WILBERFORCE, Ohio – The United States needs more farmers to replace those aging out in the nation’s top industry. According to the USDA, only one in 10 American farmers is under the age of 35. Between 2017 and 2022, the number of farmers 65 or older increased by 12 percent.

Facing this rapidly aging workforce, some in Ohio and other states are recruiting an underrepresented population in agriculture – Black people.

In 2022, Black farmers comprised approximately 1.4 percent of all farmers in the U.S. This represents a decrease from a high of around 14 percent in 1920.

Some, like Sharifa Tomlinson, are out to get more people of color involved in agriculture, even if on a small scale.

In 2017, Tomlinson founded a 12-acre urban sanctuary (LLC) near Dayton that she calls Arrowrock Farm. She became a full-time farmer in 2023. Arrowrock Farm is also a cooperative with seven or eight other local farmers participating. She is building it into a cooperative urban market for farmers of color and a demonstration farm, complete with housing for those learning about regenerative farming on the property.

“I always wanted to be a farmer from an early age,” Tomlinson said. “I wasn’t raised on a farm but did grow some vegetables at an early age. When I purchased this property, I had the goal of being a regenerative farmer with the idea of raising lots of chickens and growing food for the community. A lot of times we got into the rural areas, especially in Ohio, and you might be the only person of color there.”

Arrowrock is in the small city of Riverside, east of Dayton and quite close to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.

Tomlinson started with just 30 chickens. Last year she raised about 1,000 chickens for The Foodbank and grows vegetables for herself and her family on the farm. She works closely with Central State University, Ohio State University, University of Dayton and others to do research on the property. Last summer, she worked with recent immigrants from Rwanda who were growing beans. She also teaches people how to cook.

Tomlinson’s farm is another way that people can learn and research farming practices, in addition to helping people learn how to grow their own food.

“This research has given me the confidence I know I can succeed,” Tomlinson said.

Many Black farmers are drawn to small-scale, urban farming such as Arrowrock.

“We’re trying to just make people at little bit healthier,” Tomlinson said. “We’re also trying to find young people who want to learn to farm, and that’s really difficult.”

Tomlinson is a registered nurse and still works one day a week. She came to farming later in life. She said she kept seeing Black patients come in with diseases related to the food they were eating and knew they did not have good access to fresh foods. She purchased this 12-acre with a vision of helping those learn about the importance of fresh, health foods. She has done just that.

“In five years, I want to retire from farming, live on this very property, and watch other people farm,” Tomlinson said. “I’d like to teach classes like canning, processing, growing – I want to be that instructor. And in 10 years I want this property to be totally self-sufficient.”

Patricia Allen, executive director of the Black Indigenous People of Color Food and Farming Network based in Yellow Springs, Ohio, did come from a background of farmers. While Allen grew up in Dayton, her family founded an Illinois farming collective in the 1860s for Black farmers called Stringtown. Some of her earliest memories are of gardening in the summer with her parents and brother.

“That used to be a part of our DNA and our culture…growing tomatoes, growing the collards in the backyard and whatnot,” Allen said. “And I really feel like that’s a lost art.”

Allen grew up growing food and began to realize, as they got further into careers in different fields, that not many people understood how to garden, especially people who looked like them. Teaching people to grow their own food was a way to help others.

Allen said she wants to change that mindset and gain recognition for those working on smaller plots of land.

“I wanted to be a part of changing that mindset,” she said, “that if you’re producing food and you’re feeding your community, that’s what it means to farm.”

Similar efforts are taking place in the Bluegrass State, only on a larger scale. Black Soil KY of Lexington is a one-of-a-kind Black woman-founded and led 501c(3) nonprofit agribusiness established in 2017. It has invested over $1 million into Black farming operations, culinary businesses, creators, craftspeople, and makers through grants, strategic partnerships, sales and agritourism activities.

For Black Soil KY, part of the solution lies in reconnecting Black Kentuckians to their agricultural heritage.

“We’ve always been focused on bringing rural farm products to our urban communities,” said Ashley Smith, founder and CEO of Black Soil KY. She said her work is inspired by Lexington’s Black hamlets, rural settlements within Fayette County which were hubs of Black life and community.

“Black Soil KY brings the increased population of those living in urban communities back into what often is a two-to-three generation removed connection to the land and agriculture,” she said.

The organization aims to address both rural and urban food insecurity by empowering Black farmers, who face significant barriers in the agriculture sector.

“Oftentimes, farmers or folks desiring to farm become discouraged because the information is just so convoluted,” Smith said.

The agriculture industry’s regulatory hoops, while powerful tools to protect the public and enforce good practices, can often be hard to navigate for newcomers without pre-established connections to the industry. But Smith sees a future where the loss of generational knowledge can be bridged with horizontal knowledge sharing.