigh for a second pick-up soon, so they’ll be here for just an hour, then close up the trailer and drive 27 miles southeast.

A family of four, including two small kids, walks up. Like the patrons before them, they exchange greetings before picking up a box of veggies: several bundles of greens, a dozen eggs, two varieties of potatoes, a bag of oyster mushrooms, and more. But instead of heading home, they take a seat on the steps of the old church. They’re waiting to say hello to a friend who’s coming to grab fresh produce too, this outing likely their only reasonable excuse to interact.

They’re not alone. Across the relatively narrow street, two friends are bemoaning their distance, remarking how odd it feels to see each other and not embrace. They come up with a creative solution: pretending to launch hugs towards each other. They look like a loving version of cartoon characters shooting fireballs from their hands.

This is Tall Grass Food Box. In many respects, it mirrors a traditional Community-Supported Agriculture (or CSA) model—customers pay a set price and receive a recurring box of produce straight from a farm. But several things make this central North Carolina project different from its counterparts. For starters, it began as a response to the coronavirus pandemic. And it isn’t designed to benefit just one farm: it’s a collective effort to give black farmers direct access to consumers amidst a global crisis.

In early March, before coronavirus fully unleashed on North Carolina, Carter ran into the owner of Goorsha—an Ethiopian restaurant in central Durham—at the grocery store. They chatted, wondering what the virus could mean for them.

“I just remember that shaking me, seeing his face,” Carter said. “It’s one thing to hear stories from afar, but to hear how it was affecting people in your community that you care about, that affected me.”

“I just remember that shaking me, seeing his face,” Carter said. “It’s one thing to hear stories from afar, but to hear how it was affecting people in your community that you care about, that affected me.”

She started thinking about how local black-owned food businesses like Goorsha and beloved East African restaurant The Palace International would weather the storm. Wanting to help, Carter initially envisioned an email newsletter to raise awareness, then decided the situation demanded a bigger response.

Carter is a cultural preservationist who grew up in Apex, North Carolina. She lived in New York City and worked with preeminent black chef Joseph “JJ” Johnson before returning home to her family’s farm two years ago. Her work around black foodways, farming practices, and traditions is deeply rooted in the area, making her a natural progenitor. She set up the Tall Grass Food Box project alongside Derrick Beasley, the creative director of the wildly popular homecoming-style diaspora event Black August in the Park, as well as friend Gerald Harris, the senior director of campus and student engagement at Duke University, who is handling much of Tall Grass’s writing and marketing efforts.

Together, the trio surveyed black farmers in the area, stretching north to Pine Knot Farms in Hurdle Mills, west to Kindred Seedlings in Graham, and south to Faithful Farms. Soon they had amassed a list of around a dozen farms that wanted to participate, eager for a direct line to more consumers as the farmers markets and restaurants where they’d normally sell their products shuttered.

Tall Grass is building on a long history of community-supported agriculture projects. Despite the CSA model’s modern association with crunchy white farmers, it was pioneered by black Southerners decades ago. Tall Grass is particularly significant because it comes at a time when black farms have dwindled, down to about 2,000 in North Carolina (of the state’s roughly 46,000 farms). Nationwide, less than 2% of our remaining farmers are black.

The drop is due in part to systemic barriers and attacks on black farmers, who have been routinely forced off their land. The issue isn’t abstract for Carter; her state intends to turn the two-lane road in front of her family’s homestead into a seven-lane highway. North Carolina has seized her great uncle’s house and farmland, using eminent domain in order to build that thoroughfare, Carter told me. The road will claim about a quarter of their land in front of the house, she added.

So in the face of both a global pandemic and the plundering of black farmland, Tall Grass Food Box has proven to be the right idea at the right time. Across the country, consumers are flocking to CSAs like never before as they search of a more stable food supply. black farmers, like all farmers, are struggling to survive. Tall Grass is responding to both trends, improvising as they go.

New to this project and unsure how it would be received, Carter, Beasley, and Harris capped their first run at 30 boxes. They sold out quickly. Two weeks later, for Round 2, they lifted the cap and sold 59 boxes. The third iteration, on May 1, proved equally successful, and now Tall Grass offers a 3-month subscription, with boxes available for pickup every two weeks in Durham or Raleigh.

In the face of both a global pandemic and the plundering of black farmland, Tall Grass Food Box has proven to be the right idea at the right time.

“It feels really good to be able to tap into this and share some of the resources we had access to,” Carter said. “One of our farmers was like, ‘What do you want me to grow?’”

Anna Huckabee, owner of Moonlight Farms in Trinity, North Carolina, was thrilled when Beasley reached out to her.

