It’s a cloud-shrouded Friday morning in early October, but warm enough to feel more like summer than autumn. Dressed in a battleship-gray T-shirt, faded black jeans, a tan baseball cap pulled on tightly, and white Nike trainers that stand out against the rich brown dirt, Brandon Starkes, 35, walks through a long, open-ended hoop house, checking out neat rows of hot and sweet peppers, and trellis lines sporting Rubenesque, regally purple eggplants. He’s chatting with Gail Taylor, the owner of Three Part Harmony Farm, a 2-acre plot in Northeast D.C. pocketed between The Catholic University of America and Trinity University.
The two are discussing the produce Starkes will be picking up in the coming days. Whatever just-harvested greens and vegetables he receives will feature in his weekly deliveries to customers around the D.C. area through his startup venture The People’s Market, a riff on the CSA (community supported agriculture) model in which customers subscribe to a farm’s harvests for a set period of time. With a focus on supporting Black-owned farms, such as Three Part Harmony, the company offers weekly, biweekly and monthly subscriptions for a half box for $40 (which is ideal for two people for four or five meals) or a full box for $60 (best for four people for four or five meals), with the option to add other local products, including eggs; flowers; jams from Browntown Farms in Warfield, Virginia; and soaps from Root Down Cleansing in Silver Spring.
For Taylor, working with Starkes is a way to honor her labor and her crops. “To be able to hand over my products, that I put so much love and intention into, to this man, who I know is going to take care of it the way that I want it to be and get it to his customers fresh, that’s wonderful,” she says. “I really appreciate Brandon and everything he’s doing. It’s a perfect synergistic match.”
Though the two would love to chat more, Taylor has a long to-do list, and Starkes must get on the road to make a pickup at another one of his partners, Upper Marlboro’s OlaLekan Farm. Hopping into his black 2006 Toyota Highlander “with too many miles on it,” he sets off.
This farm-to-table journey began in the early days of lockdown as the pandemic raged in the spring of 2020. Starkes found that he and his family were developing bad habits around food. They weren’t eating well, and he was gaining weight. When he went to the mainstream grocery stores near his home in northern Silver Spring in search of organic produce, so he could cook healthier fare, the vegetables and fruits looked wan and unappealing. There isn’t a Whole Foods or MOM’s Organic Market near his home, so Starkes began going farther afield to visit farmers markets, where he finally found a bounty of naturally cultivated, hyper-fresh, regionally grown produce. This discovery got him wondering. How could other people access vegetables, fruits, greens and herbs like this if they didn’t have an organic grocer nearby and couldn’t visit a farmers market due to scheduling conflicts, transportation obstacles or other issues?
Another thought process was unfurling on a parallel track. Starkes kept seeing Black farmers on his social media feeds, a growing movement of younger entrepreneurs frankly discussing their operations, what they were growing, the challenges they faced. Some of the obstacles echoed long-standing issues Black farmers have been confronting since the Great Migration, which started early in the 20th century and spanned roughly six decades, during which about 6 million Black Americans left the South for Northern, Midwestern and Western states. “Sometimes the picture is painted that folks moved for a better opportunity,” says Starkes, who is Black. “But a lot of them were running from Jim Crow laws and spaces where people didn’t want them.”
This profound internal diaspora—coupled with limited access to capital due to discriminatory lending practices and structural racism—had a devastating impact on Black farmers. In 1920, roughly 1 million Black farmers worked the land, accounting for 14% of all farmers; in 2017, fewer than 50,000 farmers identified as Black or mixed race, a mere 1.4% of the total, according to the USDA.
In all this bleakness, Starkes saw an opportunity. He could support Black farmers by creating a market for their crops, while also helping customers access locally sourced fresh seasonal produce. It would be a completely new career path for him, but he could lean into the relationship-building and organizing skills he honed while working as a community organizer in D.C. Mayor Vincent Gray’s administration and in local government for Prince George’s County, where he is still employed.
There was just one fundamental obstacle: He needed farmers, and he didn’t know a single one.
Starkes began cold-calling anyone and everyone. At first, farmers he managed to get on the phone were too busy, didn’t have time to talk, weren’t sure they wanted to work with a startup. And who was this guy that was calling? What was his story? Finally he got a green light from Botanical Bites & Provisions in Fredericksburg, Virginia—a two-hour drive if traffic was bad. It wasn’t ideal, but it was a starting point.
Thanks to persistence and a lot of time on the phone, he built a small, sturdy network that now includes roughly half a dozen farms from across the D.C. area. Though he focuses on supporting Black-owned operations, he sources from a diverse array of small farmers. “As long as these farmers care about the community, the soil that they work, and the work that they do, I’m willing to work with anyone,” he says.
When it came to naming his blossoming venture, Starkes wanted “something powerful that meant something.” He cast his thoughts back to the tragic story of the People’s Grocery, a Black-owned business and thriving community hub on the outskirts of Memphis, Tennessee. In 1892, a fight erupted outside the store between white and Black residents, including some of the staff. Confrontations with the police followed, and the shop’s owner and two employees were arrested. While they were in custody, a mob stormed the jail and lynched the three men, a horrifying act that sent shockwaves across the country.
