In a corner of south Dallas, Tyrone Day wakes to the same blackness that surrounded him in sleep. In the countdown until sunrise, he mentally runs logistics — prioritizing the work that must get done before the oppressive midday heat of the Texas summer sets in. 

Day is a co-founder and the lead horticulturalist at Restorative Farms, a role he has been preparing for since childhood. 

Day recounts that, “When I was young, in the summer my mother used to send me to my grandmother’s, in a little town outside of Dallas. It was garden work in the morning and if you didn’t work, you didn’t eat.”

Co-founder and lead horticulturalist Tyrone Day packing CSA shares. Photo courtesy of Restorative Farm

While Day’s formative years with his grandmother were the foundation of his interest in horticultural pursuits, his most extensive training came during a 26-year wrongful incarceration. During this time, he was able to pursue a degree in horticulture through Trinity Valley Community College, where he graduated at the top of his class. 

“For about 19 years I managed three big greenhouses at TDCJ [Texas Department of Criminal Justice],” he said.

Following his release from prison Day connected with Richard Miles of Miles of Freedom, an organization that helps former inmates transition to life after lockup by providing jobs, training and support. 

Miles founded the organization after he too, was exonerated of a crime he did not commit, following 15 years of wrongful incarceration. This kindred connection with Miles, eventually led Day to meet his co-founders of Restorative Farms.

A farm worker harvesting greens. Photo courtesy of Restorative Farms

Creating an oasis in the desert

During a roundtable discussion at the Martin Luther King (MLK), Jr. Community Center, Day found himself at the table with two of his future co-founders — Brad Boa and Owen Lynch — as well as others dedicated to creating change in South Dallas. Their goal was to address the issue of the community’s food desert. 

A food desert is an area that lacks healthy and affordable food, especially fresh fruits and vegetables, within a reasonable traveling radius for residents. 

The food desert has been an issue in South Dallas for decades. Recalling the landscape of the neighborhood from his youth, Day said, “We had all the fast food we’d want, but fresh vegetables were limited.” A problem he would solve by biking to farmer’s markets in another part of the city with his younger sister.  

The issue of food deserts has been something co-founder Brad Boa has been working on since 2015. At that time, Boa had co-founded a monthly gathering to find out more about food deserts, as he says, “to find out who were the real players in that space, who was impactful and ‘for real’.” 

Brad Boa at an early meeting to address food deserts. Photo courtesy of Brad Boa

Those meetings are what led Boa to meet Owen Lynch, a professor at Southern Methodist University (SMU) and a Hunt Institute senior fellow. Lynch also brought their fourth co-founder to the table, Dr. Doric Earle, a fellow SMU professor who had been working with Frazier Revitalization in South Dallas to realize their mission to further economic and cultural development in the neighborhood.  

Boa knew that Lynch was more than just talk. “Owen had a plan, a real plan that matched up with my pragmatic, entrepreneurial mindset,” Boa said. “That plan took into consideration the need for an agri-system, [making it] more likely to attain sustainability and thus be scaled up and be impactful.” 

The impacts would not only be increased access to fresh, healthy foods, but also jobs, as well as entrepreneurial and leadership skills that could be applied in other fields. 

A member of Restorative Farms prepares to water. Photo courtesy of Restorative Farms

Stronger together

Restorative Farms has been set up as an agri-system since its inception in 2017. The first piece in the system is located at the MLK Center where the co-founders had their first fateful meeting. It was during this meeting that the issue of what to do with a dormant garden on-site was being discussed. It was decided that the site would be used as a seedling farm. “We wanted to make it a seedling farm to show people how to grow their own food,” Day said.  

The site is now known as The MLK Freedom Garden and houses a 16-by-20-foot greenhouse. In 2021, over 40,000 seedlings were grown there for retail sale, internal use, and for donation or sale at cost to other community farms. 

The alliance with other area farms is another tendril of strength in the web of the agri-system approach. Boa reflected that, “there is something magical about having people from other communities working together.”  

As for the internal use of some of those seedlings, Restorative Farms welcomed another component to their operation in 2019: Hatcher Station Training Farm. The 1-acre plot is located adjacent to the Hatcher Dallas Area Rapid Transit (DART) Station in South Dallas. The training farm is the model for what other farms in the agri-system can be. 

Hatcher Station Training Farm. Photo courtesy of Restorative Farms

The first growing season commenced at Hatcher in 2020. The crew is continuously streamlining processes and working toward maximizing yields and profits, while training new farmers in their farmer training program. It is the goal of Restorative Farms to build out several Hatcher-style farms in the future.

Of the training program, Boa said, “We are currently working with the USDA to develop a more formal curriculum but as the interns work with Tyrone, he is inculcating them with the fundamentals of growing.”

It is this type of knowledge sharing that is at the heart of the farm. Restorative Farms is not only endeavoring to supply food to the community, but to empower the community itself through skill building.

The latest addition to the farm was a 16-by-40-foot hydroponic container farm affectionately known as GroZilla. This beast that churns out the greens came to the farm in August 2020 and sits right beside the Ferris Wheel at the Texas State Fairgrounds. 

 

GroZilla beside the Ferris Wheel. Photo courtesy of Restorative Farms

Thus far, Boa says, “GroZilla has been an experiment … and an excellent ambassador for the urban ag mission” and also notes that, “As an educational platform, GroZilla has been a top performer, it has given us a great platform for people to learn the fundamentals of Controlled Environment Agriculture.”

