Phillip and Dorathy Barker are the owners of Olusanya Farm, a Black-owned farm committed to growing healthy food for their community and employing local workers. Olusanya Farm is the demonstration site for Operation Spring Plant Inc. When they purchased their property in 1981, it was a cattle farm for beef. Hoping to diversify their operations at that time, they built a dairy barn with the help of their five children. “We were very good dairy farmers,” Phillip said. “Our production was very high, even with smaller cows. That allowed us to continue to pay our bills and stay on the farm.”

Phillip began exploring other options, including farming vegetables: “I decided to begin growing vegetables on a small scale, but we were borrowing from Farmers Home Administration.” Because of the controlled nature of this funding, Phillip was unable to access funds to expand his vegetable business. Five years later, Hurricane Fran tore down the Barkers’ barn. Recovering from this would have meant investing in another barn and 100 more cows, which Phillip estimated would have been about half a million dollars. Instead, the Barkers decided they were done with dairy. They brought in a cold-storage unit and began removing the tanks from the dairy parlor to construct a kitchen for washing, packing, and grading their produce. The pair started putting the barn back up but then “couldn’t get the funding,” Phillip said. He added that it had taken two years before they realized that “Transfarmation was trying to do this kind of thing” through our research and innovation grants.

In addition to receiving an R&I grant, the Barkers have partnered with Transfarmation to promote policies supporting farm transitions and specialty crops, both as farmers and through their nonprofit, Operation Spring Plant Inc. Phillip explained, “Operation Spring Plant was born out of the struggles of Black farmers on their land, and it was developed to keep them on their land as owners and operators of that land.” The Barkers launched the nonprofit 40 years ago, just a few years after they started Olusanya Farm. “Transfarmation’s projects are exactly what our farm work’s all about,” Phillip said. “We didn’t plan it, but they fit.”