Rooted in Resilience

Fighting poverty with permaculture in rural Louisiana

Growing up in Jamaica, Donna Isaacs would pass guavas, mangoes, ackee, and breadfruit on her walks to the beach. Her family home sat on a hill, surrounded by chicken coops, pig pens, and a permaculture food forest brimming with grapefruits, papayas, cherries, bananas, sugarcane, callaloo, coconuts, and more. But she didn’t think of her family as farmers.

“For us in Jamaica, instead of putting in flowers and a garden, we plant food,” says Isaacs. “Just a smorgasbord of food around us that was producing year-round…I didn’t think of it as farming, what we learned to do was tend to the land.”

Today, Isaacs is recreating that model of living as a tool for economic development in some of the poorest towns in the United States. At DeLaTerre Permaculture Farm and through the nonprofit Campti Fields of Dreams, she is teaching residents throughout Louisiana how to grow their own food.

Isaacs believes that integrating agriculture and food systems back into communities can not only build local food sovereignty but also help to revitalize Louisiana’s local and rural economies—and often, it starts with just one fruit tree.

Reversing the trend

Almost 42% of the population in Campti, Louisiana, lives below the poverty line. When Isaacs moved to the area almost 15 years ago, she was shocked to learn how many of her neighbors were living on extremely limited resources. She recalls helping an elderly woman collect paperwork to apply for rural housing assistance and learning that the woman was receiving just $16 in food stamps per month. 

“A lot of people weren’t making enough money to put food on the table, much less fix their homes,” says Isaacs.

The area is comprised mostly of farmland and has followed a decades-long national trend of agricultural consolidation and deterioration in rural communities. Between 2017 and 2022 alone, Louisiana lost more than 2,000 farms while the amount of land used for farming stayed roughly the same, according to the USDA Census of Agriculture.

Isaacs’ friend, JW Anthony, witnessed the impact firsthand: vibrant small farms that fueled rural economies, all sold and aggregated to a few wealthy farmers. Anthony was a school bus driver in what is now the Cane River National Heritage Area, where three busloads of children needed to be transported to school. By the time he retired around 40 years later, only one girl needed school transportation.

“It’s just amazing to see the change. I mean, that whole vibrant community just died,” says Isaacs. “Once in a while, you can see a small, old house that’s in rapid decay because they would buy the farmland, but they didn’t really care for the house.”

While her background was in sustainable community development and LEED-certified buildings, Isaacs quickly realized much more was needed to help these communities. She shifted her focus entirely to building food security, using her childhood as inspiration.

“The way I was raised, we may not have had a lot of money, but we never had to think about where our next meal was coming from, because there’s always the breadfruit tree, the banana tree, and the mangoes,” says Isaacs. “It can be done. It can be done in Louisiana.”

A self-sustaining ecosystem

Isaacs built her first demonstration farm on sandy soils with very low fertility. To top it off, she didn’t have access to water. The team hauled water from other facilities and collected rainwater when possible. 

“I definitely broke a few rules along the way,” says Isaacs. Working with government organizations like the Natural Resources Conservation Service to develop the farm, there were “very strict guidelines for what you can and cannot do. But I had to build the soil fertility. We did what we needed to.”

She learned about unconventional techniques like hügelkultur—“mound culture” in German—which involves constructing a mound from decaying wood debris and other compostable plant materials. The organic mass builds soil carbon and fertility that, when crops are planted directly into the mound, acts like a sponge to absorb water. She also studied books by farmers and researchers like Sepp Holzer and Bill Mollison, and slowly, her focus went toward permanent agriculture and growing with the environment—something familiar to her from her childhood.

Soon, Isaacs began seeing “incredible crops” from what used to be unproductive plots of land.

“I knew nothing about farming, per se. But I had a model. I had an idea. I really wanted to rebuild my childhood,” says Isaacs. “That’s how everybody should live, just going out and picking fruits.”

