In fall 2022, when Mecklenburg County received a $14,000 grant to be put toward a farmland preservation plan, Cherie Jzar of Deep Roots CPS Farm in northwest Charlotte thought it signified that the county was on the right track.
Then came a meeting of the Mecklenburg Board of County Commissioners in March 2023, when the farm preservation plan was adopted, at which District 2 commissioner Vilma Leake made a comment that showed Jzar the type of misinformation she was working against as a local urban farmer. (Discussion begins around 1:09:00 mark of video embedded below.)
“One of our commissioners said in the meeting when they adopted it, ‘Farmers? We got farmers in our community? When I think about farmers, I think about somebody out east with overalls and the straw hat on,’” Jzar recalled. “And I was just furious. I was like, ‘What in the world? You’re about to pass a farmland preservation plan and one of our commissioners is asking who are the farmers?’ So that’s what inspired it.”
By “it,” Jzar is referring to the formation of the Growers Network, a coalition of Mecklenburg County farmers, advocates and adjoining agencies who have been working together to better inform one another about resources and opportunities available to local farmers — and better inform the elected officials who control those opportunities.
“I invited every county commissioner [to our farm]. I sent an email to every one of them and said, ‘Hey, I’m glad you passed this plan. It’s great that we’re preserving land. We also need to preserve farmers and support farmers and increase the number of farmers. Come to our farm, you’ll see a farmer, and you’ll see a farm in Mecklenburg County,’” Jzar said. “So that was the impetus about it.”
Having launched their family-operated urban farming business in 2019, Cherie and her husband Wisdom Jzar quickly entered the small group of farmers still operating in Mecklenburg County, and an even smaller group of Black farmers in the area.
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Since then, the pair have worked to not only increase food access for those in the Beatties Ford Road corridor but to strengthen the network of farmers working toward their own similar missions through advocacy and education.
At a recent meeting held by Mecklenburg Soil and Water Conservation District Supervisor and Chair Barbara Bleiweis at Renfrow Hardware in Matthews, some members of the Growers Network had a chance to interact with NC Commissioner of Agriculture Steve Troxler.
Together, local stakeholders discussed how local farmers often struggle with navigating planning and zoning regulations, how to capitalize on the continued growth of the Charlotte Regional Farmers Market, and how improvements at the market could help farmers and community members.
For the Jzar family, the Growers Network is just the latest step in their ongoing mission to connect communities with fresh food and a more informed outlook.
Launching Deep Roots CPS Farm
Married since 2003, Cherie and Wisdom originally began doing urban farming with a goal to provide fresh fruits and vegetables to their family. In 2019, after that work made them more aware of food access issues in Mecklenburg County, they launched Deep Roots CPS as a business.
The couple farmed separate plots spread piecemeal around the city, offered up by folks with extra land they weren’t using — unknowingly forming the beginnings of their evergrowing “green network,” as Cherie called it.
Predictably, developmental pressure pushed them off of the largest plot they were farming, so they began looking for a stable space. They found a 7-acre property off Primm Road near Oak Hills Park, located between Oakdale Road and Beatties Ford Road in northwest Charlotte, and began farming it in 2021.
Between that time, COVID-19 swept through Charlotte and the rest of the world, uprooting countless businesses and forcing others to pivot whatever plan they operated under. For urban farmers like the Jzar family, however, the pandemic actually pushed people their way.
With distribution channels shut down across the country and grocery stores limiting their hours, people began to rethink where they get their food.
“People reached out to local farming communities, and then farmers markets were some of the only places the governor said were essential so they didn’t shut down,” Jzar recalled. “So a lot of people discovered local farmers and local food, and demand was very high, which was something that we were able to capitalize on because we had started our business a year prior to COVID.”
Their location along the Beatties Ford Road corridor also allowed the Jzars to serve a community that struggles with food access even when there’s no pandemic on.
According to Cherie, that was no mistake; it actually played a large role in choosing the farm’s location.
