Patrick Chandler Brown is not your typical farmer. He operates Brown Family Farms in Henderson, North Carolina, near the Virginia border. He's been named the state's Small Farmer of the Year by North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University. Patrick cultivates 200 acres of industrial hemp as well as vegetables, wheat, soybeans, corn, and hardwood, all on land where his great grandfather, Byron, an enslaved man, worked as a sharecropper once he was freed. Christina Cooke shared Patrick's story in a piece for The Bitter Southerner entitled "Black Earth."
Evan Kleiman: Hi, Christina. I just have to tell you, this story is so extraordinary.
Christina Cooke: Thank you so much. I was felt very lucky to meet Patrick Brown,
You really told his story beautifully. How did you first learn of Patrick Brown? And after you met him, how many visits did you make to his farm in North Carolina?
In addition to freelancing for publications like The Bitter Southerner, I'm a staff editor for a publication called Civil Eats, and that's a National Food Policy website, so I'm really attuned to issues of food and agriculture and farming, and am also just very interested in the theme of reclamation. I encountered Patrick originally through a short documentary by Patagonia Films about his hemp operation and was just really interested in the ways that he's reclaiming things.
As I spent time with him, visiting him on his farm, I realized the extent to which he's reclaiming things, from the soil to his community's health to his family story. I visited Patrick about three times over a growing season. So in April, in June, and in August.
During my first visit, the season hadn't really ramped up at that point, so he had more time to spend with me, and he took me on a tour of Warren County. We drove around in his white work truck, and he showed me all these sites that were significant to him and to the community, from the plantation house where his great grandfather had been enslaved, to Confederate cemeteries, to his own parents' graves overlooking the farm, to the site of some protests that happened. I felt like I got a huge history that first visit.
The other visits, he was more focused on farm work, like planting corn seeds or harvesting wheat. So we would do an interview, and then I would shadow him as he did his work.
Let's talk about that incident in November 1982, which started both an environmental and civil rights movement in Warren County.
Warren County in the late '70s and early '80s was one of the poorest counties in North Carolina, and it had the highest population of Black people in the state. In the summer of 1978, a trucking firm out of Raleigh was hired to dispose of oil contaminated by PCBs, which have been proven to cause cancer. They're very toxic, and instead of recycling them as they were supposed to, they dripped them. They would go out at night and drip the contaminated oil along the roadsides in 14 counties in North Carolina, including Warren County.
When it was discovered, the state had to figure out what to do with that toxic soil, and elected to establish a toxic waste landfill in Warren County. So in 1982, the people in Warren County, residents, banded together to protest. They would lie down in the middle of the street to prevent the dump trucks from bringing that toxic soil into their community.
Unfortunately, they were not successful, and 7,000 truckloads were dumped. But that incident did kind of spark the US environmental justice movement, and has shaped the way that communities have responded to environmental racism since then.
It's so ironic that Patrick Chandler Brown's initials are PCB, and he was born just a few months later.
Yes, that's actually intentional. His father, Arthur, was a farmer and a preacher and an activist, and was one of those protesters who lay down on the road and was arrested for it. He intentionally named Patrick "PCB" after that incident. I think it really stuck with Patrick and shaped who he is and how he approaches life and farming in terms of standing up for what he believes is right and for his community.
He is such a considerable person. Oakley Grove was the name of the plantation where Patrick's great grandfather, Byron, was enslaved. What do we know about who owned the land and the people who worked the expanse of it?
Oakley Grove was owned by a medical doctor named Lafayette Brown and his wife, Marianne Falcon Brown, and at its peak, it was huge. It was like 7,000 acres. They grew tobacco, cotton, and wheat and were dependent on the labor of 175 enslaved people.
What were the circumstances of Byron's birth and childhood? How did he come to own land in the area?
When Lafayette Brown died, his son Jacob started running the plantation along with his mother, Marianne, and he inherited a young woman of color named Lucinda Fauci, and he arranged for her to work as a cook in the big house. He exploited that unequal power dynamic and had nine children by her. The oldest of those kids was Byron, who is Patrick's great-grandfather.
When the Civil War ended and Byron found that out, he fled the plantation, went to the opposite side of the county, got a job as a sharecropper. When the man who owned that land that he was working died, he willed 10 to 15 acres to Byron. By the time Byron died, he had amassed 2,000 acres of his own that he was farming.
