This is the third in a six-part series of stories produced through a partnership with the Southeast Tennessee Young Farmers Coalition.

Before you hear the stories about Miss Rose or the homeless man's cantaloupe or the way the dozens of kids plant-steward-harvest like a 21st-century army of Old McDonalds, there are a few facts that bear standing up, each flowing out of this very special farm in the middle of a south Chattanooga food desert.

Last year, the urban farm at The Bethlehem Center on West 38th Street produced an enormous amount of food.

"Four thousand pounds," said Damon Bartos.

Damon's the farm coordinator - the man growing all the food on a postage-stamp plot of land.

"One-third of an acre," said Lillian Moore.

Lillian's the Director of Community Impact - that's a good term, community impact - to describe the farm's work. Why?

They give all their food away to the Alton Park community.

"150 to 200 families per month," said Lillian, who remembers something Joel Tippens - our city's urban farm pioneer - used to say.

It takes a village to feed a village.

Damon grew more than 40 different varieties last year, from strawberries to peaches to collards.

So, you must be thinking he's a veteran grower, right? An old codger of a farmer? Coming in with gobs of experience?

"None," he said. "This is my second growing season."

Wrap all these facts together - 4,000 pounds, 200 families, all receiving free organic food - and you realize why ground zero for an urban farm renaissance may be right here: the one-third acre farm surrounded by old brownfields on West 38th Street in Alton Park.

Just wait till you hear what the kids have to say.

More than a century ago, a group of Methodist women banded together to create the origins of the Bethlehem Center. One founder was Black. One, white. Both had created Bible studies that merged together into early community support.

This became known as the Bethlehem Center.

Today, The Beth serves Alton Park families with all kinds of loving service.

Like its urban farm.

About a decade ago, folks there installed raised beds.

The raised beds didn't take. Inattention, lack of funds, what-not.

Three years ago, Lillian was hired.

"Food justice is the ability for all families to have agency in all the choices they make with household food," she said. "The injustice comes in when we have systems and spaces that rob them of the ability to make those choices."

In Alton Park, "there is a pretty serious lack of infrastructure and investments in food and healthy food," she said.

A graduate of Univ. of Tennessee at Chattanooga, she studied environmental policy, worked for Water Ways then with Joel Tippens and City Farms Growers Coalition.

Damon? The Chicago native had moved to Chattanooga a few years back. He was headed for the classroom, with a job offer to student-teach high school biology. He'd been a part-time educator at the Beth, helping launch the after-school Garden Club.

"He has this tenacity. He really cares and was great with the kids. He keeps troubleshooting until stuff works," Lillian said.

So, she made an offer:

Why don't you take over the farm program?

In 2024, Damon - with zero farming experience but a wellspring of compassion and no-quit grit - said yes to running the urban farm. Prep-work, ground-work, planning, 100s of hours on YouTube or TikTok. But the best help?

"An 8th-grade science textbook on root systems and plants," he said.

He launched the 2024 growing season with full bore wholesome practices: all organic, no plastics, drip irrigation, a thick "lasagna" mulch system, soil amendments, cover crops, no-till, bone meal, companion and rotational planting, a kind sensitivity for life and constant eyes: he kept watch, paying attention to the wind coming down from the mountain, early signs of blight, what works, what doesn't.

"My life would be so much easier with black plastic, but what am I doing to the soil? Your soil is like your savings account," he said. "If I take from it, I have to put something back."

What's true for the soil is true for communities.

"I remember what this site used to be. If we can create some little space out here that is doing all these organic practices, we are leaving the space a little better than when we found it," he said.

The farm's 19 or so raised beds are abundant.

In a zip code of seemingly ongoing extraction, the urban farm keeps adding and adding.

There are strawberries, lemon balm, okra, lettuce, collards, peaches, cucumbers, garlic and grapes, honeybee hives and honey, zucchini, sweet potatoes, melons - "last year, we grew over 1000 pounds of watermelons" - marigolds, okra, ground cherries, spinach and rows of tomatoes.

How do we celebrate Damon, 27, and Lillian, 28? The 30 Under 30 Awards? They're part of the Beth team - one colleague prepares 800 meals per day for kids and families - that offers fresh fruits and vegetables in a context of education, playfulness and love.

"We're proud to be a part of a much larger food ecosystem in a neighborhood of resilient people," Lillian said.

Chefs, too, have noticed. Calliope featured Damon's produce, with Chef Khaled AlBanna calling it among the best he's tasted.  

Damon sells at the farmers' market - every third Saturday - at Massey's Kitchen on Lookout Mountain.

The Beth's urban farm is one of two urban farms in Chattanooga. Despite all this - Calliope, 4000 pounds, 200 families - Damon isn't sure what the future holds. Budget cuts. Strained resources. (You can financially support The Beth and its urban farm here.)

