The State Fair of Texas is trying to remedy past injustices to South Dallas via its urban farm
It’s a cruel irony that the largest agriculture promoter in the state, the State Fair of Texas, is surrounded by a ‘food desert,’ the neighborhood of South Dallas.
When 4-year-old Jonah saw the baby cucumber poking up through the dirt, he shrieked, delighted. The viridescent dot had the group of children hollering and screaming.
“They could not believe it! They didn’t think it was real,” recalls Sherri Mixon, executive director at TR Hoover Community Development Center, home of the Hoover Learning Garden.
She and her afterschool charges had planted various items, but the cucumbers grew fastest, and that was exciting, Mixon says. After she convinced the kids that they could eat what was growing from the ground, they eventually tried it. Some turned their noses up, others liked it — the point, then, was to introduce them to vegetables.
She says it’s the whole reason she, with help from a State Fair of Texas partnership, started the garden.
“Because kids wanted to know where veggies came from,” she says. “We have been able to teach them and see the different changes as they are growing. I tell them all the time — it’s just like you are growing.”
Mixon is aware of the irony: The State Fair of Texas — the largest promoter of agriculture in the state — neighboring a community where children don’t know where vegetables come from. But she says the fair’s work in recent years is helping to make amends for creating scarcity of food and other resources in her South Dallas’ Bonton neighborhood.
She felt it first-hand when the COVID-19 pandemic began. By March 2020, when nationwide stay-home orders were in effect, Hoover’s emergency food pantry ran dry. Even the neighborhood grocer, Fiesta, ran out of fruit and veggies, she says.
“I had to figure out a way to produce more,” she says, “because people were about to go hungry. I felt like the weight of the world was on our shoulders.”
That’s when workers from the State Fair of Texas stepped up their support — bringing boxes of fresh produce from its Big Tex Urban Farms four days a week. During the early months of the pandemic, Mixon used the yield to feed 50 to 70 carloads of Dallas residents in a given day.
Today Big Tex Urban Farms partners with more than 70 South Dallas nonprofits that address poverty-created problems in the neighborhood. The farm has contributed some 764,000 servings of produce to the fair’s overall tally of 500,000 South Dallas residents served through community programs and initiatives since 2016, making it a solid food solution, says Froswa’ Booker-Drew, vice president of community affairs and strategic alliances at the fair.
She says the fair, in the past, was on the wrong side of history, but now it can make amends and be part of solutions for South Dallas.
“It is going to require investment, innovation, and creativity in addition to doing something beyond just traditional ways we’ve done it in the past,” Booker-Drew says.
April 1, 2016 was Froswa’ Booker-Drew’s first day of work at the fair. She had been hired to help restore a wounded relationship between the 277-acre city-owned exposition park and nearby residents it disenfranchised.
Big Tex Urban Farm, a mobile agriculture program situated in the shadow of the towering Texas Star, was introduced that same year. Alongside a handful of employees from other departments, Booker-Drew seeded 100 shipping pallets turned into raised planting beds, which lined an 80-by-80-foot area formerly used to house the Gateway Pavilion during State Fair season.
“When I started at that time, we really began focusing on listening to community needs,” Booker-Drew says.
She is aware of the documented history of South Dallas’ dismantling, with homes seized and people of color displaced. But Booker-Drew says she believes the Fair, today, is “committed to being a better neighbor, something that hasn’t historically been a part of the narrative of the organization with our neighboring community,” she says. “I would be remiss to ignore the history of the State Fair of Texas, and I believe it drives us to do the work differently.”
The year Booker-Drew started at the Fair, South Dallas’ supply of fresh fruit and vegetables was so lacking that the city offered millions of dollars in an attempt to lure grocery chains to the area. It was a “food desert,” something The United States Department of Agriculture defines as a place with people who have limited access to healthy and affordable food, a poverty rate higher than 20 percent, and a third of the population that lives more than a mile from a major grocer. Activists today have replaced the term “food desert” with “food apartheid.” It better captures the role of politics, racism and injustice in food deserts’ creation, they say.
Of Dallas’ 1.2 million residents, some 450,000 live in the system of food apartheid, according to a 2017 study by the City of Dallas. In 2020, real estate research company JLL Research conducted a study that showed the food desert in the Fair Park area is inhabited mostly by Black residents.
While a Save-a-Lot and Fiesta are now in the neighborhood on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard — across the street from one another, a stone’s throw from the fair gates — many activists believe that grocery stores, while helpful, are not necessarily the solution to South Dallas’ food scarcity issues.
“As much as we need more grocery stores and options, I also think that there is a need to support local farms and gardens,” Booker-Drew says.
Big Tex Urban Farms features a massive hydroponic growing system that feeds South Dallas residents through partnerships with local organizations.