The Power of Sustainable Urban Farming: an Interview with Tosha Phonix

Tosha Phonix, Food Justice Organizer at Missouri Coalition for the Environment

Source: Women’s Earth Alliance (2020)

Taking on the role of Food Justice Organizer for the Missouri Coalition for the Environment in 2018, Tosha Phonix has utilized her platform to be a beacon for Black growers in and around St. Louis to turn to. From supporting Promise Zone residents through the Neighborhood Leadership Fellows program and Neighborhood Leadership Academy to spearheading various initiatives like the Food Equity Advisory Board which brings together community leaders in the fight for food justice, Tosha’s work has been influential in promoting community development through improved access to fresh, healthy food. In my conversation with Tosha, we discuss her journey in growing food, the role of race in navigating the agriculture industry, and the continued need for a food justice movement in St. Louis.

If you were to approach Delmar Boulevard, located in St. Louis, Missouri,  from the South, you would walk through a neighborhood that is 70% White. Though if you approach that same road from the North, you would find yourself amidst a community that is 99% Black. This disparity, known colloquially as the “Delmar Divide,” is no coincidence. Rather it is symptomatic of the decades of calculated de facto segregation ingrained throughout an oppressive history. Indeed, those numbers are by design. Though beyond the conspicuous racial polarization found between each community, another disparity runs deep as well: food accessibility. 

In 2014, it was reported that 54.9% of St. Louis City residents live in neighborhoods classified as food deserts, per the standards of the USDA. Limited access to affordable and nutritious foods gives way to many adverse health effects for those living in food deserts. This is evident in the increased rate of heart disease, high blood pressure, and diabetes that is found disproportionately in zip codes of north St. Louis. Such a reality is problematic for the future of Black youth as many children growing up in these environments void of access to nutritious food suffer health ailments at higher rates than their White counterparts. Moreover, this issue becomes even more pressing when the impacts of food insecurity are contextualized within other prevalent disparities (including but not limited to healthcare, violence, and income) are taken into account, all intersecting to result in a lower life expectancy. 

One notable industry with the prospect to combat racially disparaging impacts of food insecurity has increasingly been urban agriculture. From gardening on rooftops and in vacant lots, to constructing facilities capable of fostering indoor agriculture, innovation within this ever-evolving realm seems endless. Although some growers have used urban farming to enter the niche, more upscale markets such as those of leafy greens and herbs, others have used it to provide fresh produce that is both high quality and accessible to those living in food deserts. Tosha Phonix, a St. Louis native, has been one such person.  

Collin Riggins (BT): I spent some time looking into all of the different initiatives you are involved in, and it is really inspiring work. Could you just kind of take a moment to explain your story and what brought you to this work?

Tosha Phonix (TP): I’m a grower. I’ve been growing food since my son was one. That’s about eight years now. I started at Your’s Market, which was a Black-owned grocery store in one of the roughest neighborhoods St. Louis, Baden. They had a farm in the back, and I used to volunteer there. The store ended up closing, but I would still grow food at lots where people would say, “Hey, we got this lot over here where we’re growing food. Come on over.” I would grow and interact with the community and always give the food away. I was really looking just to master growing techniques. One day, my cousins reached out to me and said, “We live in North County. Come grow some food.” I laughed. I was like, I’m not going out there to grow anything. For anybody familiar with St. Louis, you really don’t like to go out to North County. But I got invited out there for the Fourth of July with the rest of my family and saw the land--they sit on three acres--and I immediately told them I’d be out there to grow. It’s been a process for me growing and establishing.

In 2018, I started working at the Missouri Coalition for the Environment as the Food Justice Organizer.  A friend of mine sent me a link that said a job was available. It said “Food Justice Organizer”. Now, I didn't think that I was going to get hired. For one, I've heard the term Food Justice Organizer and those kinds of positions, but I never heard anything like that being announced in St Louis. Food justice here isn’t really thought of as a fight here. A lot of people that are fighting social justice issues don't necessarily see the fight in growing your own food. So, when I saw the position, I hesitated on applying. But I read it and it was everything that I had been doing. It was advocating for the community. It was advocating for growers. It was advocating for healthy nutritional foods. So I said, let me apply. I don’t have anything else to lose. And I actually got the interview. I remember standing out in my mom’s front yard barefoot, no shoes, in the grass, talking, big smile [laughter]. I was like ‘yes, this is going good’ because this is my feng shui. This is me. This is what I do. As they say, the rest is history. But it wasn’t history. It was the start of something monumental that I didn't know was going to change the trajectory of my life.

