Her life’s work was fighting infections. Now she’s fighting Sunnyside’s food crisis as an urban farmer.
One of the biggest challenges of urban farmings in Houston is just finding access to land, especially for someone looking to own, Horne said, citing Texas’ notorious reputation for high property taxes.
By Laura Duclos
Houston Chronicle
Feb 9, 2022
Excerpt:
Ivy Lawrence-Walls didn’t set out to choose farming. But it chose her.
She grew up on a five-acre farm in Houston’s Sunnyside neighborhood that her parents purchased when she was just 3 years old, and credits many of her life lessons to the time she spent outdoors simply observing. As an inquisitive 7 year old, she remembers watching a bird build a nest. From there she learned patience as the nest gradually grew bigger over time.
She didn’t know then that many of those childhood lessons would apply to her life now as a full-time farmer and entrepreneur.
Now at 27, she owns that same land that she grew up on but has repurposed it into a community farm and vegetable garden aimed at creating sustainable, healthy food access for residents in the historic Black neighborhood.
Lawrence-Walls started Ivy Leaf Farms in August 2020, shortly after moving to the area from Pearland. She quickly discovered she lived in a USDA-designated food desert, where the majority of residents live more than one mile from a supermarket or large grocery store, and 21 percent of residents do not own a vehicle. Sunnyside only has one supermarket, a Fiesta Market on Cullen Boulevard.
At her farm, she grows okra, broccoli, carrots, collards, cabbage, onions, garlic, squash, peppers, among other organic produce, and delivers for free to local residents within specific zip codes.
The farm also sells seeds for self-growers, hosts various plant pop-up events and a few community gardens, including some at local schools to encourage the next generation of farmers. Lawrence-Walls’ next venture for Ivy Leaf Farms is opening small fresh foods grocery store, Fresh Houwse Grocery, on Reed Street with her business partner Jeremy Peaches of Fresh Life Organic Produce Co. through Black Farmer Box, which connects Black farmers directly with local consumers.
The farm also sells seeds for self-growers, hosts various plant pop-up events and a few community gardens, including some at local schools to encourage the next generation of farmers. Lawrence-Walls’ next venture for Ivy Leaf Farms is opening small fresh foods grocery store, Fresh Houwse Grocery, on Reed Street with her business partner Jeremy Peaches of Fresh Life Organic Produce Co. through Black Farmer Box, which connects Black farmers directly with local consumers.
‘Leap of purpose’
Starting the farm in the early stages of the pandemic was a “leap of purpose,” said Lawrence-Walls. She traded in her lab coat as an infection preventionist at Memorial Hermann Hospital for muddy boots and dirty jeans to produce food full-time for her community.
Although she’s not directly in the hospital anymore, she’s still in the business of public health.
“Food is public health and we hope to solve some of the issues that we do face in the neighborhood through food and community wellness, greenspaces, mental health awareness,” she said.
“One of the biggest things I did learn at the hospital is that if you don’t have quality food to uptake medicine, then you can’t get better. So if your doctor is saying ‘take this with food’ and it’s fast food, what is that doing for your body? Or ‘take with water’ and you only have Gatorade or juice or Coke or tap water. The quality of things that help yourself get better is hard when you don’t have the bare minimum of food, water, shelter.”
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Lawrence-Walls said her biggest challenge transitioning from her 9-to-5 to a full-time business owner was breaking the news to her mom, who thought she was crazy to leave her corporate job to dig holes.
“She’s like ‘you’re gonna leave this great job? You went to school to do all these things, and you’re gonna come back home and dig outside?'” said Lawrence-Walls, who graduated as a biology major from Prairie View A&M University.
Her time at PVAMU, a historically Black land-grant university, gave her great connections in the agricultural community and made for an easy transition into an entrepreneurial role farming full-time, she said.
“I did graduate Miss Prairie View so I learned how to put together a platform and promote it and also advocate for others,” said Lawrence-Walls. “Sunnyside is a historically Black community and it’s basically like just putting it on a wider block.”
But aside from convincing her mom, she said, she had to mentally move past society’s traditional standard for success, which includes going to school, getting a job and retiring with that company.
“It took a lot for me to realize, Yes, I am digging holes. Yes, I am dirty 90 percent of the time, but I’m happy and realizing that my happiness comes from doing this work,” she said. “And then everything else started flowing effortlessly through that.”
Stamped by Beyoncé
Unlike some pandemic-born entrepreneurs who initially struggled to get going, Lawrence-Walls had a major boost after receiving a $10,000 grant from Beyoncé’s BeyGOOD organization. Ivy Leaf Farms is currently the sole agricultural business featured in the Houston-bred superstar’s directory of Black-owned businesses.