“They came at the perfect time,” Huckabee said with relief. “It was like a week or two after I had all these orders get canceled from the local restaurants around my area.” She continued, adding that Tall Grass has “given me the opportunity to keep my business afloat, and it’s enabled me to reach people that wouldn’t have ever known about my farm.”

Huckabee started growing mushrooms after her daughter announced her intention to go vegan. Concerned about her daughter’s healthy options, Huckabee began cultivating king trumpet and golden oyster mushrooms. After feeling out interest in the neighboring cities of Greensboro and Winston-Salem, Huckabee ramped up production. She had just started selling to restaurateurs when the virus shut everything down.

And now, she’s scaling up again. In an April 25 Instagram Live video, Huckabee introduced her farm to Tall Grass’ fans while Carter cooked the vibrant pink oyster mushrooms with vegan red-eye gravy and grits with chimichurri. That sparked interest from around the country, leading to a spike in orders. Now Huckabee is shipping her mushrooms—as well as grow-your-own kits for the green-thumbed—nationally. Temporarily sold out, Huckabee will have more on hand to ship to her new fans in a few weeks.

Her oyster mushrooms appeared in the most recent Tall Grass box, to the delight of customers, flanking sweet potatoes, lemon thyme, mint, and more. To keep up with new online orders and demand from Tall Grass, Huckabee and other farmers have already doubled their next harvests.

Chantel Johnson—a social worker and doula who also runs Off Grid in Color in Pittsboro—already ran out of chickens. For previous Tall Grass boxes, customers could choose a whole bird as an add-on to their box order, and soon that will be an option again. Johnson has always focused on direct sales, so the pandemic didn’t sideswipe her business the same way it did to other farms. Still, Tall Grass has become an “essential part” of her business, in part because of the clientele.

“I’ve been struggling with how to get my product to black people,” admitted Johnson, who also raises hogs. “I know it’s challenging because it’s not affordable; I can’t even afford my meat. I saw this as an opportunity to connect with more folks of color and people who want to see black businesses thrive.”

Johnson’s typical customer is a middle-aged white woman. “There’s nothing wrong with that,” she said, “but I’d like my products to be in hands of color, too.”

Similarly, Huckabee sees Tall Grass as a much-needed opportunity for visibility.

“I always wanted to live off the land and be a farmer, but I never thought that it was something that me, as a woman of color, would do,” she said. “I think the important thing is representation and letting people—and other people of color—know we even exist. Black farmers are out there.”

The overwhelming majority of customers who arrived at the most recent pick-up in Durham were people of color, most of them black. The project has white clients, too; they’re also buying into Tall Grass’ explicit rooting in black food sovereignty and supporting black-owned farms.

Though everyone wore masks and kept their distance at the pick-up, the mood was jubilant. Some danced as they stepped from their cars, others stood in the middle of the street chatting freely. Sitting in the grass next to the U-Haul trailer full of boxes, Beasley greeted several supporters with familiarity.

“Thanks so much for coming back!” he said to someone who’d walked up with their dog.

“Of course!” they replied, stooping to grab a box. “This is like, the high point of my week.”

The clientele extends well beyond the founders’ immediate network, Beasley and Carter said. Indeed, as they waited for patrons to drop in, a woman in a minivan stopped to ask Harris about what they were doing and how she could sign up. Moments earlier, a man walking home with groceries paused with the same inquiry.

“I think people are realizing how broken our food system is,” she said. “This is the time for us to reimagine our food system.”

More than press or happenstance, word of mouth will likely be the primary reason Tall Grass Food Box keeps growing. There’s an obvious need, and customers clearly love it. As one white-haired woman wearing a polka-dotted dress told Carter at the Durham pick-up: “Girl, it tastes like home every time I open it.”

Tall Grass Food Box certainly isn’t the only example of black farm solidarity, including elsewhere in North Carolina. But Huckabee and others hope it’s a harbinger for what’s to come. Tall Grass connected her to new customers and new allies, including black farmers she didn’t know before.

“I hope this goes even further and we start connecting and networking once social distancing isn’t an issue,” she said. “I want a convention or something. Hopefully out of this pandemic comes a silver lining of people wanting to eat more locally and support a local food revolution.”

Johnson is also hoping the immediacy of this moment will outlive the pandemic. “I think people are realizing how broken our food system is,” she said. “This is the time for us to reimagine our food system.”

That should mean taking steps towards self-sufficiency, especially when it comes to growing your own food, Johnson said, something she teaches in workshops. But it could also mean groups elsewhere in the country following Tall Grass Food Box’s lead.

“Produce boxes exist, we’re not the first,” Carter explained. “A lot of those don’t look like ours. We’re hoping this is something people can replicate wherever they are, and we can reimagine the way we look at food.”