To Detroit entrepreneur Dazmonique Carr, almost any patch of dirt can be a farm, and almost anyone can be a farmer.
Eight years ago, Carr established
Deeply Rooted Produce, a farmer-to-consumer food distribution service, after learning about Detroiters’ lack of access to healthy food in a nutrition education class at Wayne State University. The business provided local farmers of color with a reliable income by marketing their fresh, locally grown food to Detroit residents.
But Carr’s service revealed a gap in the burgeoning urban farming scene: suppliers/farmers needed serious help distributing their goods.
To help fill that gap, she created
Deeply Rooted Gardens, given nonprofit status in 2022.
Through incubator space, classes, and community meals showcasing the farmers’ goods, Deeply Rooted Gardens offers Detroiters the tools to realize their potential as urban farmers.
Farming doesn’t just fill bellies. It brings joy, creates healing, and strengthens bonds within families and across generations, Carr says.
“We never know how deep that connection will go when it comes to growing food,” she says. “Everything is deeply rooted. There’s always more to the story.”
Farming with inexhaustible energy
Carr may be the overseer and driving force of two businesses, but first and foremost, she’s a farmer. Her three-acre fruit farm on the east side of Detroit produces everything from Honeycrisp apples to apricots to persimmons.
The fulfillment she finds in that work motivates her to help others see themselves as farmers.
To meet the government’s definition of farming, a person has to grow produce equal to $1,000 in revenue. Detroiters can achieve that mark in a small plot, a back yard, or even on their balcony, Carr says.
When her food-delivery business skyrocketed during the pandemic, local farmers didn’t have the capacity to keep up with demand. So she decided to help them.
At first, she pitched in her own time and physical labor. She spread herself thin across multiple farms, managing harvest lists and labor force, paying staff, and packaging and preparing food for distribution. “I was just doing the work,” she says.
Deeply Rooted Gardens, located in northeast Detroit’s Mapleridge neighborhood, expanded on that effort. Now, the nonprofit — still backed by Carr’s hard work and seemingly inexhaustible energy — provides farmers with the tools to create and maintain farming operations, at whatever level works for them.
A space to learn
People growing food need to know how to prepare it for sale, whether that be cleaning, weighing and packaging fresh produce for sale or turning harvested produce into a product, like salsa or jam. Incubator space provided by Deeply Rooted Gardens will help them do just that. Carr is in the process of transforming two houses on her property into licensed commercial kitchens, complete with “everything that a farmer’s heart desires.” There, farmers can rent space, experiment with their food, and attend classes.
Carr leads classes demonstrating how to preserve, prepare, package and market food. She uses her farm’s abundant produce to teach how to create a host of value-added products, from raspberry popsicles to an apple-based barbecue sauce that receives great reviews.
Chefs with their own farms can use the incubator kitchen to turn their produce into prepared, packaged and sealed meals they can then sell.
Deeply Rooted Gardens’ classes also teach people how to become a farmer. Instructors show participants the resources at their disposal, preparing them to turn a side lot or other spare bit of land into a farm.
After a recent event at which Carr spoke, numerous people said Carr’s presentation inspired them to take advantage of space they already had to create a farm of their own.
“A lot of people don’t think they have a green thumb,” Carr says. But, when people are given a packet of seeds or a resource that invigorates them, “the excitement alone helps you grow food.”
Reconnecting with the land
For the last three years, the nonprofit held weekly Sunday dinners to showcase farmers’ products. Carr’s dear friend and chef Alexanderia Monet Laura Thompson recently succumbed to cancer, putting the weekly meals on hold.
The Sunday dinners intentionally celebrate the contributions of Detroit-based people of color, from a sweet barbecue sauce to local fish and chicken.
Deeply Rooted Gardens targets “people who want to reconnect with the land, on any scale,” Carr says. She expects to see auxiliary chapters of the organization in other places eventually. For now, it will focus on stabilizing the Detroit area, and, in particular, hopes to reach farmers of color.
Historically, resources targeted toward minority farmers have gone to support white women and people of Asian background, not Black or Indigenous people, Carr says.
Those groups have other barriers to farming, as well. American history includes long stretches of time when Black and Indigenous people were either forced into working the land or had it taken away from them. Those injustices, Carr says, left behind “all these negative connotations we have when it comes to occupying the land and holding space there.”
To reintroduce Black and Indigenous farmers requires undoing some of that harm by reteaching a love of farming and demonstrating “how we can heal by reconnecting and placing our feet on the land,” Carr says.
Celebrating good food
As she teaches lessons, serves dinners, creates learning spaces and mentors new farmers, Carr and her organization strengthen the neighborhood right around them by the simple act of sharing food.
Communities create positive change when they invest in their residents, “not by increasing the development of houses but by increasing the bare minimum things that people need to survive,” Carr says. By promoting farming and good food, “we can decrease the amount of violence and pain and despair” ― the deeply-rooted issues, she calls them.
As the organization grows and expands its reach, she expects some of the people who drive by “and wonder why there are farmers in the middle of Detroit” will find inspiration to start food-centric projects of their own, like opening a grocery store or co-op.
The modern American food system is convenient and quick, Carr says, “but it doesn’t provide a rejuvenating, renewing relationship with the land.” Deeply Rooted Gardens promotes a slower, more deliberate connection to life’s essential elements, and to other humans, too, Carr says, adding, “All these things that start with occupying land as it is.”
Resilient Neighborhoods is a reporting and engagement series examining how Detroit residents and community development organizations work together to strengthen local neighborhoods. It's made possible with funding from The Kresge Foundation.