Closer to Home: A Summer of Good Food in the Delta

On a Thursday evening in Clarksdale, Mississippi, Queen Blue takes a five-minute drive to the summer farmer’s market, where she finds vendors selling squash, tomatoes, peas, greens, and her favorite, okra.

That same week, 50 miles up the road in Ruleville, a line forms before the truck does, and by the time pallets are unloaded outside the community center, residents have queued a block deep.

Two models, one goal. This summer, Partnership for a Healthier America’s Good Food at Home program ran weekly produce box distributions in two Delta towns and supported farmers markets in three more places.

“We are a small town with a big heart. And this type of market in our town means so very much to me.” - Queen Blue, Clarksdale farmer’s market customer

Pictured: The Clarksdale Farmers Market in Clarksdale, MS.

Twelve Weeks of Boxes

Two-hundred-and-fifty boxes are split across sites in the Delta rather than concentrated in one place.

“Transportation is an issue for people in the Delta, and this allowed for us to reach more people,” said Jermeria Skillom, Coordinator for PHA’s MS Delta Programs.

Partners host the distributions their own way; some make an event of it, others just hand out boxes. Most people picking up boxes are 55 and older, for whom a trip to the grocery store is hardest.

Michael Clark spent 15 years as a police officer in Ruleville before he ran for mayor. He knows the town — just shy of 3,000 residents, many of them elderly — and said yes right away when the program came up.

“I love my community. I love the citizens. I wanted the community to know that they have a mayor who cares.” - Ruleville Mayor Michael Clark

Each week for 12 weeks, 150 boxes arrive by truck. It’s Ruleville’s first produce box program — demand outran supply immediately, with close to 300 applications for 150 spots.

So Clark built his own overflow system: produce can’t be held overnight, so whatever’s left goes out into the neighborhoods, to elders who missed the pickup. Residents say the boxes save them a trip to the store and a grocery bill.

The remaining 100 boxes go to Mound Bayou, where DeVoyce Miller makes a full day of each giveaway, then treats her volunteers to a meal.

To Market, To Market

The Clarksdale farmers market, hosted at Collective Seed and Supply, has grown a season at a time. Manager Julie Diaz moved to Clarksdale from San Diego five years ago, where she ran a food business and taught kids’ cooking classes. Her first work with PHA was cooking demos at pop-up markets, putting a fresh spin on traditional produce dishes.

“I love showing people new ways to cook with fresh produce, to get creative. I love hearing ‘Oh, I didn’t know you could do that with purple hull peas,’” Julie said.

Most of what Queen gets at the market she could find at one of two grocery stores in Clarksdale, but she says there’s nothing like fresh-grown vegetables straight from the garden. Some go into dinner with her son that night, including their shared favorite: fried green tomatoes.

The market’s engine is a voucher — ten $1 tickets, good for $10 to spend on produce. It’s a starting point, not the whole transaction: a family with $10 guaranteed often adds $20 of their own and leaves with $30 of produce. For Queen, who requests one each week, “the $10 voucher most certainly comes in handy.”

The vendors’ operations are small by design and circumstance: a couple are retired and farm for love of it, one raises tomatoes in two hoop houses around a full-time job. A man who grows blackberries sold out in the market’s first two weeks.

Pictured: Vendors with their local produce at the Clarksdale Farmers Market.

“The people who grow the food are happy that they have somewhere to sell it, because they grow it wanting people to eat it.” - Julie Diaz

The Season Winds Down

Jonestown, a much smaller community nearby, is employing local youth to learn the operations of farming. This is work that’s already boosting production and setting Jonestown up to join the farmers market and pop-up markets, including PHA’s sponsorship at this year’s Higher Purpose Festival, which gives small businesses a platform.

All of it closed by mid-August — the markets, the festival, the last of the boxes. Roughly 1% of Delta land grows food people eat, Jermeria notes, in a region rich in land and short on food. Against that: 250 boxes a week for twelve weeks, and real money for people farming a few miles from where it’s eaten.

Behind both models is a movement with a name: Rootswell, a growing effort lifting up and supporting access to fresh, affordable, local food. Rooted in community, Rootswell is uniting farmers, chefs, corner stores, farmers markets, creatives, and organizers to transform the region’s food landscape, in collaboration with PHA.