BLACK SOIL DON’T SPOIL: Texas Small Farmers and Ranchers Organization “Digs In” at New Mount Rose Missionary Baptist Church to Help Turn Fort Worth’s 76104 From a Food Desert Into a Food Forest.
BLACK SOIL DON’T SPOIL: Texas Small Farmers and Ranchers Organization “Digs In” at New Mount Rose Missionary Baptist Church to Help Turn Fort Worth’s 76104 From a Food Desert Into a Food Forest. Link: https://youtu.be/1zFbKLdHgkA?is=tIeEmE1GXvXctcgr
By Pastor Kyev P. Tatum, Sr.
FORT WORTH, TEXAS — Black soil does not spoil.
It holds history. It carries memory. It receives what has been buried, nourishes what has been planted and—when tended with faith, knowledge and determination—produces a harvest.
In Fort Worth’s historic Morningside neighborhood, Pastor Kyev P. Tatum, Sr., and farmer P. Wade Ross are digging into that truth. One leads from the pulpit. The other leads from the pasture. Together, the rancher and the reverend are working to turn one of Texas’ most medically vulnerable urban communities from a food desert into a flourishing food forest.
Their unlikely partnership began with a prayer.
In 2025, Pastor Tatum was invited to deliver the invocation at the 46th Annual Landowners Association of Texas State Conference in Tyler. He arrived prepared to pray, listen and learn. He also brought a vision that had been growing in his spirit.
He called it Faith in the Farm—a collaborative network through which small Texas farmers and ranchers could provide fresh meat, dairy products, fruits and vegetables directly to families living in underserved urban neighborhoods.
The idea was simple but potentially transformative:
From the farm, to the family, to the fork.
Pastor Tatum knew that communities such as ZIP code 76104 did not merely need occasional food distributions. They needed a dependable food system—one that could connect local producers with urban consumers, improve nutrition, create economic opportunities and help families live longer, healthier lives.
Then P. Wade Ross stood to speak.
When the Farmer Met the Faith Leader
Ross, president of the Texas Small Farmers and Ranchers Community-Based Organization, began describing the challenges facing Black farmers, the importance of connecting producers directly with consumers and the need to develop sustainable markets for small agricultural operations.
As Ross spoke, Pastor Tatum began connecting the dots.
“It was as if P. Wade Ross were reaching directly into my mind and describing the very thing God had placed in my heart,” Tatum recalled.
After the presentation, the two men met and agreed to continue the conversation.
Several months passed. Then tragedy struck.
In February 2026, a son of the community was killed in a gang-related shooting. Pastor Tatum responded by expanding the church’s community agriculture work in collaboration with the national Guns to Gardens movement.
The goal was not simply to grow vegetables. It was to cultivate hope.
The garden would create a peaceful and productive place where young people, returning citizens, senior residents and neighborhood families could learn to plant, work, heal and grow together. It would give the community another reason to choose life—and another reason not to pull the trigger.
Somehow, in the middle of the grief and the growing, the Lord connected Pastor Tatum with Ross again.
The two men have been working together ever since.
The Birth of the Funkytown Food Forest
During one of Ross’ agricultural training sessions at New Mount Rose Missionary Baptist Church, he surveyed the garden beds, the volunteers and the possibilities taking root around him.
Then he spoke what sounded like both an observation and a prophecy:
“This looks like you are going to turn this community from a food desert into a food forest.”
With those words, the Funkytown Food Forest was born.
The vision is far larger than a traditional community garden. It is being developed as a comprehensive urban agriculture and community health hub where residents can learn to prepare soil, grow crops, raise chickens and goats, preserve food, develop agricultural enterprises and understand the connection between nutrition and long-term health.
It is a place where people who have spent generations as consumers can begin to see themselves as producers.
It is a classroom without walls, a laboratory without white coats and a sanctuary where worship is expressed through work.
Every seed becomes a lesson.
Every garden bed becomes a classroom.
Every harvest becomes evidence that abandoned land and overlooked people can still produce something powerful.
New Mount Rose and the Texas Small Farmers and Ranchers Community-Based Organization have now joined forces to bring farm-fresh food directly into the Morningside community.
It is soil meeting soul.
Agriculture meeting ministry.
The country meeting the city.
A Legacy Rooted in Texas Soil
Ross is not approaching this work as an agricultural outsider.
As co-owner of Hoaganie Farm Products, a cattle and grass-farming operation near College Station, Ross represents the fourth generation of his family to farm land that has remained in the family since the 1800s.
His parents, W. Wade and Anita Ross, established the Texas Small Farmers and Ranchers Community-Based Organization in 1998. Its mission has centered on strengthening Black farmers, protecting landownership, expanding agricultural education and helping small producers survive in an industry in which they have often been overlooked, underfunded and disconnected from profitable markets.
Before becoming the organization’s chief executive, P. Wade Ross served as its education director. He assumed the organization’s top leadership position during the disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic, helping move its work into what he describes as the “connected age.”
Ross has become recognized across Texas as an advocate and change agent for small farmers of color. He serves on boards, coalitions and agricultural collaboratives throughout the South and was selected to represent East Texas in the Delta Regional Food Business Center.
His work addressing racial equity, landownership and agricultural justice has been featured by CNN, The Dallas Morning News, The Wall Street Journal and The Austin Chronicle. He was also a plenary speaker at the 2024 REGENERATE Conference.
