The roving urban farmer

Cameron Terry

Providing good food is a vital form of community action!                     

Margaret Gray Bayne

Wearing a Timberland knit cap, small hoop earrings, Humble Hustle hoodie* and brown cargo pants, Cameron Terry is a fresh take on Old MacDonald. But young blood looks worried as he examines some chard. 

One of the sites of Garden Variety Harvests in Roanoke VA. (Photographs provided by the subject unless otherwise noted.)

Cameron Terry, 33, is among a new breed of growers called “urban farmers.”  He owns Garden Variety Harvests in Roanoke, (pop. about 100,000) in Virginia. Founded in 2018, GVH has all the trappings of a full-fledged farm: rows of produce, well-maintained sheds, pick-up trucks, crop covers, and tarps covering heaps of soil and compost. 

But the farm is in a regular residential neighborhood where the city looms on three sides. There’s a house with a deck just in front of the farmstead and two more houses on either side.  

View of Garden Variety Harvest’s home base.

Cam Terry's GVH has many community connections and benefits. Over the past four years, he has grown crops on nine different sites: back yards and lots throughout the city.  

He’s also involved in public programs such as Agrarian Commons which supports community land ownership; LEAP, the Local Environmental Agriculture Project, which supports garden training for public school students; and the Morningside Urban Farm.

Garden Variety Harvests supports community programs such as LEAP.

 “What’s more important than knowing where your  food comes from?”

During those five years, Terry was “captivated” by the response of his friends and family.  “I enjoyed the way people reacted when I put purple beans in front of them or red  carrots.” At the same time, his enthusiasm for filmmaking waned. “I got really tired of video production as a means of making money and justifying to clients how much  videos cost. With vegetables, you don't have to do that. At the farmer's market, people  know why things cost what they do.”  

For more training, Cam and his partner, Chloe, put their possessions in storage, left  Denver and went to British Columbia, 1700 miles from Denver, to volunteer and  apprentice on organic farms. “I was looking for a business model for me as a  farmpreneuer. In Canada, I learned about the Curtis Stone model.” Stone, author of  “The Urban Farmer: Growing Food for Profit on Leased and Borrowed Land, 2015, runs Green City Acres, in Kelowna, British Columbia. Stone is one of many urban farmer  gurus with published books, YouTube videos, and lectures. “His claim to fame,” says Cam, “was that he was able to make a hundred thousand dollars in revenue on a  quarter acre of rented yards—his and his neighbors.” 

Pivotal training also included a weekend conference, conducted by Leah Penniman of Soul Fire Farm near Albany, NY. Penniman, author of Farming While Black. Penniman is a leading food sovereignty advocate and educator whose work focuses on training  beginning farmers, urban gardeners, and teenagers. 

Leah Penniman (right) and her sister at Soul Fire, a community farm in New York state. (Harper Collins/Allison Gootee)

Now the budding farmpreneur’s profit motive was augmented by an educational one. He started his own YouTube  channel featuring videos and historical mini-docs about organic farming, food justice,  land and ownership. The video “Certified Organic” focuses on why conventional growers need to be certified. 

But it’s not just weather or the available backyards and lawns that make Roanoke more hospitable: “There’s also the food culture. I was pleasantly surprised by the local food culture in Roanoke and a farmers market amenable to small growers. The farmers’ market doesn't allow large scale reselling. And so, it's a place where a small business  like mine could be competitive. 

It's been quite amazing, the amount of community we've been able to build around the business. I'm not making six figures but that never was the goal. I don’t think anybody gets into farming because they want to get rich. I enjoy the lifestyle, and don’t see myself doing anything else for at least the next 20 or 30 years.”

There are “not a whole lot of people who look like me at the farmers’ market.”

As positive as Terry’s experiences have been, he acknowledges “not a whole lot of people who look like me at the farmers’ markets.”  However he believes the notion of seeing farmers markets as ‘white spaces’ is something we counter by showing up as buyers and sellers. 

Sign posted on Cam Terry’s FB page with inset photo of North Carolina farmer Julius Tillery and his father. Terry does not have a tractor which is good for the land! It is possible to maintain soil health on land farmed with tractors, but it requires careful management and a focus on practices that mitigate the potential negative impacts. (Inset photo: courtesy of American Giant clothing)

The geographical context

The shortest driving distance from Denver to Roanoke, Virginia, is a little over 1500 miles. On  a map, the route looks like a slightly curved line that  starts in Denver and runs east across Kansas,  Missouri, Kentucky, and West Virginia before it  finally bends south towards Roanoke, the Capital of  the Blue Ridge that used to be a railroad hub and a  gateway to the American West. Today, the local  tourism department still touts it as a transportation  hub, known for distribution, trade, manufacturing,  health care, entertainment, and its convention  center. “Festival City” is one of its nicknames.

