Week 4: Helping Black-Owned Farm Tours
After an awesome week in St Louis, our team set out for Atlanta to work with Georgia Black-Owned Farm Tours. This was the longest section of the road trip. To make it easier on ourselves we split the trip into two legs: St Louis to Chattanooga on Friday and then Chattanooga to Atlanta on Sunday. While the drive to Chattanooga was rather boring, traversing the seemingly endless fields of farmland reminded us how big America is, and how significant agriculture’s impact is on the landscape and the economy. Shortly after crossing into Tennessee, we made a pitstop in Nashville for dinner at a Japanese-Thai restaurant where we discovered the euphoria that is tempura cheesecake.
Fueled up, we hit the road once again and made it to Chattanooga at dusk. After seven hours of driving, we finally re-entered the Eastern Time Zone. We spent just one full day in Chattanooga, but we made the most of it by visiting local patisseries and eating our fill of pimento cheese and fried green tomatoes. The city was hosting an Ironman triathlon the next day and so the riverfront was lined with sports goods vendors galore. Jacob even got a massage at an athlete’s tent. He said something about “NASCAR’s a sport and I just did all that driving. I earned this.”
The next day we left early to make it to Atlanta. It would have been nice to spend more time in The Scenic City, but we had booked a tour with Georgia Black-Owned Farm Tour (GBOFT) so we could better understand their business model before beginning the work. GBOFT is a small non-profit that organizes public tours of Black-owned farms in Georgia in an effort to educate the public about issues Black farmers face, advocate on behalf of the farmers, and compensate them for their time through direct sales during the farm tour as well as a lump sum payment from GBOFT.
To understand why there’s a need for such an organization, you have to look back at the history of the United States. Black landowners have been systemically and acutely discriminated against since the Jim Crow era. Since 1920 the amount of acres owned by Black farmers has fallen over 70%; a value of $320 Billion dollars vanished through various means, sometimes in the form of discriminatory USDA practices, and others in the form of violent mobs chasing Black families off their land. GBOFT was founded to help Black farmers reclaim this tremendous loss of generational wealth.
The tour was stellar, highly illuminating, and a rewarding experience. We had the opportunity to speak directly to farmers and understand their challenges. What struck our team as most significant was the variety of backgrounds and experiences among the farmers. Some farmers had been in the business for decades, while others were new to growing. Despite that, both groups experienced similar challenges in navigating regulations and securing financing, but they’ve seen success in CSAs and other direct sales methods.
On Monday we met with GBOFT to discuss how we can best serve their needs and settled on developing a marketing strategy. During the tour, we got a good sense of who the current GBOFT customers are, but the company wants to expand to new consumer segments. Thus, we set about understanding who those new customers might be and how to reach them.
When we weren’t developing GBOFT’s new marketing strategy, we explored the City in the Forest via the Beltline — a 22-mile pedestrian and bicycle path built atop a former railway that encircles the city. Our Airbnb in Inman Park was the perfect launching point to reach Atlanta landmarks like Martin Luther King Jr’s boyhood home, Piedmont Park, and Krog Street Market. Jacob and Aaron lived in Atlanta prior to Michigan so they served as great guides through the city’s history and culinary scene.
By week’s end, we had identified three new consumer segments for GBOFT to target and created a roadmap of services to offer each segment. This plan will allow GBOFT to diversify its offerings and scale its operations. From here, the team will go their separate ways for summer internships, but the bonds we forged this month will certainly last a lifetime.
You can read more about issues facing Black farmers here:
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/apr/29/why-have-americas-black-farmers-disappeared