The organization’s influence stretches back decades.
Texas Small Farmers and Ranchers is widely credited with helping produce an unprecedented response from Black farmers during the federal agricultural census. In 2012, organization founder W. Wade Ross received the United States Department of Agriculture Secretary’s Honor Award for forging partnerships that led to changes promoting agricultural sustainability.
That history matters in 76104 because the struggle facing small farmers and the struggle facing underserved urban neighborhoods are connected.
Farmers need dependable markets for their crops and livestock.
Families need dependable access to affordable, nutritious food.
The partnership between New Mount Rose and Texas Small Farmers and Ranchers is designed to bring the two together.
Fifty-Pound Proof of What Is Possible
The community recently received a very large—and very sweet—example of what that partnership could produce.
For New Mount Rose’s back-to-school outreach, P. Wade Ross and his brother, Ken, arrived with a refrigerated trailer filled with enormous, farm-fresh watermelons.
Many weighed nearly 50 pounds.
Neighborhood residents were astonished by their size and pleasantly surprised by their sweetness. But the watermelons represented more than a summertime treat. They offered tangible proof that fresh products could move directly from a Texas farm into a central-city neighborhood.
No distant corporate office.
No complicated distribution chain.
No produce spending days losing freshness in warehouses.
The farmer knew where the food was going, and the families knew where it had been grown.
That is the relationship Ross and Tatum hope to expand.
These brass-knuckled food fighters are preparing to battle food insecurity by connecting farmers and inner-city families in ways that allow consumers to become producers—and help producers become profitable.
This is not charity disguised as agriculture. It is the foundation of a new community food economy.
The High Price of Living Without Healthy Food
The work is especially urgent in Fort Worth’s 76104 ZIP code, a community frequently cited for having one of the lowest life expectancies in Texas.
Residents face overlapping health and economic challenges, including high rates of chronic illness, infant mortality, poverty, food insecurity and limited access to affordable fresh food.
A family may want to purchase healthier products, but desire does not create dollars. When household income is already consumed by rent, utilities, transportation, medicine and childcare, fresh meat and produce can become difficult to afford.
At the same time, small farmers may have quality products but lack access to consistent urban markets.
That is why Tatum and Ross are working to build more than a garden. They are developing a cash-flow mechanism—a local food system through which farmers can earn a fair return while families gain affordable access to healthier food.
Without that economic bridge, the farmer can have a field full of food while families only a few hours away remain hungry.
The problem is not always a lack of food.
Sometimes it is a lack of connection.
Faith in the Farm
Pastor Tatum believes the church is uniquely positioned to help establish that connection.
For generations, Black churches have served as spiritual homes, meeting places, organizing centers, schools, shelters and launching pads for social change. New Mount Rose is extending that tradition into food production, health promotion and agricultural education.
The church calls itself a small congregation with a big mission.
Through its Community Food Bowl, Funkytown Food Forest and other neighborhood ministries, New Mount Rose has worked to fill empty bowls while blessing struggling souls.
The partnership with Ross expands that mission beyond emergency food assistance.
A food pantry helps a family survive today.
A food forest, agricultural training program and direct farm-to-family market can help transform tomorrow.
The vision includes fresh produce, meat and dairy products; chickens and goats; youth agricultural education; gardening classes; workforce opportunities; community markets; and support for small farmers and ranchers seeking dependable customers.
It is a vision rooted in faith but built to produce measurable results.
Guns to Gardens to Groceries
The work also completes a powerful circle in the community’s response to violence.
What began as Guns to Gardens is growing into Guns to Gardens to Groceries.
The strategy recognizes that public safety cannot be separated from public health. Violence, hunger, unemployment, trauma and hopelessness frequently grow in the same neglected soil.
If a community wants to reduce gun violence, it must give young people more than warnings about what not to do. It must give them meaningful work, practical skills, trusted mentors and a vision of what their lives can become.
A young person who learns to grow food is learning patience.
A child who feeds a chicken is learning responsibility.
A teenager who helps operate a neighborhood market is learning business.
A returning citizen who prepares soil is participating in restoration.
A senior resident who passes down gardening knowledge is preserving culture.
The soil becomes common ground.
The Rancher and the Reverend
Ross understands the land.
Tatum understands the neighborhood.
Ross knows how to cultivate crops and livestock.
Tatum knows how to cultivate faith and community partnerships.
Together, the rancher and the reverend are exploring new ways to help farmers, ranchers and families eat healthier, live longer and build prosperity from the harvest.
Their model is built on a shared conviction: Communities cannot close health and economic gaps by merely describing them. Somebody must be willing to dig.
Somebody must prepare the ground.
Somebody must sow the seed.
Somebody must water the crop.
Somebody must build the market.
And somebody must believe that a harvest can grow in a place others have already written off.
Black soil does not spoil.
It receives the seed, protects it in darkness and prepares it to rise. What appears buried may only be planted. What looks like an empty field may be a future food forest waiting for faithful hands.
At New Mount Rose, those hands are already on the plow.
The seeds are already in the soil.
The farmers are coming to the city.
The neighbors are learning to grow.
And in the heart of Fort Worth’s 76104, a new harvest of health, hope and opportunity is beginning to rise.
From guns to gardens to groceries.
From the farm, to the family, to the fork.
From a food desert to the Funkytown Food Forest.
The rancher and the reverend are digging in—and they believe the best is yet to grow.
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