BT: That’s incredible. So, in a way, you have been able to flip a switch from growing food yourself to supporting other growers?

TP: Well I hear a lot of people talk about shifting power, right? I was listening to a brother who was talking about power and privilege, or the illusion of power. For me, I'm not in a powerful position right now. I’m in a privileged position. I have a job doing what I love, but I don't own that job. I use the resources that are available to make sure that communities can have those resources and power themselves, like giving growers funds and not asking them for this long list of things that they need to get a grant. But then also shifting and giving the resources to communities so they can empower themselves. 

For example, we are working with Fairground Neighborhood to do a community-owned grocery store. I tell people it's not a cooperative because cooperatives are really still coming from the same system--a group of people that is over another group of people. I didn't want to do that. In Fairground, the Schnucks grocery store left. The neighborhood association reached out and said the community needs them; there’s a lot of elderly in this community. Schnucks said some very disheartening things about the community. So, I asked what it would look like for the community to own its own grocery store. I wanted a nonprofit model to help establish the store, but I wanted the store to come away from that and the community to be self-sustainable and self resourceful. I put together a bullet point talk to the community members and as I was presenting, everyone was loving it. However, I will never forget this one man in the room. He said, “I mean it sounds good, but is it actually going to happen?” It hit me. Wow. It hit me not because I didn't think this could be done, but because the hopelessness that this city has left the Black community in: from politicians selling us out to politicians allowing North City to crumble as it has. And so with the Food Equity Advisory Board, I started working to do community engagements. 

In the beginning, the growers weren’t interested. It was hard to move. I made a call out to rural Black farmers in a group and somebody tagged Tyrean Lewis from Heru Urban Farming. Now that has been history right there. He allowed me to help them and a year later we are here. He‘s been highlighted getting moonshot awards and all of that. Now I'm doing that with the rest of my growers. I have some amazing humans who are growing food for their community and for their family, who understand why food and land ownership is important in the context of the system of racism and White supremacy. Working with them has been a pleasure.

BT: It seems like you have been able to really use that title of Food Justice Organizer to spread opportunity. That is powerful. 

TP: Mhm. A while back, I invited some of my farmers out to an event I was doing at WashU with the Sustainability Department. Pandora Thomas was invited to speak. If you don’t know Pandora, look her up--she speaks for herself [laughter]. As people began coming in, she started shaking their hands and thanking them for being there. I’ve never been to a lecture where somebody has taken that much effort to interact with the people in the room. Then she got to talking. Pandora does work in permaculture and was brought in to Marin City to design a solution for flooding that was happening in the community. Marin County, I found out, is one of the richest counties in the country, while Marin City is predominantly Black. In that, they paid her. You know, when you’re dealing with the city government, they pay you [laughter]. She said, “I took what they paid me and paid the community to design their own solutions.” Woah. That is the most revolutionary thing I have heard. I don’t know what people’s idea of revolution is, but my concept of revolution is love. Looking at the African American community overall and the internal self-hatred that we have exhibited to each other, to do something like that shows her love for her people, for our people. It shows the revolutionary thing that we need. When Pandora spoke, it really helped me home in on ideas like the community-owned grocery store.

BT: Are there currently any obstacles holding the urban agriculture industry back?

TP: I always say there is no organization doing food justice in this region. I say that because food justice isn't just about access. It's about giving power back to the community to allow them to make the decisions and be in control of their food system. There's nobody really doing that. They're doing the band-aid solution. They're saying, “Go to the foodbank.” The foodbank sets up a scarcity mentality. First of all, it's dehumanizing. People are embarrassed. The staff isn't always friendly. Who's giving the growers in the community the resources to be able to stand as the vanguard of their community? Culturally we know what we like to eat. That's not the type of talking they're doing. That's not the type of work they're doing. They want to keep people in the same predicament because the reality is, nonprofit sounds like it's supposed to solve a problem, but nonprofit has morphed into something that has been there to make sure the problem exists while only helping a select few.

BT: Going back to what you said about power and privilege, that feels like White liberalism in the sense that it keeps a select few Black people in positions of privilege without ever really giving them power. 

TP: Exactly.

BT: So to make these local endeavors larger in scope, what the farmers need are resources? 

TP: Yes. Resources and promotion. And I'm working towards that. I went and talked to the USDA about getting resources yesterday because ultimately the growers that I work with are farmers. They aren't on 30 acres, but they are still farmers. They're urban farmers.

BT: Here in Kansas City, there’s no real local movement for food justice either. Why do you think it still isn’t more of a mainstream conversation?