"I hope to exist still," he said.

"Hey mister, can I show you something? Would you come over here and look at this?"

Christian is nine years old. He's part of the Beth's Garden Club, a group of neighborhood kids who learn and work with Damon, intern Grace Burks and Lillian.

He called us over to a raised bed. Pointed in the ground.

"That's a carrot," he said. "You just put a seed in there and it starts growing."

They were on a scavenger hunt: calendula, cucumbers, oregano.

Garlic.

And worms.

"We found lemon balm and a peach tree and a sunflower," said Faith, 9. "You want a strawberry?

"A blackberry?"

She's been coming to the farm since Damon and Lillian began.

"Everybody here seems like my family," she said.

The afterschool center serves more than 80 neighborhood students during the school year. Part of that? Farm education. The farm has two bee hives and a hoop house.

"I learned to make sure you watch where you step and a strawberry is not a berry because the seeds have to be inside the berry, not outside," said Faith.

Damon pointed to Avant, 9.

"He actually planted half the strawberries," he said.

We walk over to the strawberry bed, some 30 strides long.

"We have to dig a hole then plant them and put the dirt back," Avant said.

Near the peach tree, Damon shouted: anybody want to try fresh garlic?

It's a question repeated 100s of different ways: want to try carrots? Cabbage? Who wants to try okra, cherry tomatoes or lemon balm? Damon and Lillian never stop offering food, like eternally hopeful tour guides, opening doors and offering on-ramps that often seem food-desert-impossible.  

(Obesity rates are higher in food deserts. Being overweight as a child could double the risk of adult obesity, a new study shows.)

Garlic, though, isn't the answer.

"I'm not making my breath smell like the Grinch," Faith said.

Christian, tentative, tries one bite.

Nope. "Can I get some water please?"

The larger community has responded. Folks, grilling burgers, stop by for onions. Damon, close to tears, remembers one homeless man who stopped by for a cantaloupe.

"It was like he had forgotten what fruits look like," he said.

(Watch our Youtube video of Damon telling the story here.)

One day, Miss Rose stopped by. At 4'11", with dentures, she was a "firecracker," said Lillian, "the perfect person."

She asked for some food.

"I walked her home with 20 pounds of produce," she said.

I don't have any family in town, Miss Rose told Lillian as they walked.

I don't either, said Lillian.

The two women turned and looked at one another.

Maybe we could be family together.

"We developed a super sweet relationship," said Lillian. "She'd call me her granddaughter."

Lillian helped care for her after cataract surgery. Drove her to doctors' appointments. Helped with her water bill.

I haven't taken a shower in a couple weeks, Miss Rose said.

I use the hose at the neighbor's house when they leave.

Last winter, Miss Rose died.

"This is not a singular event," said Lillian. "There are a lot of Miss Rose's out there."

So, the growing continues. Miss Rose, cantaloupes, kids planting strawberries, hey-mister-come-see-this-carrot ... the growing must continue.

"I'm really proud of it," said Lillian. "By no means do I think it's enough or solving food insecurity, but until you have a model, you don't know what's possible.

"When you take an area with decades of pollution and neglect and we can grow anything on it, that's a small light.

"And people get to go home with some really good tomatoes."

This is the third in a six-part series produced in a partnership with the Southeast Tennessee Young Farmers Coalition. The series profiles young farmers in the region. Each farmer profile will contain these questions and answers. Here's Damon:

What do you love most about farming?

I love being outside. I love hearing the birds, seeing the bees head-first in flowers, seeing butterflies flutter over my head, and I love having my hands in the dirt.

I love growing food for people, whether it’s a family in need getting my produce from a food pantry or it’s someone sitting in a James Beard-nominated chef-owned restaurant, I love that people are sitting in togetherness enjoying something I grew.

There’s something beyond nourishment that food allows for; it’s fostering a community, and even though these folks don’t know me personally, they know a part of me just by eating something I worked hard on growing.  

Most of all, I love the nurturing aspect of farming, on the organic, environmental stewardship, regenerative side of the house. You have to nurture your space or it will not reward you. It starts at the soil level, constantly adding organic matter, checking the pH, feeding your microbiome, applying cover crop, refusing to till, not using plastic so there is no microplastics in my food source.

My soil on my farm will be better each year I farm on it so that one day, when I leave this spot, someone can pick up in a much better start than I had it.

I love nurturing and taking care of my production plants; there’s something really cool about taking care of a plant whether it’s 20 days like radishes or 120 days like watermelons. Everyday you are taking initiative towards something with the end goal in mind that you are going to make a small change in your community's food source or to someone’s dinner table. And I love how farming nurtures me. It has made me a better person undoubtably. It has taught me patience and compassion. It gives me confidence and it makes me feel fulfilled. Farming saved my life in a time where everything felt pointless.

