Hannah Vinueza McClellan

In a little, three-story blue house, Asia Brown discovered her love of farming.

Surrounded by 20-acres of land in Culpeper, Virginia, its landscape painted the scenes of her childhood: a pond with frolicking ducks, a rolling pasture with cows and goats and a horizon dotted with wildflowers that welcomed the breeze with dance.

Also in the picture is the person who built and cultivated it all – her grandfather.

He taught her how to retrieve chicken eggs. He taught her how to speak firmly to the goats. He taught her how to sow white corn to yield the biggest harvest.

“I asked so many questions, I wanted to know everything,” she said. “It was the place I remember associating with happiness, with education and with being able to enjoy the simplest things in life. I just loved it there.”

Now 30 years old, Brown still uses the knowledge of and love for the land she first learned from her grandfather, as an urban farmer and food activist in Washington, D.C.

She didn’t always want to be a farmer – first, she was a journalist, and then an aspiring professor. She’s currently a communications project manager within the U.S. Department of Defense.

She’s also a social-media influencer of sorts, with 33,000 followers on Twitter.

But like the resilience of the farmhouse she grew up in, and of her Jamaican grandfather who built it, farming remained a grounding practice and community in her life. As a Black woman, she’s inspired by his desire to reclaim farming, especially after her grandmother’s life growing up in a family of sharecroppers. More than 70 miles from her grandfather’s plot of land, Brown continues the tradition of making space to grow food, in between slabs of crowded concrete and 9-to-5 workdays.

Reunited with farming, she can’t imagine her life without it.

***

Owen McKenzie was retired, in his 50s, when he finally decided to make good on his dream of owning a farm. He traded in his city life in the district, where’d he spent all of his married life, for the small-town, no-traffic-lights wonder of Culpeper.

A lifetime carpenter, McKenzie was used to working with his hands. Every nail, siding panel and shingle was put in place by his weathered hands.

He painted the house blue, bought goats, cows, chickens and seeds of grain. Even after remarrying, he invited all his children and their children. He made more than a farm; he made a home.

McKenzie’s oldest daughter, Cheryl Brown, accepted the invitation by bringing her two daughters to his farm whenever she could. Her oldest daughter, Asia, had a knack for gardening before she even started school.

“She likes to grow based on what she's seen in her family,” Brown said. “It's a wonderful thing that the family has embraced – we pass it down and she'll continue to do the same.”

***

With almost 33,000 Twitter followers, Asia Brown is perhaps a slightly different kind of farmer than her grandfather.

For starters, people actually care about the plants she grows. She also works hard to talk about what she does in ways that make sense to beginners, without all the jargon.

“Some of you know that I am a beekeeper,” she tweeted this September. “Well, I have reason to believe my bees killed my queen and re-queened themselves. I’m not going to let it stress me out until next year, though, because there is nothing I can do about it right now.”

Following a thread of 13 tweets updating followers on the unfolding drama – which some followers characterized as a “a better throne takeover than Game of Throne’s final season” – Brown realized she had a larger interested audience than she’d previously thought.

A Twitter user since 2010, she said she’s been “sort of Twitter famous” since 2012. She’s always used her Twitter as a space to discuss things that matter most to her: feminism, sexuality and her experiences as a Black woman. And of course, farming.

Recently, she’s made it a point to now be more honest about her gardening and beekeeping progress. From the time she won second place at the D.C. State Fair for her squash, to the disease that killed last year’s tomato crop, and everything in between.

“It’s really valuable to me for people to consider that the real tangible life is still worth a lot,” Brown said. “Urban farming is a form of truth I was able to come to which forced me to live the truth in both realms, with Twitter and with farming.”

***

It was during college that Brown stopped growing food. Starting undergraduate school at Fayetteville State in 2007, she fell into a pattern well-known to many college students: buying the cheapest, most convenient food as possible, no matter their nutritional value.

Associating her happiest memories with her healthiest – at her grandfather’s farm – in 2012 Brown started transitioning back into farming. A graduate student at UNC-Charlotte, she began gardening in an abandoned, no-trespassing-labeled 10x10 plot in the suburbs of Charlotte.

After dropping out of graduate school, she pursued a career in marketing. While she enjoyed the work, she couldn’t fight the feeling that something was missing – and the occasional visits to her plot of tomatoes and peppers weren’t cutting it.