TP: On a national scale, there is a food justice movement. California is a big one. The East Coast and the Southeast have huge food justice movements. Detroit has the Detroit Food Security Network. New York has the Black Urban Farmers Conference. On a national scale, people understand the need and the necessity for food justice. And they're getting the resources to help rural Black farmers and urban growers. In St. Louis, they don't look at food justice as a social justice issue oftentimes because there is a lack of studying. I tell people all the time, “Y’all love quoting Malcolm. But you all don't quote all of Malcolm.” Malcolm said every revolution was fought on the basis of land. People don't look at farming as the base of social justice, but it is. That's why in other places, people are fighting for food justice as much as they are fighting to defund the police. There’s a disconnect. Our ancestors were braiding seeds into our hair just to bring them over here. That's how we got okra seeds and other seeds that are indigenous to West Africa. They knew the importance of those seeds and keeping some kind of culture alive with us to our eventual bondage. 

When you want to be the best at something, you study the greats. That's what I am doing. My cousin was a basketball player and I used to watch him study basketball. He used to watch it over and over. I applied that method to this work. I'm studying what the national players in food justice are saying. I'm studying their methods. I’m taking them and moving out.

BT: Has policy and working with governmental organizations been a big influence in getting resources and support for these endeavors? Or is there more that needs to be done on that front?

TP: It's twofold. There have been policies like the chicken bill and the urban agriculture zoning bill that have helped. However, it was a struggle because I had to do a lot of pushback on the language. I'm tired of people coming into our communities like we are not doing this work and using policy to snatch the little work that we’ve done away from us. We have got to make sure policy isn't a way to gentrify the neighborhood using urban ag. Eventually, it came to a good resolution. They changed the language because one of the terms was “idle properties”. Property can be idle for six months and you’re saying you can come in and take it? I’ve got properties on my street right now that are idle. They’re not dilapidated, they’re in great condition. They’re just idle. We went back and forth on the language. So yes, policy has been a benefit but a hindrance also. 

I work for a policy organization. We’ve been up to the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, advocating for Black farmers. My coworker actually got a Technical Assistance Grant from the USDA and made Known and Grown which is a marketing program for environmentally sustainable farmers. It's so dope because now here’s an opportunity to market Black farmers. But in that, we can't even market Black rural farmers because nobody will give us their names so we can work with them and assess their needs. And these universities are having classes out in sundown towns when I don’t feel comfortable sending my growers there--they don’t feel comfortable. So, I made noise.

When I would go to these conferences, it would be a group of us who would be pushing for change. But some of those people are gone now. The burnout is real at our organizations. The amount of racism we experience is real. We can’t always push the needle forward and advocate because of the burnout.

BT: How has COVID-19 played into all of this work?

TP: Well, on July 1st, we launched a grant for BIPOC growers in North St. Louis City, North St. Louis County, and in areas of the Metro East [in response to COVID-19]. That is something that hasn't been done here for those growers, especially Black growers. That’s an accomplishment. I took money that was given to me for community engagement, which because of COVID I couldn't complete. So I asked what I could do with the funds. Do I just let the funds sit? Do I return it to Women’s Earth Alliance? Or do I ask to do something substantial? I asked them if I could take their funding and do a mini-grant, and they said yes. So in me doing that, I took $800 and put it towards a grant. I then reached out to the Franciscan Sisters of Mary and asked them to match that grant, and they matched it. I asked the Nature Conservancy if they could match, and Rebecca Weaver of the Nature Conservancy said yes. Now we’re looking at about six mini-grants for Black growers, indigenous, people of color growers who live in communities that are considered food apartheid. Being able to help them elevate in the business because we don’t always get access to the resources.

BT: One thing I noticed when I was researching food insecurity was the use of that term food apartheid instead of a food desert. Could you explain the significance of that? 

TP: Absolutely. The term “food apartheid” was coined by Karen Washington and given a working definition by Dara Cooper. Food apartheid is the systematic destruction of Black self-determination to control our food. It's a hyper saturation of destructive foods and predatory marketing and the blatantly discriminatory corporate-controlled food system that results in our communities suffering from some of the highest rates of heart disease and diabetes. It's not just that we don't have food, but it's like what happened to the Fairground Neighborhood. The grocery store up and left. You have corner stores on the street who come into our community and don't offer the best produce, and if they have produce, they skyrocket the prices. It looks at the whole system of food, not only access to food. It looks at the inability to produce our own food, how we can't access land, we can only do urban ag on lease lots, and things like that. It looks at the whole system.