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When Christa Barfield left her career in healthcare administration just shy of her 30th birthday, she had no idea what would come next. That leap became the catalyst for FarmerJawn, a regenerative farming venture rooted in health and community.
Since 2018, she’s grown it from the ground up, becoming a local name, and now leads one of the largest Black woman-led regenerative farms in the world.
A Life-Changing Introduction to Farming
A native of Northwest Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Barfield received her bachelor’s degree in healthcare administration from St. Joseph’s University, following in her mother’s footsteps who was a nurse.
In January 2018, after ten years in the healthcare industry and experiencing burnout, she made the risky decision to leave her full-time role to focus on her health. Barfield did not know at the time that her decision would be a life-changing pivot as a trip to Martinique that same month sparked her desire to explore agriculture.
“I’ve been speaking French since I was eight, so I chose a [French-speaking] country for my first solo and international trip.” Barfield says, “I got a chance to be one with nature, in a way I hadn’t been in the past.”
During her 5-day stay, Barfield became enthralled by the people she stayed with, and how they lived off the land. “My initial awakening into agriculture came from my Airbnb host who was a Thai chef,” Barfield recalls. “He prepared me meals daily, and I would watch him go to his garden, pick herbs, and pour hot water over them. That was my first experience drinking tea in a different way.”
On the second leg of her trip, she dove even deeper into the island’s agriculture when one of her tour guides offered her a chance to accompany him to work. “At that time I didn’t know what his work was,” Barfield shares.
“I got to meet his team, and they were packing boxes of fresh produce and people were coming to pick them up for 20 euros.” With a desire for entrepreneurship brewing, and this new exposure to agriculture, she returned home rejuvenated and ready to brainstorm ways in which she could pursue farming as a career.
The Origins of FarmerJawn
“From 5 a.m. to 9 a.m. I would do Uber, and from 5 p.m. to 9 p.m. I would do Instacart… but [during the day] I was really figuring out how am I going to be a farmer and started building a business plan,” Barfield says.
With a strong desire to learn as much as possible, Barfield sought out opportunities to dive head first into urban farming including volunteering locally at Henry Got Crops (part of the Weaver’s Way Co-Op) and Greensgrow Farms.
“Being unskilled, I found that volunteering meant I would either be weeding or packing vegetables, but that wasn’t going to get me to fully understand operating a farm,” Barfield shares of her volunteer experience.
Although Barfield was gifted a 24-square-foot greenhouse for Mother’s Day (which she credits as being her first “farm”), her desire for more hands-on experience led her to purchase her first piece of land, a community-like garden in Roxborough. Through this, she began growing herbs and making tea blends that she would eventually sell at local markets and events in late 2019.
A surge of opportunities followed, including becoming a vendor for Di Bruno Brothers (a local specialty grocer), features in local media and continuous land offers. As her business grew, Barfield began to think more strategically about these prospects. She developed what she calls “The FarmerJawn Formula,” a decision-making tool with three core tenets: environmental health, physical health, and social health.
“Digging into my health background, I look at the environmental health of the decision I’m making. ‘Am I going to be able to impact the physical health of the people in that area with my products and am I going to enrich the social health of the people?’ All three of things must be a yes for me before I decide to move forward,” Barfield shares.
Resilience in Regenerative Farming
Thankful for each opportunity coming her way, Barfield’s sights were still set on having her own farm. And while she was able to dip her toe into farming on smaller projects (a corner store project in Germantown, and five acres of farmland in Elkins Park), her goal was ultimately realized in 2023, when Barfield acquired a 123-acre farm in Westtown, Pennsylvania (a suburb of Philadelphia roughly an hour drive away).
An accomplishment she rightfully wears as a badge of honor. “Only .04 percent of farmers in the United States are Black women [and] there are a lot of misconceptions we are debunking.”
A visit to Barfield’s farm makes her commitment to community and challenging the ideas of what farming looks like clear, especially for Black women. Committed to accessibility, she’s even launched a weekly bus trip from the city to her location.
The trip includes a tour of her grounds where Barfield provides education on regenerative farming, including her use of chickens to tend to her land, sustainable agriculture practices, soil health, and a peek into her greenhouse filled with dozens of varieties of herbs. Guests also get a chance to shop her farm store, which is stocked with organic produce, local meats, and goods from nearby makers, including pastries, honey and teas.
Barfield shares, “People are miseducated on where their food comes from and how that impacts their health, and we’re here to be the light and to enlighten people on how you actually heal yourself from the inside out is caring about and knowing who your farmer is.”
Her success has not come without its challenges and turmoil, from people stealing soil and breaking into her store on the farm, to continued vandalization and racial discrimination. She does not let these acts of hate slow her down, instead, she uses them to push further.
“If we are cared about this much by people who wish to throw hate in our direction, unfortunately that’s an indicator we are doing something right. The anecdote is to continue to expand on how much we are doing and continuing to do it chemical-free.”
RELATED: Regenerative Farming Techniques: A Path to Cultural Resilience
The Future Vision for FarmerJawn
Her work hasn’t gone unnoticed, if media features weren’t enough, she also achieved one of the highest honors in the food and beverage industry when she won a James Beard Award in 2024, a goal Barfield had set for herself early on.
“In the culinary space people give chefs all of the glory, but farmers are actually the origin story for any chef to be great…and to be able to let people know that we are here, showed me that there’s a lot more to come.”
Already setting future plans in motion with an eagerness to increase access to locally grown organic food, especially in food deserts, Barfield has plans to launch Corner Jawn, her spin on a neighborhood corner store in late 2025.
The concept (which she has been honing since 2020) builds on her first Germantown store but is now reimagined with more experience and a broader vision with hopes to expand to multiple locations. “Corner Jawn is meant to be a food is medicine corner store, except on a smaller scale. It’s meant to be able to be approachable to people who live in the city.”
In addition to Corner Jawn, Barfield has plans to continue hosting pop-up dinners in collaboration with chefs, expanding speaking engagements, and mentoring the next generation of Black farmers. She aims to foster community-supported agriculture and build a healthier future.
“When it comes to lineage, we’re eating for the future ancestors,” Barfield emphasizes. “Our community’s health issues stem from what our ancestors were eating, and we owe it to the next generation to care for them by caring for ourselves now.”
To learn more about Christa Barfield and how you can support or pay a visit to her farm, check out the FarmerJawn website or follow @farmerjawn_ on social media.
