AphroChic Magazine: Issue No. 12

Culture
With a career change already taking shape in
front of her, Christa took on the challenge of urban
farming and horticulture, producing organic and
natural fruits and vegetables under the brand name,
FarmerJawn. The term jawn is a shoutout to her
birthplace, Philadelphia, where Christa has lived all
her life. One of the English language’s few all-purpose
nouns, Philadelphians are famous for using the
word in place of just about any thing, person, place,
or event. For Christa, the name is at once an ode to
where she’s from and an affirmation of her chosen
profession. It’s also just what she is — that "jawn" that
farms. As her motto succinctly states, “Agriculture is
the culture.”
Christa’s work could not be more important
or timely, particularly in the community where she
operates. Out of the 10 U.S. cities with the largest
populations, Philadelphia has the highest prevalence
of diabetes with more than 15% of those over
18 diagnosed as diabetic. The rate represents a 50%
increase since 2004, ranking diabetes with other
co-morbidities, such as heart disease, among the
leading causes of death in the city. In particular,
Black Philadelphians are 60% more likely to die from
the disease, a rate one-and-half times higher than
the national average. Increasing the availability of
affordable and healthy food is one of the main strategies
that the city is using to combat the health crisis,
and organizations like FarmerJawn, with a focus on
community health, nutrition, and education, are a
major help to that initiative.
In service to her cause, Christa leads an
expansive brand with a retail and garden learning
center in Northwest Philadelphia, a Community
Supported Agriculture (CSA) business, and five acres
of farmland in Elkins Park. The jawn with the green
thumb took another major step at the start of 2023,
acquiring 123 acres of land in West Chester. Farmer-
Jawn will farm the land and use it to stock the farm
market already located on the premises that will
eventually include a CSA, organic prepared foods,
and other locally grown and sourced products.
The remaining acreage will become a food and
farming incubator, engaging a host of cooperative
farms operated by a cohort of Black farmers who
will be chosen and trained through FarmerJawn’s
non-profit arm. For members of the inaugural
cohort, FarmerJawn will offer educational development
opportunities and a pathway to entrepreneurship.
Christa is quick to state that the work she does
is about more than the rows of tomatoes, turnips,
and arugula growing on her farm. She sees farming
as an important building block for Black and Brown
communities and recognizes that she is upholding a
proud yet unremembered legacy of Black farmers.
Included in that legacy is the invention of the nation’s
first CSA model by Booker T. Whatley in the 1960s. An
agricultural professor at Tuskeegee University in
Alabama during the Civil Rights Movement, Whatley,
a horticulturist, advocated for regenerative agriculture
and worked with Black farmers to develop
“pick-your-own farms” and “clientele membership
clubs,” where customers paid in advance for
the season of produce, guaranteeing business for
the farm. The idea was a direct response to Black
farmers being routinely denied loans from the
federal government and forced off of their lands
through discriminatory practices by the USDA. Yet
despite the efforts of Whatley and others, from 1910
to 1997, Black farmers in America lost 90% of their
land to those same practices. Today, while American
farms grossed over $601 billion in 2022 alone, just
1.4% of America’s farms are Black-owned."
“The whole CSA movement grows out of this
recognition that there’s not going to be support
from above from the government,” explained writer,
Clyde Ford, to Smithsonian Magazine, “you have to
find the support within the community,” The author
of Of Blood and Sweat: Black Lives and the Making of
White Power and Wealth, Ford continued, “Buy local
wasn’t just to support your community; buy local
was survival for Black folks. It was the only way, in
many instances, that they were able to survive.”
With FarmerJawn, Christa continues the legacy
of regenerative agriculture, a holistic approach to
growing that focuses on the integration of farming
systems, the local ecology as a whole, and the community-focused
economics of Whatley’s CSA model.
At FarmerJawn, CSA members can get a $400 membership
for the season and receive 14 weeks of fruits,
organic vegetables, herbs, tea, and honey.
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