JACKSON, Miss.—Standing in the middle of an M-shaped garden beside Midtown Public Charter Primary School, Midtown Partners Urban Farm Consultant Matt Casteel reaches for a pink and white bloom on a pineapple guava plant. Farm to Community Garden Coordinator Dewaski Davis’s face lights up. It’s his first time seeing the plant’s first bloom.
“What is that on there?” Davis asks.
“That is its first flower,” Casteel says, as Davis reaches for the colorful bloom.
“Once this tree gets mature, which is probably at the end of this season or early next season, it’ll pop, and it’ll have those everywhere,” Casteel continues. “It’s gonna be awesome.”
It’s April 24, 2025, and the area around the pair is covered in plants and flowers. On the other side of the playground are fruit trees. Casteel leans on a rake and points out apple, pear, and persimmon trees. Davis points out recently harvested garlic and plucks a leaf from a kale plant for a taste.
Students have harvested crops from hydroponics labs, planted in the outdoor gardens and planted fruit trees in orchards with their parents. The group has also sent trees home for students to plant in their yards.
It’s all part of a program that is now under threat from the Trump administration’s mass slashing of federal funding.
“We get to show the students that the flower flowers first and that’s how the fruit is made,” Casteel told the Mississippi Free Press on April 24. “That’s the cool thing, the visual hands-on piece to this. One of the cool things the students learn is how important it is that we consume our veggies relatively soon after the harvest because they can lose up to 40% of their nutrients within four to seven days, depending on what crop it is.”
Midtown Partner’s Farm to Community initiative has served nearly 400 underserved elementary and middle school students and more than 2,000 community residents since its start. They’ve distributed hundreds of pounds of radishes and leafy greens from the winter harvest, going door-to-door doing community food distributions.
“First and foremost, we try to get the food into the cafeterias,” Davis said. “We’re growing a lot more food than we even need there right now, so the surplus is meant to go out to the community.”
But the garden is in jeopardy.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture notified state agencies in April that it was canceling the Patrick Leahy Farm to School grant, which funded programs like Midtown Partners’ Farm to Community Initiative. The grant opportunity would have provided $10 million for child nutrition programs to introduce students to locally-sourced foods for fiscal year 2025.
Midtown Partners had planned to apply for another Patrick Leahy grant this year.
“(With) that big chunk from the Patrick (grant), we were allowed to rock forward and do a lot more of the things that we would not have normally been able to do with the piecemeal model that we had in place at the time,” Casteel said. “We’ve got lots of assets now, so there will be more opportunity for grants. But again, without some structural funding, it is going to be hard to pull that off at the same time as building the model.”
The annual competitive federal grant, which began in 2013, has awarded $100 million for 1,275 projects. It assisted grantees in planning, developing, and implementing programs. Grantees used the funds in prior years for a variety of initiatives, including school gardens. The grant has provided 13 Mississippi grantees with more than $1 million in funds.
“This loss creates uncertainty around funding and future Farm to School programs,” Mary Jo Wilson, the marketing and outreach lead for the Mississippi Farm to School Network, told the Mississippi Free Press on April 23. “It also shows how our current legislature overlooks the value of local food and nutritious school meals for children and also threatens vital progress towards improving children’s health, food security and improving the lives of local farmers.”
The USDA awarded Midtown Partners $98,000 in 2024 for their farm-to-school implementation grant. The group used the money to begin permaculture gardens and community gardens. They also purchased three hydroponics growing labs. The program is Davis’s full-time job.
Wilson said canceling the grant will mean fewer resources for local food purchasing. It will also mean that farm-to-school programs that were looking forward to receiving the funding will have to scale back on school garden programs, nutrition education activities, and Farm to School initiatives, Wilson said.
Wilson said the cancellation will not only affect student learning and wellness, but also the broader goal of building a stronger and more sustainable relationship between schools and local food systems—a goal that is especially important in Mississippi due to its challenges in food education access.
“The Patrick Leahy grant opened a door to be able to secure funding from other organizations,” Wilson said. “They were also able to secure funding from an organization that provided fruit trees for the community, all the surrounding school gardens, and urban farm sites in the Midtown community area. They created a network of learning gardens and urban farm sites that can address food insecurity through local procurement and nutrition education for their students as well as their families and the broader community.”
That’s important to Casteel, Davis, and Midtown Partners Creative Economy Coordinator Jina Daniels, who all live in the Midtown neighborhood. Davis, affectionately known as Cowboy, has lived there his entire life. The program presents an opportunity to change their community’s cultural fabric, tying the community together in abundance and caring for each other through growing and sharing.
“What we’re trying to do is not create something that we’re giving people, but empowering the community to be part of the growing part of it,” Daniels said. “It’s like food sovereignty is really what it’s about. It becomes an essential civic infrastructure. It’s like a park or library. We want to create that environment, health, and cultural health in our community.”
They envision expanding the work. Matt has plans to start a summer garden club at the school. He also hopes to start a podcast to communicate the stories of growing and the lessons the students and community learned. Daniels shows a website in progress that will soon include a tree locator. They’ve planted more than 200 trees in the community and turned several blighted lots into community gardens.
“How is this waste? Why is it government efficiency to cancel funding for food programs for students, teachers and farmers?’ All you are hurting are community members,” Daniels said. “It’s wild.”
