Most days, Patrick Brown kneels in the red clay of Warren County, North Carolina, running the soil through his fingers. 

His roughly 300 acre farm has been in his family since 1865 and has survived crisis after crisis. Now it has another important job to do — affordably feeding families in one of the state’s most persistent food deserts. It is not an easy task in a place where climate threats like storms are expected to cause the area to lose more crops and farmlands this century than pretty much anywhere else.

Brown is a regenerative farmer. Regenerative agriculture is a way of farming where you treat the soil like a living sponge by keeping it covered with plants, minimizing plowing, and adding compost so that each year the land grows richer, holds more water, and supports more life instead of being worn out.

By caring for the land, he said, it makes it easier to care for his neighbors. His farm delivers boxes of fresh produce to local families who otherwise wouldn’t have access, through a  Community Supported Agriculture program, and he teaches others how to farm sustainably. 

In a majority Black, low-income community with almost no other fresh-food outlets, his CSA is one of the few direct sources of fruits and vegetables. His town, Henderson, North Carolina, has only one grocery store for its 14,000 residents, a scarcity that Brown says creates “a convenience market for processed food” to flood the area and promotes chronic illness.

Brown’s program model operates on direct subscriptions of $25 per week, eliminating middlemen and connecting consumers directly to their food source at a price well below what most North Carolina grocers are offering. This year, he has over 100 members. Virtually all of his members are Black, he said, and they receive weekly boxes of vegetables accompanied by recipes that teach which foods benefit specific health conditions.

While the exact size of the boxes vary by the season, CSA boxes are typically a better value for customers because CSA farmers tend to include higher-value and specialty and native crops that are not found in grocery stores. 

“It gives the opportunity to learn and educate themselves on obesity and what non-processed foods can offer compared to processed foods they’ll get at a Dollar General or Dollar Tree,” Brown explained.

Not only do the families in his community benefit from his eco-friendly CSA, the soil does, too. Brown plants ‘cover crops’ like rye and buckwheat to blanket the soil in winter, helping it hold onto moisture for spring planting and making his fields less vulnerable to the droughts that have accompanied climate change as it heats the atmosphere and pulls more moisture out of land and plants. His focus on sustainability offers a model for other farms nationwide. Less than 5% of U.S. farms use regenerative soil practices. 

“We have to bridge the gaps and create ways and opportunities for producers like myself, nonprofits, and for-profits to see what ways can help diversify opportunities to create gaps and bridge for climate resilience,” he said.

How innovation is fighting North Carolina’s food deserts

Programs like Brown’s are part of a broader push to sustainably close food gaps across North Carolina. 

Research shows CSAs can improve food access in rural food deserts. These programs can boost the amount of produce families eat, offer it at prices that are as low as or lower than other local options, and cut down on long trips to distant grocery stores by providing more convenient pickup sites.

But traditional models often struggle to reach low-income households. Brown and other CSAs in North Carolina address this by focusing on affordability and education, reducing barriers through subsidized shares, offering payment plans, and accepting food assistance like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and Electronic Benefits Transfer (SNAP/EBT).

At North Carolina A&T University, a multidisciplinary team recently launched the Fresh & Local Nutrition Incentive Program, which reduces barriers by offering half-priced CSA boxes to people using SNAP benefits at a weekly campus market in East Greensboro. 

The project uses a ‘double-up’ model that matches SNAP dollars at a campus market, turning a $10 swipe into a box of in-season fruits and vegetables worth twice as much.

The impact extends beyond nutrition. 

Brown said he’s watched community members learn where their food comes from and how to sustain themselves on the land they inhabit. 

One longtime customer told him she’d never cooked some of the vegetables in the box before the recipes started arriving each week, but now her kids “ask when the farm box is coming” and help wash and prep the produce.

The plight of Black farmers

During the Biden administration, urban and small-scale farming initiatives received backing. The administration created more ways to deliver loans, and funded partnerships with community groups so food could reach those most in need. 

But there have been cuts during the Trump administration. The administration rolled back federal support for minority-owned farms and cut the Regional Food Business Centers program, which provided up to $100,000 in grant funding to small and midsized farms.

Federal data shows that a majority of Black-operated farms report very low annual sales compared with all farms and are more likely to need grants.

Yet, Black farms are less likely to receive support. USDA loan programs granted loans to 72% of white applicants in 2022, but only 36% of Black applicants. The disparity extends beyond financing. North Carolina’s Black farmers owned just 3% of farms in 2017. 

Climate change compounds the pressures on the remaining Black farmers. While regenerative practices build soil and land resilience, farmers “really don’t have any control” over extreme weather events, Brown said. Hurricanes and rainstorms flood fields and strip away topsoil, while the increasing number of winter storms freeze and kill crops and damage tools and equipment.

To keep his operation viable, Brown has made a strategic shift away from commodity agriculture, which is when big, single-crop farms grow things like corn and soy mainly for food corporations. 

Rather than gambling on commodity prices, Brown focuses on specialty crops: organic wheat for direct retail sale and industrial hemp fiber for textile and building manufacturing. He often sells hemp to clothing companies like The North Face and Patagonia, and also directly to consumers on his website.

But Brown is candid about limitations as the Trump administration’s support for Black farmers dwindles. 

Brown said he would not advise someone to start the farming journey without outside income, due to the compounding situation of declining federal support and climate threats. “I would advise them, especially during times now where there are no programs available for them to get started, to do as little as they can to get to where they want to be, but to apprentice at a farm where they can learn more over a period of time.”

Pathways to learn from farmers still exist. Organizations like WWOOF-USA connect aspiring growers with over 1,400 host farms nationwide for hands-on training. 

Sustainable food access for the next generation

Brown also opens his operation to aspiring farmers, demonstrating how to create local food systems and agritourism opportunities.

Many weekends out of the year, teens gather at Brown’s farm as he pulls carrots from the soil, handing them over for tasting while explaining how the cover crops beneath their feet hold moisture through droughts. Aspiring farmers from nearby lots shadow him, watching as he packs CSA boxes with recipes and diabetes-fighting greens.

Brown is building a model for how Black farmers can reclaim both land and legacy on a farm that his family has fought hard to retain control of.

He is tilling the same soil that his ancestors worked — first as enslaved people and then as sharecroppers during the reign of Jim Crow.

And it’s the same ground his father stood on four decades ago as trucks rolled past carrying toxic waste to a nearby landfill in 1982.

Brown’s father, Arthur Brown, a preacher and farmer, joined more than 500 protesters who were arrested during six weeks of demonstrations against the dumping in 1982. 

The protests failed to stop the landfill — 7,097 truckloads of contaminated soil were buried within 7 feet of groundwater. The contamination gave birth to clusters of cancer cases in the county and took decades to clean up. But they succeeded in birthing a movement. The Rev. Benjamin Chavis, who organized the demonstrations, coined the term “environmental racism” from his jail cell after being arrested with Brown’s father.

More than 40 years later, Brown’s experiment is bolstering a central belief that striving Black communities have enough power and resources to support one another. In 2021, he purchased the Oakley Grove Plantation house where his family was enslaved.

In the past decade, Brown has helped over 75 Black farmers adapt regenerative practices on their land, which in return has helped mitigate climate change impacts, made farming more profitable, and slowed land loss among Black farmers.

“We have to make sure that Warren County residents excel in growth, whether it be environmental, whether it be jobs, whether it be access to food,” he said.