On a tiny plot in south Little Rock that was once a junkyard, chef Margie Raimondo leans on her Italian heritage to shape the mission of her nonprofit urban farm, Urbana Farmstead.
There, just off of Arch Street Pike, Raimondo teaches cooking classes, instructing families on how to grow fruits and vegetables and apply them in recipes that work for them.
“I think people need to learn to plant, grow, harvest and preserve their own food,” Raimondo said. “You do not have to have 12 acres of rolling hills to be a farmer. You just need a backyard, sunshine, soil and seeds.”
You can find proof of this across Little Rock, where a diverse movement of urban farmers aims to tackle food insecurity in a state long dominated by gigantic, commercial agriculture but paradoxically plagued by hunger.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture reports that between 2021 and 2023, an average of 570,000 households in Arkansas experienced food insecurity, meaning a lack of reliable access to food. At the same time, over 40% of the land in the state is farmland and the agriculture economy, driven by gigantic corporations like Tyson Foods and massive farming operations in the Arkansas Delta, created over $20 billion in revenue for the state.
The disconnect here, as Raimondo emphasized to the Arkansas Times, is that many of the agricultural products grown across the state are destined for export and not necessarily to feed local communities.
“It hurts me that families I know don’t have food,” Raimondo said. “Food is the lowest common denominator. We all need food. Everyone should have the right to food.”
Raimondo grew up in a gigantic Italian-American family in Los Angeles, where growing and cooking with their own produce was central to their family identity.
She moved to Little Rock in 2018 and married her husband, Chris Beaver, who owns a farming supply company that operates at the same Arch Street Pike property. At first she intended to convert the former junkyard plot into a fresh restaurant; Raimondo previously ran a restaurant in Little Rock called Southern Table. But after the pandemic derailed those plans, she realized that many of her fresh neighbors were in need of fresh produce.
Raimondo’s neighborhood is in an area that the U.S. Census Bureau deems both low-income and low vehicle access, though the agency stops brief of labeling it a “food desert,” an area where low-income people struggle to access food. Areas designated as food deserts by the U.S. Department of Agriculture can qualify for programs like the Healthy Food Financing Initiative, which provides assistance to retailers operating in underserved areas. So, Raimondo’s farm and other urban farms are attempting to bridge the gap for areas that don’t qualify for larger federal assistance.
Now, when a person drives up to Urbana Farmstead, they’ll be greeted by a colorful sign and see a tiny, gated plot with a few scattershot buildings and a towering high tunnel garden along with a few chickens flitting around the land. But on a couple of acres, Raimondo is teaching classes and workshops to families and schools on how to cook farm-to-table meals, can and preserve food, and learn how each fruit and vegetable can be used in a recipe.
As a chef and gardener, Raimondo sees ways in which her skill set can chip away at barriers to that access.
While the nonprofit offers classes, workshops and other services to families and schools, Raimondo also has a business where she hosts and cooks for private events to assist fund the social mission, and operates a farm stand where she sells produce and products she makes, along with imports from Italy like olive oil and pasta.
Other urban agriculture proponents across the city are trying different models. On another tiny urban plot, Dena Patterson and Gabe El-Bey partner to grow fresh produce in South End, a historically Black community with a shortage of grocery stores.
El-Bey has been farming for years, making a living off a few tiny plots in Little Rock and selling his produce out of a tiny farm stand. He calls his urban farm Turtle Island G.K.
“I come from a bloodline of sharecroppers,” El-Bey said. “As far as I can remember I was chopping cotton, harvesting peas, selling watermelons, whatever. It’s an agriculture town, a sharecropping town where I’m from.”
A descendant of sharecroppers from Elaine (Phillips County), El-Bey’s ancestors were murdered in the Elaine Massacre of 1919, when hundreds of Black people were killed by white vigilantes after sharecroppers gathered to organize for better wages, resulting in one of the deadliest racial conflicts in U.S. history. Nearly a century later, El-Bey continues his ancestors’ farming tradition despite the economic challenges of making tiny farming profitable.