To honor the legacy of those murdered, Starkes chose the moniker The People’s Market. “I named it after them because I wondered what they could have become,” he says. “What could they have created for their community and other communities? I saw their vision, and I saw myself in their vision.”
With a name and a business model, Starkes began making deliveries in June 2022. His weeks have a set, steady rhythm. On Fridays he picks up produce at farms. More is dropped off at a warehouse in Hyattsville, where on Saturdays he assembles the coming week’s offerings with a small team of apprentices from OurSpace, a local nonprofit focused on aiding systemically disadvantaged farmers and adjacent communities. Starkes and a few other drivers do up to 60 deliveries on Sundays in Montgomery County, D.C., and parts of Arlington and Alexandria, Virginia.
When you arrive at OlaLekan Farm in the Urban Farm Incubator at Watkins Regional Park, the landscape goes wide-screen, revealing a sweeping spread surrounded by trees and dotted with well-maintained garden plots, growing tunnels and small sheds. Farmer Tolu Igun is at a portable table flanked by two red plastic baskets packed tightly with freshly harvested ginger. Their conventional farmers garb—black overalls and a tan shirt—is offset by closely sheared lime-green hair, pink plastic bangles on one wrist, and gold hoop earrings catching the midday sun. Hose in one hand, a fistful of young ginger in the other, they run the water over the blushing twists of the aromatic rhizome, separate them into smaller clumps and snip off their leafy stems.
“You can make tea with the leaves,” they say as they set the clippings to the side and weigh the ginger. “And I was talking to someone who stir-fries the leaves.”
This is Igun’s first growing season, though their farm experience stretches back a decade, when they began learning about urban agriculture while living in Detroit. OlaLekan Farm honors their family’s Nigerian roots by growing crops of the African diaspora, including black-eyed peas, beans and okra, its mesmerizing pale yellow flowers with resplendent purple centers in full bloom in the sunshine.
It’s one thing to grow a crop; it’s another to sell it. Working with Starkes gives Igun a guaranteed market, which means guaranteed income. They might sell 1 or 2 pounds of this ginger to a customer at a market, but Starkes is here to pick up 15 pounds. After they finish bagging it all up—along with an extra bag they give Starkes to take home to his family—he films them on his phone, asking questions about the ginger and how to use it, so he can make videos for social media.
Starkes is a constant presence online, posting clips soundtracked to R&B and hip-hop and packed with info on what’s in that week’s delivery and how to use it; footage of farm visits and farmer spotlights; and insights into his work. His videos glow with earnestness and infectious positivity, conscientious counterprogramming to all the negativity online. “There are folks who say Black businesses have this challenge and that challenge—and those things are real,” he says. “But at the same time, there’s a lot of us who just have our noses to the ground and we’re working hard. I want to show that it’s not all about the trauma that we’ve experienced, though that’s real, too. I’m not trying to re-create the narrative, because I don’t really have the energy or time for that. I’m just telling my story and other people’s stories in hopes that it connects for people.”
His posts and the reactions they garner also help him get to know his customers better, giving him a peek into their lives. Sometimes if he sees someone is celebrating a birthday, he’ll include a note in their delivery box, or if someone has lost a family member, he may slip in a bouquet of flowers.
Bumping down a maze of winding dirt roads through forested areas and alongside pastures, Starkes makes his way to Owl’s Nest Farm in Upper Marlboro, the last stop of the day. Pulling up to a clearing next to a collection of sheds and covered wall-less work areas where produce is being cleaned, sorted and packed up, he greets owner-operator Elizabeth Whitehurst with a hug. Later he says, “A lot of these farmers have turned into friends, which is special.”
The two walk to the nearby fields to see what’s on the verge of being harvested. There are neat rows of greens with leaves fully parted to catch the sun, bushes ornamented with snack-size sweet peppers, and long mounded lines of dirt hiding a crop of sweet potatoes. Over the course of the year, roughly 50 different vegetables and fruits will come out of these 6 acres. “We really want to grow a wide variety of things, because people don’t want turnips every week,” says Whitehurst, who is white.
When the tour is over, Starkes returns to his Highlander, pops open the hatch, and begins filling the rear with racks full of just-harvested kale, collard greens, shishito peppers and Tokyo Bekana cabbage. “It’s like a cross between lettuce and bok choy,” he says, explaining the cabbage. “It’s tender like lettuce, but it has a little bit of a bitter kick at the end like bok choy.”
Ensuring that everything is arranged snugly and safely, he closes the hatch and bids Whitehurst a warm goodbye. Then he’s back behind the wheel. Tomorrow he will be packing boxes, and Sunday will find him on the road again to make deliveries, all part of the cyclical rhythm of The People’s Market.
Nevin Martell is a full-time freelance writer based in Silver Spring whose work regularly appears in The Washington Post, The Boston Globe and The Daily Beast.
This story appears in the May/June edition of Bethesda Magazine.