What is the hardest part of farming?

Organic farming is hard. It’s hard to fight pests and disease with spray bottles and household items when you know there are 10 other ways to do it right and easy but they aren’t organic. It’s even harder when the climate is changing. Controlling the independent variables has become harder.

Coming from a science lab background, I flourish in controlled sterile environments, where the only independent variables that come in to play are ones I’ve introduced intentionally. Part of that control sterile technique has helped me out tremendously in farming because I am able to treat my space with the scientific method, keeping things the same and controlled but one thing that has made farming difficult for me but as well as many farmers is the weather and environment shifts.

I cannot control the weather, though I wish I could. Last year in the summer, we were in a drought; this year, we’ve gotten more rain than we can withstand. Last year, the farmers' almanac said the last frost date would be November 1st. It was 80 degrees that day. Predicting that kind of weather is impossible.

The change in climate is prominent and negatively impacting the farm. My fall crops were not ready till December or January because how hot November was. The pests stayed out longer and diseases were able to spread more because of the extended warm temperatures. Chattanooga shifted zones this year to 8A even. The intensity and change in weather patterns will be a problem that will get worse year after year, and farmers will either have to shift crops to tolerate or witness our demise.

What inspires you and keeps you going?

The people, the community, and the supporters.

Last year was my first year growing and I did not expect to succeed, and when we did, I was on top of the world. I had a paid salary a big budget to run with, and if I errored there was no pressure because no one expected anything of me. This year in January was alot scarier; funding was scarce, grants disappeared, NRCS reps couldn’t answer phone calls or keep contact, and this year, there was no room for error because an entire community is now relying on your food production.

The community inspires me to support them. What has inspired me this year is the people, as well. The people that liked my produce so much last year that they are calling dibs on it this year. The recognition that we have gotten, although we may be working with half the budget this year as last year, we have articles being written about our projects, media coverage of our urban farming practices and our hope is that the more public coverage we have for our project the more donations and support we can receive to continue.

After a larger farm in town - Quail Run Farms - cut off our partnership to sell our produce ,we were scattered trying to find a new income source to offset our budget costs. The Lookout Farmers' Market at Massey's Kitchen and Chef Khaled AlBanna from Calliope have been our avenue sources to making income to continue our farm; without those two revenue sources, we would not be operating next year and for that I can be nothing but appreciative and inspired to continue farming.

I am just the farmer taking care of plants, and if it weren't for the community and the people, I would be stuck with thousands of pounds of produce for my compost piles. It’s the want from others that inspires me to fill the need.

What do you think are some misconceptions people have about farming or other agriculture work?

That environmental stewardship or healthy organic farming practices are too much work. They are not.

Organic farming is easy. It’s a lot of work under the notion that you need to constantly do pests walks remove pests by hand, spray essential oils rather than pesticides, and practice vertical growing to allow wind and the sun to remove some of your pests, but that’s kind of work - although tedious - takes just as much effort and time as spraying pesticides and tilling your soil in my opinion.

Organic farming is easy if you care.

I would never sell or give away food I would not personally eat.

The other misconception I’ve learned about farming is that the grocery stores have lied to you. We have grown so used to all produce being in the store at all times all year, but that produce is not local, and it certainly is not fresh. It is not realistic that you should be able to buy tomatoes in January and strawberries in February unless they are coming from some far away location.

A lot of folks have misconceptions about what the seasonality or true local produce is. Also we are so used to the giant perfectly shaped red tomatoes or the hole-less greens that have become the standard of healthy food and it's not. Healthy food has holes, organic food has holes. Organic tomatoes not pumped with Miracle-Gro are small and have cracks and markings.  

What do you hope to achieve with your farm in the next ten years?

I hope to exist still. Simply put: I do not know with funding cuts for food security, crowd-funding for salaries or my line of urban farming garden-for-the-community-style career if we will exist in 10 years.

We are one of two urban farms in Chattanooga. In 10 years, I hope that we are still working and supporting our community and if for some reason my salary cannot be paid or the Bethlehem Center closes down, I hope that anyone - whether it's volunteers, community members or a stranger could pick up where I left off at my spot and farm because we stewarded the land so well that it will be farm safe forever.

The Southeast Tennessee Young Farmers Coalition (SeTNYF) works with farmers across the Tennessee-Alabama-Georgia region, connecting them with the tools, resources, and people they need to build a successful farm business.

SeTNYF is a fiscally-sponsored Chapter of National Young Farmers Coalition. Young Farmers has a mission to shift power and change policy to equitably resource our new generation of working farmers.

Story ideas, questions, feedback? Interested in partnering with us? Email: david@foodasaverb.com

This story is 100% human generated; no AI chatbot was used in the creation of this content.

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