(Roanoke Regional Partnership)

During the transitional period, Cam learned he could  actually farm using other people’s backyards! But  not in Denver. “My biggest barrier was definitely  access to land and Denver was not the right place  for this.” The couple moved to Roanoke in the fall  of 2017 when Chloe’s parents, who had relocated  to Roanoke, offered their backyard. Terry and  Chole jumped at the opportunity and “hit the  ground running.” Roanoke’s climate is more  conducive to farming (average low temperature  around 47˚ F; about 20 inches of snow per year  compared) to Denver’s average low of 36˚ F and  whopping 55 inches of snow per year!  

 A testament of their enthusiasm for Roanoke is  how they promote it. “Chole and I sell everybody  on this cool place that we found every time we're talking to people back home.“ So far they’ve recruited his brother and Chloe's sister and  brother to join them.  

“I get asked all the time whether my farm  is organically certified.”

The answer is no. Conventional growers are permitted to use a near infinite list of chemicals in the growing of their products. And what we know about  worldwide  consequences of some of those methods seems to  keep evolving. There are aquatic dead zones in ecosystems, massacres of pollinator species, depletion of aquifers—all the result of bad agricultural practices and with no conventional  oversight as to how much of a dangerous chemical they want to use.  Producers who go organic want to have a more equitable and  sustainable relationship with the environment and provide their customers with a product they can be confident is safe and wholesome. 

Their farms are less likely to cause environmental  damage with the methods they’re allowed to use.  Yet they're required to spend thousands every year if  they want to call their products organic. So, what  I’m suggesting is perhaps the conventional  growers should be the ones who need to be certified so that we can be sure they are using  chemicals safely.”  (excerpt from GVH video)

Scouting for gardening spaces in Roanoke was not difficult. Terry contacts interested homeowners and looks over their property. “I follow up with  them to investigate if it makes sense for us to try to grow on their property.” He looks for  things like flat land, access to water, sunlight, decent soil and drainage and short driving  distances from the farmer’s market and his other sites. 

One of GHV’s backyard sites.

One GHV notice reads: 

Let us take all the garden chores off your honey-do list! GVH is currently  accepting land owners interested in turning idle yards into thriving gardens, all the while  contributing to slow food in the Roanoke area. If we can use your yard to grow strawberries or salad for farmers markets, you can count on a weekly basket of produce throughout the growing season! Fill out the form below to contact us and join the network! 

Cam Terry’s former videography work complements his current experience which has multiple artistic aspects, including his artistic garden photography. 

Cam Terry’s artistic landscape photography

When we originally spoke, Terry’s farm consisted of four plots in Roanoke: Wise Avenue Gardens, the home base; the North Huntington Boulevard location with winter garlic and greens and a new irrigation system; Morning Side Urban Farms, and another residential backyard. (An update on the GVH farming sites is at the end of this article.) In addition to plots, the sites have caterpillar tunnels to protect plants from heat and cold and  processing sheds. The actual growing concern measures about a third to a quarter acre. Terry believes managing a larger space is doable with the right infrastructure.  

“Acquiring these sites,” Terry says, “has not been difficult. If I wanted to stay in the yard  farming business forever, there would be no shortage of homeowner clients who would take me on. People around here are more interested than I can really keep up with.”  

However, “I struggle with the amount of inefficiency that comes with driving from plot to plot, not having a central place where I can have workers show up to. Right now, I spend a lot of time driving from place to place and making sure I have all the right tools for the day. We’re also maxed out for a one-man operation, and without a central hub or a single location, I don't really see how we can expand.” 

But he’s extended the business in another way with the GVH brand of condiments (including rainbow kim chi, fennel chi, beet curry kraut, radish pickles, apple tomato chutney, beet and greens chow-chow) colorfully shimmering in glass jars, and fresh-picked garden bouquets of flowers. 

Terry is looking for a permanent base for his farm. The requirements are close to town,  a minimum of 10 acres with three to eight acres suitable for planting, and room to build a house, a  café and farming structures like sheds and barns. He wants a location visible from the roadside to attract customers to the farm stand and cafe.  

“When the federal government legislates toward  farmers, they're not talking about small farmers […] like me.” 

— Cameron Terry 

He doesn’t believe that the COVID relief for farmers or proposed “Justice for Black Farmers” legislation which includes land grants for black farmers will help small farmers in  general like him in his land search. “When the federal government legislates toward  farmers, they're not talking about small farmers or very small farmers like me. I envision  a world in which one day maybe they are, but they're talking about large-scale  commodity farmers who take on massive amounts of federal debt every year and work  in the commodity system. These programs are generally the way they help big farmers.” 

Instead, Terry says, “We're working with a nonprofit called the Agrarian Commons,  which seeks to modify agricultural land and put agricultural land ownership in the hands of communities. And if anybody is interested in that land search, I would love for them  to be directed to the website for the Agrarian Commons or me directly.”