On May 11, we celebrated the second annual Reggie’s Urban Ag Day, hosted at the Community Farm at Mill Ridge. The event’s organizer and namesake, Reggie Marshall, convened a variety of peers, professionals, lenders, and local vendors including Pathway Lending, SUDA, NRCS, Farm Service Agency, Farm Credit, Zysis Garden, Reggie’s Veggies and his nonprofit venture, Reggie’s Helping Hands. The goal? To provide resources for aspirational farmers hoping to get their start in urban agriculture.
An expert in regenerative and sustainable agriculture, Reggie Marshall originally came from a farming family in West Tennessee and has been growing food for the majority of his life. His formal training was as a nurse, and eventually, he merged the two and Reggie’s Veggies set up shop at the Nashville Farmers Market as well as Ascension St. Thomas Midtown, where he piloted a “food as medicine” program. Patricia Tarquino, director of community agriculture at The Nashville Food Project, happened upon him there for the first time while she was pregnant and in the market for some some herbs. Some friendly conversation quickly revealed that his farm was in her neighborhood — and she stayed connected ever since.
With a dream of bringing healthy and nutritious foods to his community, Reggie launched Reggie’s Veggies in 2015 after graduating from TSU’s New Farmer Academy. He started out growing food in his container garden on a small amount of land in Antioch with a mission to practice sustainable agriculture and community stewardship.
Several years later, Patricia was a part of Whitsitt Elementary School’s PTO when they received a random donation of 600 5-gallon buckets. When she reached out to see if Reggie had a use for them, Reggie explained that he had, over the years, developed the soil on his property and was able to farm in-ground at that point, but offered to teach families at Whitsitt how to utilize the buckets to container garden. For him, it was an opportunity for another community touchpoint — something he valued deeply. By teaching others how to grow with the resources they had, he was building resilient community.
That’s what Reggie’s Urban Ag Day is all about, too. Reggie sits on multiple committees related to agriculture and food at both the state and national levels and is passionate about bringing people together to share knowledge and resources. Over the years, he has found that people of color specifically in urban areas lack access to land, resources that the government offers, etc. to get started farming on their own. Reggie’s Urban Ag Day sets out to change that, bringing together all parts of the bureaucratic system and a place where folks in Antioch, a majority BIPOC neighborhood, can have access to space to grow.