Mar 18, 2024
Today's podcast is a story of one man's personal journey to making a difference by building communities. Zach Wyatt grew up caretaking an old 300-acre farm in Virginia. He went to college and ended up working in mortgage lending. And then something changed for Zack, and that's where the story gets interesting. He now leads the Carolina Farm Trust, working to strengthen local food systems in the Carolinas. The trust cultivates urban farm networks, farm apprenticeships, supports local farmers in purchasing equipment or land, making informed-decisions, and more.
Interview Summary
I'd like to understand a little bit more, why did you want
to start the Carolina Farm Trust?
Well, with a lot of things, it was just kind of by accident and
circumstance. And I would say subconsciously I had agriculture in
my bones, ever since I was a kid growing up in agriculture in
Northern Virginia. It just kind of seeps in. We [The Family] still
have that little arm reached out to being a part the DC metro area.
Growing up in an urban-rural environment kind of planted, I think,
a lot of the seeds in the work that was going to transpire so many
decades later. But it really just kind of came down to a life
event. I had a partnership that just ended in one day, which was a
huge blow to us financially. We had to get on EBT and Snap and went
through that process. And I was really soul searching and figuring
out what were the next steps for me. Looking back on it, I think I
was really grasping on to how do I do anything, to kind of just do
something. I got back into reading about our food system and farms
and started meeting some farmers. And once you start talking to
farmers in a real way and understanding what our food system truly
is, it's horrifying. It kind of came down to seeing this visual
metaphor of a meteorite heading toward us every day, and either
sticking your head in the sand or doing something. Circumstance
just led to this next event and next event, and the next event. And
eight years later, here we are.
What I hear from you is this story of resiliency and it
seems like that's something you also see in the food system or a
need for that is that a fair assessment?
Absolutely. We just take food in agriculture for granted. And over
the last 80 to 90 years, we've really given our entire means of
survival pretty much away. Most people don't really look at food
and agriculture and how it spins every major decision on Earth.
Every social problem we typically have, every health issue we have,
if you follow it all the way down to where that problem started,
you go all the way back to the dirt. So, to kind of look at
resilience and what do we mean by that and more importantly,
building regional resilience in a global economy: I think getting
supply chains a whole lot shorter, focusing on soil health and
nutrition density and our farming community, is where we really
have to start.
I'm starting to get a sense of the big picture of the farm
trust. What is the driving mission of your work? I think you're
hitting on some of that, but I'd like to hear
more.
I'd say the vision is very clearly about building regional
resilience and then using food and agriculture as a primary driver.
The four main pillars we have are health and nutrition, upward
mobility and equity, sustainability, and climate change. Our four
action-on-the-ground pillars are first, building an urban farm
network and to get people to understand where our food comes from.
Why is that important? We do really need to push urban centers to
be more responsible for where our food comes from and playing a
role in that. Second, our farm apprentice program, workforce
development. You know, the average age of our farming community
right now is a little over 60. Where is this next generation of
farmers coming from? Where is the land coming from? So, it is not
only kind of a labor force for us, you know, but how do we make
sure every community garden, every school garden is thriving? How
do we create teams that can go help our rural farming community
with different projects or step in when someone gets sick or an
emergency? Third, when we think of food as health, what does that
really mean? If we're talking about food as medicine, in my
opinion, we've already missed the boat. We got to talk about food
as health, we got to talk about prevention. How do community health
workers get out in communities covering geographic locations,
really understanding what those needs are and how do we create
systems to go meet them where they are. And then our fourth pillar
is our distribution platform, which is really there to give a
profitable revenue stream to our farming community. How do we use
economics to really push them to start their regenerative farming
journey? And then how internally to create supply chains that not
only can work with consumers, you know, up and down the
socioeconomic ladder, but how do we make sure we can build supply
chains for larger institutions to be able to participate in a local
food economy because the infrastructure is just not there.
I was struck by your earlier comment of if you get down to
the, if you will, root cause of any problem, and forgive the pun,
it seems like it's in the dirt. Right? And I'd like to hear you
explain a little bit more about what you believe is what's wrong
with the food system as it is today. And I got a sense it's about
the lack of being local, but I want to hear it in your words and
how does this guide your actions now?
Well, it's just evolution. I mean we always try to get better. We
wanted to make food cheaper, so we went from hundreds of farms and
rapid consolidation over the years. We have processed and now
ultra-processed food, and we have to deal with slavery and
reconstruction and everything that kind of came with it with such
as sharecropping from a social standpoint. We're looking at
nutrition density and in average produce and protein sources we're
almost 30 to 6% less than what it was 100 years ago. We're looking
at climate change, sustainability. Where does that come from? Look
at the carbon footprint, our agriculture industry puts on the
planet, look at the massive consolidation of looking at if the
world gets 40% of its grain from Ukraine, and then having different
political and social issues come up. I include inflation spikes.