Hydroponic growing technology is something that Tyrone Day sees the potential to expand when looking toward the future. In response to what his hopes are for Restorative Farms, he said, “Twenty Hatchers” with a smile in his voice, noting that he has hopes for greenhouses and hydroponics at those locations, “because you can double the produce.”

Inside GroZilla. Photo courtesy of Restorative Farms

Lettuce eat

As for the produce that is being produced on the farm now, it is being sold to local restaurants and distributed in weekly community supported agriculture (CSA) shares. There are two sets of CSA shares made available by the farm, retail shares and community shares. Retail shares enable community CSA shares to be offered at a considerably discounted rate. 

Additionally, the farm is also in conversations with distributors, nonprofits and academic institutions to increase sales outlets and achieve profitability.  

A bountiful CSA share from Restorative Farms. Photo courtesy of Restorative Farms

The seedlings produced at the MLK Freedom Garden are also used to supply the farm's GroBox initiative. GroBoxes were launched in late March 2020 as a response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Originally slated to come online later, the farm shifted gears and launched the program on the fly.

GroBoxes are raised garden boxes that are hinged, a design that enables them to be folded flat for transportation or storage. Each new GroBox comes with soil, seedlings and support. Members of the Box Brigade can find helpful growing tips on the Restorative Farms website. 

Recipes are also found on the website to help GroBox users and CSA subscribers to be empowered to prepare vegetables they grow or receive that may be new to them. As Day acknowledges, “It’s a challenge to get people to eat differently and change their diet.”

Sorting produce for distribution. Photo courtesy of Restorative Farms

The boxes are manufactured in South Dallas and are “an easy entry-point for folks to start growing their own food,” Boa said. Additionally, “The program has also been a great introduction for our work team into the practice of entrepreneurship.”

Building entrepreneurial skills through the farm has been a point of passion for Boa. Prior to entering semi-retirement in 2011 following a cardiac arrest, Boa had been a serial entrepreneur working with companies like Dell, Toyota, HP and Phillips Electric. 

Charting a new course

In retirement Boa began fostering his lifetime love of growing things. He took the leap from his home garden to buying a small ranch in East Texas to explore and work with regenerative agriculture concepts, taking inspiration and guidance from the work of Wendell Berry, Joel Salatin and others.

Boa also noted that during this time, “I had also been working with a couple of Dallas nonprofits and became ever more aware of the plight of Dallas’ underserved communities.” Throughout this time of redirecting his focus, Boa met Richard Miles, the founder of Miles of Freedom — the same organization that helped Tyrone Day reacclimate to life after his wrongful incarceration.  

Boa credits Miles with helping change his perspective on what was happening all around him, saying, “Richard really opened my eyes to the plight of South Dallas where over 700 people a month are released from the Texas prison system, where almost 40% of the men have a prison experience by the time that they are 30, where the average man will die some 14 years before an average man will die in my community.”

Workers bundle and package radishes. Photo courtesy of Restorative Farms

Boa also learned that at that time Dallas was the No. 1 city in America for childhood poverty and that South Dallas was home to one of the country’s largest food deserts. The light of this knowledge is what led Boa to use his entrepreneurial prowess to be a part of the solution. 

Just as Restorative Farms has set out to create an agri-system, the founders are a support system amongst themselves, each bringing unique strengths and a unified passion to the mission. Day is the horticultural expert, Boa heads marketing and communications, Lynch leads research and development, and Doric Earle spearheads technology and operations.

Additionally, Day is passionate about offering a helping hand to other formerly incarcerated people. Since his exoneration and the founding of Restorative Farms, he has trained and employed many people who are transitioning to life after prison.   

Eyes on the horizon

While the farm is a labor of love, the team is working tirelessly to make the farm a profitable business. Their agri-system approach is set on ensuring that Restorative Farms is not among the 90% of urban farms and community gardens that fail within the first two years — notably, they’ve already surpassed this benchmark. 

Restorative Farms transform a food desert into an oasis. Photo courtesy of Restorative Farms

The passion of the founders has caught fire with community members and organizations alike. The farm has been uplifted by volunteers, grants and donations from those who believe in the goals of the farm. 

As their website states, these goals are “providing healthy, affordable produce to the community; creating income for the growers and … providing community members training, work, entrepreneurial and leadership experience … that will allow them to break the cycle of poverty and resource depletion.”

Community members positively impacted by Restorative Farms. Photo courtesy of Restorative Farms

Boa and his team intend to continue building upon their successes by “focusing on operational excellence, raising our GroBox marketing game, [and] establishing strong credibility with local financial institutions that could be a source of funding for future urban farmers,” he said. 

This is the type of scaling Boa knows is necessary to reach their profitability goals, acknowledging that “there is always a ramp up period of infrastructure investment, training and then achieving operational excellence.” 

Additionally, Restorative Farms plans to grow in other ways, he said, by “leveraging our growing credibility to influence local policy.” This is the type of systemic change that is needed in underserved communities. 

They also intend to expand their collaborations with other farms, within Dallas but also in the surrounding 100 miles. Local food is food produced directly within a community, but also within neighboring communities. It is a decreased reliance on the globalization of food and an increased reliance on the resources around us — another example of the systems approach to farming and how we are truly stronger together.  

For more information, visit restorativefarms.org.