Still, it’s a bumpy farm road ahead: no smooth pavement, with deep potholes to navigate around and animals running in front of the tractor. The soil is dead, new markets need to be developed, and for now, she’s planning on continuing to run Three Part Harmony, which will involve a lot of driving back and forth. At the same time, she’s transitioning the D.C. farm to a nonprofit and hopes donations will eventually allow her step away from the day-to-day there.

If Taylor, Graham, and the neighboring farmers can create a resilient, Black-led agricultural community as the planet burns, biodiversity plummets, and the larger food system continues to become increasingly industrialized and commodified, they will have charted a course for others to follow.

“For those of us who call ourselves the ‘return generation,’ I feel like the only way that the ancestors are not laughing at us is if we can be honest with ourselves,” Taylor says. In her family, agriculture skipped a generation after her great-grandfather moved north during the Great Migration to escape violence in Mississippi and find work. “The market forces were pressuring them to get out of this work that we all love so deeply. And so the only way that we are going to make it any different is if we do it a different way.”

Moving to the Country

In an old tobacco barn, Taylor looks at the stacks of sticks farmers used for a century of drying tobacco plants and sees tomato stakes. Ruby and Ivy, fluffy Bernese mountain puppies rolling around in the dirt between Graham’s farm boots, will soon guard chickens from predators.

But first, the soil will need to be brought back to life, having been worn out by decades of tobacco cultivation followed by commodity corn and soybean crops. Graham’s chickens will help here. They’ll diversify the farm’s income streams and deposit their nutrient-dense manure across the landscape while pecking at the dirt, stimulating microbes with their beaks.

One might suppose Taylor makes her lender nervous when she says it may be a few years before the land is ready to support vegetable growth, but Jacob Israelow, founder of Dirt Capital, is impressed with her knowledge and foresight.

“I’d imagine a lot of farmland investors want to see numbers on a spreadsheet about how to maximize yield from acreage,” he says. Instead, Israelow and his team are playing the long game. “Gail is clearly envisioning her future on that property for the rest of her life. She’s not like, ‘What can I do next year to maximize my revenue from it? She’s like, ‘What do I need to do to build a relationship with this property so that we can nourish each other for the next several decades?’”

Taylor and Graham began the search for a permanent farm site in a more affordable ZIP code more than a year ago. On top of never knowing how long their land tenure would last in D.C., increasingly, their team was being priced out of living nearby. Taylor heard about Dirt Capital as a means to make the transition to land ownership and was immediately struck by how different the conversation was with them compared to other funders.

For one thing, she said, the Dirt Capital team started by asking, “How much can you pay a month?” They then used that number to design the financing around the land purchase. Taylor and Graham don’t technically own the land—yet. The way it works, Israelow explains, is that Dirt Capital first seeks out what he calls “exceptional land stewards.”

“A lot of times they’re at that influx point of growth where they have that set of experience and their markets established and know what they’re doing, but they need that land security, need additional land to grow, or need a home farm to really secure a base,” he said.

Every project is also assessed based on its ability to deliver across an impact framework that includes interconnected factors like racial equity, soil health, and climate resilience. As the chickens and cover crops bring the soil back to life, for example, the land’s capacity to hold carbon and consistently produce nutritious foods as the weather changes will increase.

(Chart courtesy of Dirt Capital’s 10-year impact report)

Dirt Capital buys the land and then leases it a monthly price the farmers know they can afford. The 10-year lease comes with two opportunities to purchase, at five and 10 years. Most importantly, Dirt Capital sets the price the farmers will pay at either of those points in the future based on their purchase price and a set, low appreciation rate. So, whether they make lease payments for five or 10 years, if the market value of the land is increasing (which it generally is), the farmers are building equity.

The investment partnership just celebrated its 10-year anniversary, and by the end of the year expects to have completed 44 projects. Of those, nine farmers are now full owners of their land. These include organic, grass-fed dairy farmers who now own more than 300 acres in upstate New York and an immigrant family from Mexico who now owns their produce farm in New Jersey.

The rest are mostly on their way to ownership. While a few farmers Dirt Capital worked with decided to hang up their hoes or their business went bankrupt, they haven’t yet had a case where the farmers made it to the end of the 10-year term and couldn’t transition to full ownership.

All of it is funded by impact investors, a term for those who are willing to settle for minimal returns so their money can make a difference in the world. They pay Dirt Capital’s fee, Israelow explained. His team works to explore other opportunities that can boost value for farmers, such as conservation easements or community-scale solar.

“We’re investing in support of farmers, but we’re also taking money from them, right? So, every dollar we get from our farmers is a dollar less in their bank account,” he said. While most lenders would try to maximize the money flowing their way, Dirt Capital aims in the other direction. “Part of our goal is profitability and wealth-building for farmers.”

