Growing North Lafayette’s growers

Healthy foods, especially produce, have become increasingly hard to come by in low-income communities like North Lafayette. A new program by the team behind the Fightinville Fresh Market is hoping to help local low-income residents build back self-sufficiency through growing their own produce.

“For huge swaths of the north side of Lafayette, there is no no nearby source of actual food,” said Kimberly Culotta, one of the founders of the Fightinville Fresh Market, on Simcoe Street. Now, her organization, with the help of a grant funded by the United Way of Acadiana, wants to motivate residents to grow their own food, by providing materials and technical assistance to cultivate personal gardens.

The arrival of big chain grocery stores, especially Walmart, has driven out local mom-and-pop stores, Culotta pointed out. When Walmart closed in 2019, that left residents with few local options to buy healthy foods, all of which require traversing a major and dangerous roadway, the Evangeline Thruway. 

The problem is further exacerbated by the economics of grocery shopping. 

“Unhealthy, highly processed foods are what is actually affordable, so people with low income are pushed and driven toward buying unhealthy food,” Culotta said. “It’s not economically sustainable to be healthy.”

But there’s an untapped resource for affordable foods, specifically produce: growing your own. 

In Black communities, there is a long tradition of farming and gardening, Culotta noted. However, that tradition, along with Black farming practices in more rural areas, has suffered from decades of displacement, discrimination and economic disenfranchisement. Across the country, urban gardening projects have been striving to bring it back.

Culotta recalls a conversation with the father of a friend, who remembered vibrant gardens cultivated by his Black neighbors. 

“When he was growing up, poor Black people ate fresh produce because it was free,” Culotta said. Since the times of chattel slavery, Black Americans have learned how to work the soil to their advantage, being the first to cultivate many of the ingredients that are now staples of Southern cuisine, such as okra or black-eyed peas.

While the Fightinville Fresh program is not restricted on the basis of race, it is targeting low income residents of a primarily Black area, in hopes of bringing back self-sufficient farming to an area devoid of accessible alternatives, for residents of all skin colors.

As it stands now, the program aims to support 22 residents who want to become farmers on their own land, however limited it is. “All you have is a sunny porch? We have a vertical tower that we’ll set up with you,” Culotta said. “It’s going to be a very personal process.”

The grant will also be used to offer gardening workshops open to the public, not just those selected to participate in the program’s “Grow the Grower” initiative, as the gardening assistance portion has been dubbed.

Further, grant funds will be used for wash-and-pack stations and cold storage for those newly minted farmers, or experienced producers, with an overflow of produce to sell at the market. Growers don’t have to worry about setting up and manning a stand either: Market staff will sell their product on a consignment basis, taking a 20% cut to sustain market operations, with the rest going to the farmers themselves.

Many of the details, such as workshop dates or documentation that may be required to verify low-income qualifications are yet to be hammered out. “At this point, we’re really just trying to gauge interest, and then we will reach out to each applicant and have a conversation with them,” Culotta said.

The program may be especially helpful for elder farmers-to-be, who have more time on their hands but still live on a fixed, constricted income. “I hope that whole families might engage in this project together,” Culotta said. “We will give them the skills to succeed in the process of growing, to become lovers of growing.”