A sign in Warren County, North Carolina commemorates the protests against toxic waste dumping in a predominantly Black community. Photo by Cornell Watson.
And he managed to pass that land down.
He did, yes. At his death, he wanted to give 200 acres to each of his children but most of them had migrated north and just had no interest in farming or being in or near Warren County. Only one of his children, named Grover, was interested. So Grover inherited the farmland that was Patrick's grandfather's then passed it down to Arthur, Patrick's father, who passed it down to Patrick. So it has really passed through the generations.
Could you describe the logistics of Patrick purchasing Oakley Grove and the full-circle moment that it signified.
When Patrick was little, his father would drive him to the driveway outside of this two story plantation house. It was vacant at the time and they would sit outside the gate and look at this old plantation house. His father would say, "This is where our family came from." In adulthood, Patrick took his own son, who's nine or 10 now, he would do the same thing with him.
They would sit outside the gates and look at this house. One day, when they were doing that, the owner of the house, who was a Duke doctor, was there, and they started talking, and the doctor was really impressed with how well Patrick knew his history, the family history, the plantation history, and said, "You know what, you know this history, this house should be yours and not mine." So they arranged for Patrick to be able to purchase it, which he did. He wants it to be an event venue. He wants to establish a resource center for small farmers and farmers of color, and he hopes to establish a family museum there.
Amazing story. For me, the power of Patrick is, first of all, that he's kept his land thriving while being an activist for his community. I mean, he has a whole other full time job.
Yes, he has a full time job for Nature for Justice, which is a social justice nonprofit. He is director of farmer inclusion for them. His goal, this has changed slightly in the last few months, but his goal has been to distribute $1.7 million over five years to farmers of color in North Carolina to help them implement regenerative farming methods on their own properties. That's changed a bit since the Trump administration took office and has canceled a lot of that funding, so that program is in flux, but they're trying to figure out a way forward
With the systemic racism associated with Black farmers owning land, Patrick decided to opt out of the loan system. Could you speak a bit about that and what business decisions Patrick has made to be more self sustaining and not beholden?
The US Department of Agriculture has a long history of discrimination, especially in its allocation of farm loans, and in the '80s and '90s, a North Carolina farmer named Timothy Pigford filed a class action lawsuit, along with a bunch of other farmers, saying that the USDA discriminated against Black farmers, denying them loans at much higher rates, giving them worse terms or delaying them.
Patrick's father experienced that discrimination. He was one of the Pigford claimants, and Patrick would see that his father would not get the loan in time, and then would therefore not be able to plant his seeds on time, and then would be operating at a loss all season, and he was just determined not to be dependent on the government to be able to plant on time. So he operates the farm without taking grants or loans.
I think his outside job helps with that a lot, that other source of income. But also, he plants a diversity of specialty crops to create a variety of income streams. He has a CSA, so he gets paid for that at the front of the season, and that helps fund a lot of the work that he does during the season.
His hemp business is also really interesting.
Yes, he has been planting hemp for both oil and fiber for a number of years. Hemp is used for medicinal purposes, and also fiber, you can make clothing out of it, and also for building materials. There's such a thing as hempcrete that can be used to make a building.
Hemp is a great crop for him, he says, because it's really fast-growing, it thrives without fertilizer and pesticides, and it requires less water than other crops and sequesters carbon. It sequesters a lot of carbon, so he's able to grow this crop that earns him a good amount of money, comparatively, and is also great for the soil.
I understand that as an outgrowth of his hemp business, he partners with Patagonia and the corporation that owns North Face, Timberland, and Jansport.
Yes, for the longest time, hemp was not legal to grow in the United States because of its association with marijuana. Even though hemp contains only .3% of the psychoactive component and does not produce a high, there was this bias against it, and it finally has become legal at the federal level. But because of the number of decades where it wasn't legal, there's a lot of knowledge loss on how to grow hemp.
Companies like Patagonia and North Face and VF are interested in growing the domestic supply chain for hemp but there's a lot of learning they have to do. So both of them have commissioned Patrick to report back to them on the best practices for growing him. He's working with them to help them, one day, be able to establish a more domestic supply chain for that crop.