What’s on the Land?

“Other farmers drool when they see this barn!” Taylor told the tour participants as she stepped out of the rain into the property’s second barn, already outfitted with a cement floor and electricity. Plastic-covered walk-in coolers ready to be unwrapped and filled with produce and poultry were stacked on pallets. Despite the equipment, the barn felt nearly empty, and Taylor pointed out that the extra space will allow them to bring in crops from their neighbors for cooperative distribution.

The farm’s many ready-to-use structures were one reason Taylor and Graham jumped at the opportunity to purchase this parcel. Crucially, there is a home for the couple to live in and another building that could be outfitted for worker housing.

Often, farmers need money to create the most basic infrastructure before they can start planting, like digging a well or putting up a fence. Livestock can require more upfront capital compared to vegetables, so when Graham decided to get his poultry operation up and running, the couple turned to Foodshed Capital for help.

Michael Reilly co-founded Foodshed Capital in Virginia in 2018. Since then, the nonprofit Community Development Financial Institution has loaned more than $4 million to farmers and food businesses who work with small, local farms. Nearly two-thirds of that money went to BIPOC farmers.

Foodshed’s loans are also uniquely structured to help farmers. They are either low- or zero-interest, and they are unsecured, meaning the organization doesn’t ask for collateral. That means if a farmer defaults, Foodshed is on the hook, not the farmer.

“What we want to do is not just be providing capital but providing a different kind of capital that is not continuing to be extractive and onerous,” Reilly said. “It’s important for us as the lender to share the risk and let the farmer know that if something just doesn’t go right, as so often happens with farming, that we as their lender are not going to come after them.” Because Foodshed does the work of getting to know the farmer before lending and works closely with them, he said, they’ve only had a handful of cases (out of 138 projects) where they weren’t paid back.

Graham and Taylor borrowed $16,000 to get the poultry operation going, and when an unknown predator wiped out an entire flock last year (hence the puppies), they still paid it back. Now that they’re settling in at Spice Creek Farm and are assessing what will be needed next, Reilly is ready and willing to lend to them again.

Foodshed’s partnership with Dirt Capital has been complementary because Foodshed doesn’t provide loans to buy land. Often, Dirt Capital can help a farmer with the land purchase, and Foodshed can fund the projects that are needed to farm that land.

At Dodo Farms, an organic vegetable farm 70 miles north of Spice Creek Farm, the farmers recently acquired 10.5 acres with the help of Dirt Capital. They got connected with Dirt Capital through Foodshed Capital, which had previously funded their purchase of a farm vehicle. Now that they’ve found a permanent location, Foodshed is helping them fund deer fencing and irrigation.

The Black Agrarian Corridor

“This entire time that I’ve owned this farm, this has never been the only thing that I’ve done, and I’ve never only farmed by myself,” she said in November at Three Part Harmony farm, where beets and lettuces still thrived in tidy rows, despite the coming winter.

That sentiment is guiding her next chapter in multiple ways. After recently registering the new nonprofit Three Part Harmony Center for Agriculture, Food, and Learning, she’s hoping to be able to fundraise enough to hire a farm manager to run it. “I always thought this place might live beyond me and take on a life of its own, which would be great,” she said.

Later that morning, Taylor and Graham were headed to one of their neighbors, Juniper’s Garden, to start talking through the coming year. Graham said that 2025 would be a year of testing the waters of collaborative capacity building, joint distribution, and building a food community. Taylor’s also thinking about how to make working the land more manageable as climate change causes temperatures to rise. For instance, she’s looking into ways to minimize outdoor labor aside from harvesting during July and August, when Maryland’s heat becomes dangerous. It’s a lot for one farm couple to figure out, and it’s no coincidence that Spice Creek Farm abuts land that is already being worked by like-minded Black farmers. “We didn’t look anywhere else,” Taylor said.

Not only does she see a future of collaboration among the farmers in this corner of rural Maryland, she wants to feed the people who live here, too. “A lot of people for the last couple of decades had this mentality of, ‘Your customer base is in the city and the farms are in the country,’” she said. At Three Part Harmony, she defied that norm by feeding city residents with city-grown food. At Spice Creek, her vision is to rebuild a once-typical foodshed model that has become a rarity—by feeding her rural neighbors food grown on nearby farms.

Taylor doesn’t relate to the word “success,” and she is skeptical of larger barriers being broken down for farmers like her, barring “a complete, upside-down change to the entire capitalist economy.” What drives her is a simple, long-term vision shared by millions of farmers who tilled this and other parcels of land before her. Now, that vision is rooted in soil she can steward while ensuring it won’t be paved over anytime soon.

“We just want to be able to work hard and enjoy what we do,” she says, looking at Graham. “Step out of our door every day with our dogs and be at work right there in the community.”