After a Year of Hard Work, Meacham Urban Farm in Downtown Tampa is Thriving
A year in, Meacham Urban Farm has gained several volunteers and a steady clientele.
Creative Loafing, Justin Garcia | Feb 11, 2022 | Updated 02/14/22 with input from Tampa Housing Authority.
Volunteers, along with a staffer, in the midst of work at Meacham Urban Farm
After a year of being open to the public, Meacham Urban Farm in Downtown Tampa now crawls with customers, volunteers and staff farmers on the weekends.
Last Saturday, Erin Feather pulled weeds between rows of tomato plants during her first volunteer shift at the farm. She brought her friends visiting from out of town to pitch in. They drove up from Feather's house in South Tampa because over the past year, she had heard good things and wanted to pitch in.
"Having local food like this is so important for the community," she said as she filled her bucket with weeds.
Feather and her friends were just three of eight volunteers at the two-acre farm that day, doing jobs ranging from harvesting to mulching as staff advised and worked with them. Meanwhile, the line grew at the checkout counter.
They sold an array of organic vegetables from the farm, including several varieties of tomatoes, kale, cabbage, carrots, herbs and pickled goods from the farm's storefront to the 25 plus customers at the farm that morning. Partnerships with other farms allow them to offer an array of choices, including meats and other types of vegetables and fruits, some of which they don't have on the farm. Across the farm on the north side, children fed the farm's 100 chickens, which lay around 360 eggs a week.
A child feeds the chickens at Meacham.
From its opening in February of last year to December, the farm had 2,500 sales. And from the opening until now, they've grown more than 60,000 pounds of produce.
The activity at the farm is a scene that appears as natural as the food that's grown there, but the journey to this point was full of hard work under the hot Florida sun.
Partners Travis Malloy and Joe Dalessio, along with three full-time staff, run the day-to-day operations at the farm. They've worked backbreaking hours unearthing concrete chunks from a previous demolition on the property.
At times, they worked from sunup to sundown underneath the blazing Summer heat, clearing the land for tilling and planting. Once they removed the concrete chunks, they still had to reckon with the sandy soil that makes it hard to grow anything.
But there were two positive things about the soil: it drains well, so it doesn't get flooded easily, and it wasn't contaminated with lead or any other toxic substances.
"It's hard work. But it's rewarding that people care about it," Malloy told Creative Loafing Tampa Bay.
They're all smiles now, after they've overcome both the debris and the tricky soil to cultivate the thriving urban farm.
From left to right: Steven Fox, Nicole Kubilins, Joe Dalessio, David Steven and Travis Malloy. Employees of Meacham Urban Farm.
Growing local food has been an important part of Malloy's life for nearly a decade. After working for 20 years as an electrical technician, Malloy felt compelled to farm for his community and founded TrailBale Farm in Temple Terrace in 2013. From him, growing local food is, "one of those things that don't have any downsides," despite the challenges faced.
His partner Dalessio started working with the soil at the age of 14. He says he is largely self-taught in farming but also graduated with a degree in environmental microbiology from the University of South Florida. What really inspired him was reading the works of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau.
"Reading those texts at a young age really opened my mind to self-reliance, living off the land," he said.
He also had digestive issues growing up, and had to cook healthy meals for himself. "So it was all these things happening at once, that changed the trajectory of my life and what I wanted to do, " he said.
Their personal journeys led them to today, where they help feed thousands of members of the downtown community. Before Meacham, that community was a federally declared food desert, the Tampa Bay Times reported.
Right across the street from the farm is Encore Apartment Complex, which has a capacity for over 1,000 residents and accepts people who use housing assistance vouchers. A large sign at the farm says it accepts SNAP and EBT government food assistance purchases. Malloy says that residents from Encore visit them regularly and that they've been able to help get fresh vegetables into the neighborhood.
This is why the Tampa Bay Housing Authority, along with Hillsborough County Schools, which owns the property, partnered with the farmers to get the place going. In 2018, the farmers received $345,000 of a $725,000 Federal Choice Neighborhood Initiative grant to get started. The remaining money from the grant went to curriculum development at Hillsborough County Schools. The farm was named Meacham in honor of Christina Meacham, the first Black school principal in Tampa.
Meacham Elementary, named after Christina, once stood near to where the farm now exists but was demolished in 2007 when the city removed Tampa's historic Central Park Village to build the Encore development.
The farmers originally planned on hosting a student education program for local schoolchildren, but COVID-19 put a roadblock in front of them. They hope to get the program going soon and Malloy says they're trying to work with the closest schools to get kids out there when it's safe.
Leroy Moore, Chief Operating Officer at the Tampa Housing Authority, said he is exceedingly thrilled with how the farm has stabilized operations, built a solid following and introduced nutritious, healthy organic and locally grown vegetables and fruits to Tampa's urban core.
"We always wanted to demonstrate that farming can not only coexist in downtowns but can thrive as a business and provide evidence that downtown central business districts can be considered sustainable livable neighborhoods," he said.
For all that Meacham has accomplished in the past year, it's a project that's still in the making. They're planting fruit trees now that they hope to see flourish in the coming years. And getting the soil just right is a process tested by time.
"It's gonna be a long effort to get the soil to be as fertile as it can possibly be," Dalessio said.
These winter and spring months are the glory days for Meacham, despite the cold. It's the summer heat that can really take a toll on the crops. In June, they'll switch from the current spring crops, which will be replaced by summer crops like okra, black eyed peas, hot peppers, sweet potatoes and yuca. It's for this reason that the farmers measure years not in the traditional method of calendar dates but in when the growing seasons begin and end.
The school district leased them the land for five years total, so they have at least four years left to cultivate the farm. They hope that for the seasons to come, they can continue to build the farm into an even more beneficial fresh food resource for the neighborhood.
"It's amazing to see people coming back, week after week to support what we're doing," Malloy said. "And we hope to just keep building on what we have, to keep providing good food for our community."
