YELLOW SPRINGS, Ohio – Agraria Center for Regenerative Practice is giving back to the environment, regenerating the soil, water, and increasing biodiversity, thus improving the nutrient quality of the food they raise while investing back into the community.

It’s also home to the George Washington Carver Farm, an 18-acre production site that will assist underserved growers.

Agraria evolved from a previous nonprofit, the Arthur Morgan Institute for Community Solutions founded in 1940. Morgan was a well-known civil engineer and educator whose aim was to promote small communities. That was the core of Agraria’s work until 128 rural acres of land came up for sale just outside of Yellow Springs, Ohio.

With community support, Agraria was able to buy that land. But how did it fit into their mission? 

“We realized that climate change is a big issue and land use practices can be problematic,” said Alexandra Klug, outreach director with Agraria. “Conventional farming can be destructive to the soil and the climate if it is not done properly. So we decided to start a regenerative farm in Greene County, Ohio; that has been our focus for the past five years.

“We see farming and land use in this kind of work as a holistic practice,” Klug said. “We want to invest in our staff and our people just as much as we do in the land. Everything needs to be functioning successfully to be functioning at all.”

The nonprofit is currently developing 30 acres into rotational grazing and 13 acres in silvopasture, which is the deliberate integration of trees and grazing livestock operations on the same land, Klug said.

Agraria also hosts and supports research projects by universities and groups. They conduct their own limited on-farm research. Currently, that focuses on sweet potatoes, bees, mushrooms and heritage grains.

The George Washington Carver farm at Agraria was born out of the Regenerative Farm Fellowship, a program started two years ago with six participants. The goal was to teach beginning farmers in the Black Indigenous People Of Color (BIPOC) community regenerative farm skills through training, incubation, experimentation, and cooperative grants and enterprises.

Carver was an educator and a servant for the betterment of Black people stuck in the agricultural system. He was so far ahead of his time and, as a Black man in

the south at that time, so much of his work has gone unrecognized, Klug said.

“We decided it was an important legacy, and we did a capital campaign to get the infrastructure we need to set the George Washing Carver site in production,” said River Johnson, assistant land director. “We are designing that area to be a space where we can provide hands-on education opportunities.

“We are starting to build the site out,” Johnson said. “There was an existing high tunnel, so we had high-tunnel production of tomatoes, peppers and okra. We opened up a quarter acre of squash, melon, peppers, tomatoes and a variety of grains. In a short time, we opened an onsite farmers market here at Agraria.”

A section of the farm will be dedicated specifically to the work of Carver. It will feature peanuts and sweet potatoes while using regenerative methods that he emphasized, such as crop rotation, nitrogen building and cover crops, Johnson said. Another area will demonstrate the medicinal value of herbs which also coincides with Carver’s work.

The Carver Farm will bolster Agraria’s existing work in this area, including the Regenerative Farmer Fellowship, the comprehensive farmer education program, and BIPOC Farming Network, which connects food producers and activists around the country.

For information on programming and upcoming events, visit agrariacenter.org.