She adapted techniques she learned in Jamaica to boost fertility on the farm. Her family’s chickens lived on deep sawdust bedding, for example, creating compost while providing comfort to the animals. Today, she is incorporating deep beds in her chicken coops, which later get processed in DeLaTerre’s composting facility to be applied back to the vegetable farm. Isaacs’ father used to burn the byproducts from his lumber business to create charcoal, which would be added to the soil and increase fertility, carbon storage, and water retention. Now, DeLaTerre is producing biochar as a soil amendment.  

Isaacs is also in the process of rewilding a pasture to create what she calls a food forest. It will have different layers of perennial plants including nitrogen-fixers and aroma-producers, each playing a different role in attracting or repelling certain pests or building fertility. The goal is to create a self-supporting ecosystem that also provides critical nutrients to grazing livestock.

But Isaacs emphasizes that what works on her farm may not work on another. She teaches a systems approach to farm management, and no two permaculture farms look the same.

“It’s my permaculture. It’s the way that I grew up in Jamaica where we had permanent agriculture, where we could just walk out our back door and forage and not have to worry about meals,” says Isaacs.

One farm at a time

Campti Field of Dreams is implementing a USDA Natural Resources Conservation Innovation Grant, now in its third year, and supporting 20 different farms through education with DeLaTerre Permaculture Farm as a model. Isaacs says she has seen a range of different use cases and success stories.

One farm started as a side job for two women in 2022, who grew vegetables and flowers on just one quarter-acre plot. By 2023, they were farming full-time and had hired a part-time helper. According to Isaacs, they generated $180,000 from just two acres of vegetables and flowers that year. Now they are farming four acres.

But Isaacs says that working full-time on the farm isn’t necessarily the goal for these producers.

She recalls an 80-year-old woman, “one of our most ardent farmers,” who is cultivating a farm in her backyard within a housing project. She is growing locally adapted fruits like muscadines, and now, “all the people in the community get to benefit from the stuff that she’s growing,” says Isaacs.

Another farmer is a full-time deputy sheriff who runs a no-till organic market garden in the middle of row crop country. His produce is selling at both supermarkets and his roadside stand, and he regularly has intrigued neighbors stop by to learn about what he’s doing.

For Isaacs, these are the stories that can fuel a viral local food movement and relieve pressure on the American food systems. And everyone—especially landowners—has a role to play.

Rethinking green spaces

“People say that we can’t grow enough food at the scale that we’re talking about, and I beg to differ,” says Isaacs.

Isaacs envisions a world where land—no matter what size—is not seen as a place to plant grass and maintain a yard, but rather, an opportunity to develop a self-sustaining ecosystem that feeds both people and planet.

“A beautifully mowed lawn looks good to us, but it’s not productive. It literally is on life support, meaning you’ve got to feed it chemicals to keep it alive because it’s not thriving,” says Isaacs. “Whereas an abundant ecosystem is messy, it’s wild but it’s feeding us, it’s feeding the birds, it’s creating a shady area for frogs and lizards.”

Isaacs recommends starting by planting whichever foods grow wild in a particular region, including those that used to be more ubiquitous but may have been replaced by development in recent years. Mulberry, persimmon, pawpaw, and mayhaw trees, for example, grow well in northern Louisiana. Blueberries, blackberries, plums, and pecans grow well in the Northeast.

A relatively small investment can produce food for years to come. Many fruit-bearing trees grow wild in communities across the U.S. but the fruits don’t last as long on grocery shelves, says Isaacs. Planting them is an opportunity to harvest, preserve, and feed families at a hyper-local level.

“That would provide an abundance that would not only take care of you and your family, but that would be able to support the community around you…We could all share, we could all trade, and we would have true food security,” says Isaacs. “It’s healthy. It’s done without chemicals. It’s a win-win-win for everybody and the Mother Earth. The potential is absolutely huge, but we have work to do.”

This project was originally from the Mad Agriculture’s Cultivating Conservation project, funded through the Platform for Agriculture and Climate Transformation