“When I left Memorial Hermann as an infection preventionist, it was August 3 and then August 17 I was on beyonce.com,” she said. “So imagine that instant publicity. (It) really helped push us and I’m really thankful for Beyoncé for doing that and the NAACP, along with the other brands that I’ve collaborated with throughout this time period.”
By then they had already raised another $10,000 through a GoFund Me page, but that grant sent them “over the top,” Lawrence-Walls said. The money from the campaign will support farm enhancements, new equipment, expansion to a second location that will span 2.5 acres, and will boost its community share program by harvesting more than 100 households a month. To date, the page has raised nearly $15,000 in donations.
In addition to grants and donations, much of Lawrence-Walls’ success is a testament to her brand as a modern farmer, says Ivy Leaf Farms Chief Operating Officer Ashton Holmes, who assists with social media marketing and outreach opportunities in addition to farming.
“Farmers typically don’t have an Instagram or are out at brunch and different foundational events,” he said. “So just seeing (us) out here in the mud and then seeing (us) the next day out at brunch. We’re like modern day farmers, this is the new era that can be done.”
Their “modern day farmers” approach also afforded Lawrence-Walls the opportunity to help Dreka Gates, an entrepreneur and the wife of popular rapper Kevin Gates, build her dream garden. Their process from start to finish was documented on her YouTube page.
An estimated 724,750 food-insecure individuals live in Harris County, with a food insecurity rate of 16.6 percent,
about four percentage points above the national average, according to a recent Kinder Institute study.
“The consequences of this scarcity affect our communities for decades,” said Harris County Precinct 1 Commissioner Rodney Ellis, who grew up in Sunnyside.
“Children who experience food insecurity and hunger are more likely to repeat a grade in elementary school, encounter developmental impairments in areas like language and motor skills, or have more social and behavioral problems,” he said via a spokesperson.
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For this reason, he spearheaded the Harris County Healthy Food Financing Initiative (HFFI), a program designed to support the work of local organizations helping to meet residents’ “basic needs.” During the first round in March 2021, the initiative awarded $550,000 in grants to six organizations working to increase the availability of fresh and nutritious food in underserved communities, including the HOPE Clinic, Houston Food Bank, Little Red Box, Small Places, Common Market Texas, and Urban Harvest.
Round two of the grant process has not yet begun, and the county is currently waiting for an update on a timeline from its community services department, Ellis said.
Challenges of urban farming
But improving longstanding food inequities in underserved communities is not a one-man show. It requires a village of urban farmers— something that Tyler Horne of nonprofit, Urban Harvest, says is still developing in Houston.
“Houston is kind of a newcomer to the urban farming movement. There’s not too many farms within the beltway,” he said while looking at a map. “There’s some smaller ones that are super urban.”
One of those is Hope Farms, which was founded by The Recipe for Success Foundation in 2005 along Sunnyside’s Scott Street to combat childhood obesity and to educate and mobilize the community to provide them with healthier diets. Hope Farms provides various other services on its seven acres outside of growing produce including cooking and gardening classes for children and adults, weekly produce deliveries, weekly onsite markets, pop-up produce markets in the community and public events.
One of the biggest challenges of urban farmings in Houston is just finding access to land, especially for someone looking to own, Horne said, citing Texas’ notorious reputation for high property taxes.
There are a slew of other challenges that farmers face, including climate change and learning how to maintain crops in freezing temperatures and unbearably humid temperatures.
Working with Houston’s weather
With nearly two years under her belt, Lawrence-Walls doesn’t consider herself an expert in farming. She’s still learning along the way in her transition from gardening, which is growing for leisure, to farming, which is growing for high production.
Soil remediation and combating Houston’s unpredictable climate are some of the things she’s had to learn.
Any time the temperature is expected to drop, preparation looks a lot different from when the weather is nice. Every three days during cold weather, Lawrence-Walls and Holmes intensively soak the ground to retain heat in the soil, and then cover their winter crops, things like lettuce and other leafy greens that grow in bulbs.
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Those plants survived Houston’s recent freezing temperatures.
Many of their hibiscus flowers, however did not. This is why it’s best for farmers to start small and start wise, Lawrence-Walls said.
“Make the produce your mission and not your product because the weather’s crazy right now and until you understand what climate change is doing for your area, how can you make money?” she said. “Stick to that as well as growing the produce until you can get the produce that you really want. It takes years to have the great soil, to really have the great plant types, and to really know your market.”