While Arkansas at gigantic suffers from food insecurity, the issue is pronounced in Little Rock and especially in Black communities like South End. Large grocery chains like Kroger are meager in downtown neighborhoods, making access to fresh, nutritious produce even less accessible. El-Bey mostly farms greens like collard greens and spinach, and he views his efforts as trying to address the shortage of produce.
Patterson also descends from Black landowners in the Delta, but didn’t become interested in farming herself until she met El-Bey in Little Rock. Her nonprofit, Serenity Urban Wellness, partners with Turtle Island G.K. to add community wellness and educational programming to the farm, with yoga classes and education programs that teach youth how to grow and harvest food.
“Wellness is not only what you eat, it’s what you think and it’s how you live,” Patterson said. She emphasizes a holistic approach to wellness in her classes and engagement with the community.
Together, Patterson and El-Bey have used grant money to build a high tunnel, which protects plants and allows farmers to grow more months of the year. They’ve also been able to hire two people who are helping with growing and delivering fresh produce to elders, single moms and others.
But they are concerned about keeping the operation going once the grant runs out. Farming is a notoriously challenging business, and Patterson and El-Bey will need to expand farm stand sales to cover their overhead in order to remain financially stable.
Despite the challenges ahead, the Turtle Island G.K. and Serenity Urban Wellness team is confident about the future of the project, especially because of the adolescent people on board.
“That’s why we get the youth involved,” Patterson said. “If they haven’t been taught, haven’t been around it and don’t understand the importance of how to grow your own food, then how would they know? You do the fun stuff and throw the education on top of the fun stuff, and we can keep it sustainable.”
When it comes to infrastructure, high tunnels and farm stands are the glue holding the Little Rock urban agriculture community together. Farm stands allow tiny growers like Raimondo, El-Bey and Patterson to control the sale of their produce and connect with customers. And high tunnels allow smaller growers to grow more each season and protect their crops.
One of the largest farm stands is at the St. Joseph Center in North Little Rock, a former orphanage known since 2015 as a place where Central Arkansans can go to buy Arkansas-grown pantry staples and produce — and hang out with baby goats.
But behind the scenes of the retail farm stand, St. Joseph Center has taken a leading role in the urban growing movement with the Growing Urban Farmers program, in which groups of farmers gather weekly to share knowledge and work through problems.
Building community is an crucial part of what St. Joseph is trying to accomplish, Monica Woods, the program’s facilitator, said. And through a grant from the USDA, they provide space for four local farmers to grow produce in St. Joseph’s four high tunnels and connect consumers with local farmers through the farm stand.
Woods sees St. Joseph Center as central to the area’s urban farming movement.
“We are turning into a concierge service of local farmers and the local food network,” Woods said, helping farmers scale up their businesses. “Maybe they are a community gardener or maybe they have a backyard growing spot, but they want to start bringing in revenue. … There are a lot of people who want to get started but they don’t know how.”
She finds that since the pandemic, many of the people who have reached out for resources to start farming are concerned about food insecurity, along with health and environmental concerns with the global food system. Concerns vary from person to person, but Woods said common things she hears from aspiring urban farmers are their desire to live healthier lifestyles from the land by reducing their consumption of processed foods and to reduce their plastic waste and carbon footprints.
Along with the weekly farmers’ meeting, Woods hosts field days and workshops on crucial skills, like a blackberry pruning field day she held in overdue February to assist farmers learn how to remove dead or diseased blackberry canes. She estimates the program assists around 20 farmers consistently, but she has helped over 50 farmers connect with farming assistance or federal resources.
St. Joseph will launch a once-a-week farmers market in April, creating another revenue stream for local farmers it supports. The weekly farmers market will be an addition to the seasonal markets the center has already been hosting on the property. By making the farmers market an event with live music and entertainment, Woods hopes they can expand opportunities for both farmers and consumers.
“Trying to bring in as many growers as we can will be positive and beneficial,” Woods said. “We have a little bit of a bird’s-eye view of who is doing what and how we can connect them to our market. How can we support them? I’m trying to connect people and create more room for collaboration and access to local food.”