We're looking at carbon sequestration, we're looking at no-till,
we're looking at all these big environmental and all these
sustainability and allergies and cancers. And so, where does all
that come from? It comes from our environment. Looking through all
of this, you can very much see parallels of how our food system
started to consolidate and get more aggregated with all the other
problems I just mentioned. And if you look at 1930, 1940, and then
going from there, you can very much see kind of a parallel with a
lot of the challenges that we face. So, I think we really spent a
lot of time trying to kind of cherry pick among all these really
big problems. We're trying to cherry pick smaller problems because
they seem a little bit more manageable, but we really have to go
rethink the system as a whole. And that's really, really hard to
do. What we're really trying to push forward is how do we just look
at a region, because I really feel like you have to do this from a
regional perspective. How do we get a regional model to work,
really go rebuild all that infrastructure, get, buy-in,
understanding what the data's telling us, and then we can replicate
that going forward to really other regions around the world.
This is very helpful and I appreciate the way you approach
that question. Seeing that there are these large global issues and
there are structural challenges when we talk about agriculture -
and you're working in the region, my understanding, you're out of
West Charlotte - and there's a distribution center. Can you tell us
a little bit more about what you're doing in West Charlotte,
especially through this distribution center?
It became very clear that our farming community needed a market.
Farmer's markets are tough. As consumers, some of us love them,
some of us don't pay attention to them. But for our farming
community, farmer's markets are really hard. And from a wholesale
standpoint, it's very hard for Carolina farmers to compete with
Mexico, California, Florida. How do you compete regionally on a
global market? So, we had a distribution model planned for a while
and in my head, I wanted it to be in West Charlotte and it needed
to be near I-85. We wanted it to be in a community because this
kind of distribution facility would be an employment place and we
would have a real retail concept. We wanted a meat processing
butchery component. So, it was kind of putting a lot of pie in the
sky visions into one parcel. But one of our strategic advisors in
2021 was at coffee, talking to a friend about Carolina Farm Trust
and kind of what our needs were. One of them said, "Oh, my family
has this warehouse," So we took a look at it, and it met every
criterion we could have dreamed of. The only thing that was
different was that I was thinking in my head we would want like
100,000, 200,000 square feet and this one was 25,000 square feet.
But the moment I looked at it, I realized this is the exact size or
the range that we need because of the community impact. We want
more of these not one or two, you know, that are gathered around.
This being in the community was such a key factor to it. So, with
our wholesale operation, our commercial kitchen, the retail, the
event space, the meat processing butchery component of it all, we
really could start to see this framework of getting kind of an
independent food system together. So, we're working on phase one,
which is our wholesale operation and our 3000 square foot
commercial which should come online, you know, in the next six
weeks. And then we're just waiting on permitting for phase two and
fundraising on phase two to get that activated. It's a really cool
project and we're really excited to see it to come to fruition here
in the next few weeks.
This is really fascinating. You know, I haven't asked this,
but I'm intrigued. Tell me a little bit about the farmers that you
work with. What kinds of produce or crops are they or animals are
they producing? I mean, how are you developing those
relationships?
Over the course of the years we've met a lot of different farmers
and we grow everything that we can grow here in the Carolinas.
We're talking greens and obviously tomatoes and melons and corn.
We're working with our grain farmers who are growing wheat for us
and grinding flour that we're actually getting into a hotel right
now in Uptown Charlotte, which is really exciting. Cattle, pork,
lamb. And really looking to create markets for our farming
community in any way that we can. So right now, Michael Bowling,
our general manager of CFT Market, which is the name of our
distribution facility, he and his team are going all over the state
and finding arms that we've never heard of and getting
recommendations and compiling our list. A big part of what we're
trying to put together is how we can take the burden on some things
like transportation, because it's such a margin killer, and such a
challenge for our farming communities. How do we get amazing
produce from the east, you know, into Charlotte and the West, into
Charlotte. So, we're working on getting a fleet of vehicles right
now to do that. So, it's really just trying to find all of the
barriers that our farming community faces, and then how do we
create the infrastructure systems.
I want to end by asking sort of what are your hopes? Like
what is the long game? Where do you see your work and the work of
those who will follow you? Where does it lead?
Well, I think you have to be very naive to think this way. And
sometimes, being naive isn't a bad thing because if you do too much
research, then you think your way out of doing what you should be
doing. So really, the long game is trying to change the entire
industry. But it's so much more than that because our food and Ag
is health. It IS our health industry, you know, and obviously it's
our food industry. But it's also going to play a huge role in
saving not our planet for the planet's sake but saving the planet
for our sake. You know, it's just critical. So, I mean, really
we're wanting to really follow in Netflix footsteps. Netflix came
in and changed the entire entertainment industry relatively
quickly. We're looking at automotive legacy manufacturers that
weren't getting electric vehicles fast enough. So, Tesla came in
and disrupted that. Now suddenly, everybody's moving in that
direction. So really at our core, we want to take market share and
drive our industry partners to focus more on this work. That is
really the long game. For us, it's how do we build the foundation?
I know I'm never really going to see it, but how do we build this
foundation for the next generation of leadership to really get it
going on what we've been able to build in this short time.
Bio
Zack Wyatt is the President/CEO of Carolina Farm Trust. Zack grew up tending to a 300-acre dairy farm in northern Virginia. After graduating from Coastal Carolina University in 2003 with a degree in Business Administration, he worked in home mortgage lending and IT. Zack’s passion for bringing the community together over food, his understanding of the importance of equitable food access, and his drive to improve local food systems led him to develop Carolina Farm Trust in 2015.