In 2015, she moved back to the Washington area to be closer to family, and quickly joined gardening communities, tacking non-profit leadership roles to her day-job responsibilities.

“I was with it for much more time than I was without it,” she said about farming. “It's one of the best communities that I've ever found myself a part of – these people are very deeply caring for the community and neighborhood.

Brown is the vice president of Friends of Noyes Park, a community garden and park in Northeast Washington D.C. She’s also the secretary of Bertie Backus Community Garden, which is less than a mile from her apartment.

She cares about more than just her own gardening – she is passionate about educating others and making gardening accessible to everyone, Noyes Park co-founder Christina Macken said.

“Asia is incredibly friendly and willing to give of her time and insight – she really connects with community members,” Macken said.

For Brown, it’s important to maintain this connection on and offline. Whether she’s sharing agriculture tips and resources to thousands of followers or one hungry college student visiting Noyes Park, she wants to make farming accessible.

She wants to be for others who her grandfather was for her.

***

In fall 2015, Owen McKenzie died suddenly. He was 77 years old.

Like any loss, his death was difficult on the family. Made more overwhelming, was the fact that his house and land went to his second wife after his death. When she died two years later, her children decided to sell the farm.

Brown said it was devastating for her family – the McKenzie side. Her grandfather maintained the farm until the day he died.

Though she is no longer able to find solace in the blue room she slept in growing up, or by laying in the wildflowers watching the baby goats play, she cherishes the memories and lessons she learned there.

“On that farm,” she said. “In addition to learning to love the basics and the earth, I think I learned just to really appreciate that we need each other. That we need to work together on this earth to make it through.”

***

It’s corny, Brown warned, but one of the biggest reasons she loves the act of growing food is for what it reveals about caring for living things, including herself: to nourish well, accept failures and rest after a harvest.

She has more time than usual, at the moment, to reflect on such sentiments. In September, she had a laparoscopic myomectomy to remove uterine fibroids and was on paid-leave from her day job until mid-November. Now that she’s slowly returning to work, she’s looking into farming full-time.

A typical day, before surgery, meant waking up at 4:30 in the morning in order to visit her plot at Bertie Backus before work, and getting home after 7 at night, so she could take the metro from work to Noyes Park.

“It’s hard work – you have long days and it can be disheartening, because it’s never enough,” Brown said. “Regardless, you can do all the urban farming in the world, it’s not enough to sustain cities.”

Learning the rich history of Black people in the urban farming movement has helped sustain Brown when the challenges feel overwhelming. Though many people she’s spoken to think urban farming “has the face of the white gentrifier,” she’s found the district gardening community is overwhelmingly older Black people.

In a way, these mentors she meets remind her of her grandfather, and his desire to have a farm of his own, after immigrating from Jamaica and growing up in family of sharecroppers.

“Black people have always been here. They've been doing it and they were doing it before it was something a lot of people were interested in,” she said. “As a Black woman I love navigating it… I've kind of become a younger, kind-of carrier of the knowledge that otherwise might be lost, if no one was talking to these older people.”

***

Apart from looking into quitting her day job, Brown hopes to get involved directly with food justice policy in the district. Already, she’s started a biweekly food program, “Free Row,” that provides fresh, local food given based on family-size to anyone who stops by, no questions asked.

Dreaming of her time spent amongst the cows with her grandfather, she also wants a farm of her own one day.

In a little under four years, she’s transformed from a woman who thought she’d given up farming for an educated life in the city, to a fierce food advocate, looking to spend as much of her time and energy growing food as she can.

For her sister, Zyair Brown, who also grew up on their grandfather’s farm, continuing to see Asia develop as a gardener isn’t surprising. It only makes her think of their childhood – she was 8, Asia, 12 – when she watched in awe and gratitude as Asia stepped in front of her to face five grown goats who happened to fancy eating Zyair’s hair.

With a firm but gentle voice, Asia steered them away just like her grandfather had taught her.

“I hope she's able to spread the community awareness the way she wants in a way that gains traction and a way that gains attention. Because she does what she does for the right reasons,” Zyair said. “She's not in it for a profitable venture, she's in it because her heart is in making sure that people, and most things living, are healthy and cared for.”