“We wanted a property in northwest Charlotte; we wanted it as close to Beatties Ford as possible,” Cherie said. “I said that we wanted to address food insecurity, right? And so we know that they call them food deserts, even though there are other terms that we could use — one is food apartheid — but there is this disinvestment along that area, and we wanted to be the change that we wanted to see in the world and invest in a farm that people can come to.”
Deep Roots CPS — the acronym stands for Community Planning Solutions — began doing more community engagement, not only hosting events and allowing people to shop for produce on their property but going out into the community.They partnered with Historic West End Partners to build 60 4-foot-by-4-foot garden beds in and around the West End.
“We wanted to have the youth see farmers that look like them, have the community see people who look like them growing their food, people who care about them growing their food, and then take it a step further, just so they see the food growing in their community,” Cherie said.
Working toward change
According to Cherie Jzar, a big reason why she and Wisdom launched Deep Roots was to make an impact on the lack of farmers of color they knew to exist in and around Mecklenburg County. As they grew the business, the disparity became more glaring.
They saw how, due to systemic discrimination by governmental agencies like the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) over the years, farmers of color from previous generations lacked resources and opportunities enjoyed by other farmers who enjoyed closer relationships with the USDA.
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They learned how, as farmland shrank in Mecklenburg County, the state’s largest farming agency, the North Carolina Cooperative Extension, shifted its focus from farmer support to gardening and nutrition-based programming locally.
“We were struggling just to find information, and it wasn’t until we stumbled upon a couple of farmers in Huntersville who started to share information, and then people started reaching out to us, asking us for information, that I was like, ‘We all need to be together so we can support one another,’” Cherie said.
She came across a research article from the American Farmland Trust that found that more than half of all farmers say they get most of their information from other farmers.
“So I was like, ‘Okay, we need to form a group that our whole intention is to network, to share resources, to share information, to support one another so that we can be the help that we need and we can speak for ourselves,” Cherie said.
She helped launch the Growers Network in late 2022 and early 2023, originally focusing on the county’s formulation of a new farmland preservation plan but has continued to cultivate the coalition to advocate for each other and residents who need more access to produce and fresh foods.
The July 1 meeting between local farmers, officials and agency representatives gave a glimpse at the issues the Growers Network is currently focused on. Multiple farmers at the meeting, for example, discussed how they struggled with zoning regulations in the county — regulations that some of them shouldn’t even need to worry about as farmers.
State law grants exemptions to most zoning laws for properties recognized as “bona fide farms,” allowing them to build sheds, barns and the like on their land without having to go through a lengthy permitting process.
According to Jzar, however, many farmers who should be exempt aren’t even aware that the exemption exists. She said inspectors should be informing these folks of their rights to an exemption rather than placing more work on themselves and the farmers by moving forward with rezoning or permit processes.
The group at the July 1 meeting also discussed the continued growth of the Charlotte Regional Farmers Market, which Troxler said is operating at a profit for the first time in its existence. The vendors in attendance discussed how they could help each other expand the days when they’re present at the market, but also expand resources for people shopping there.
Troxler was reportedly surprised to learn that, unlike other farmers markets in the Charlotte area, EBT food assistance is not automatically accepted at the market. Instead, it’s up to each separate vendor whether to accept EBT, which can be hard for businesses without a brick-and-mortar location.
The Growers Network will be working in the coming months to bring the North Carolina Local Food Council onboard at the market, as that is the organization that has helped expand the use of EBT at other similar markets. Jzar said she’d also like to see a bus stop closer to the market to increase accessibility.
While all of this is going on, the Jzar family is also preparing to host its first Youth Summer Camp, which will run from July 22-26. Young participants will spend the week learning both how to grow and raise things on an urban farm and the importance of food access and food justice.
“We’re calling all the campers ‘future farmers,’” said Jzar, “hopeful, with fingers crossed, that we light somebody’s fire to really want to work in this space.”
She knows the best way to grow a network is to start with deep roots.
