FARMERS diary
URBAN LEGEND How a Navy veteran became a successful urban farmer in Austin by ADA BROUSSARD / photography by RALPH YZNAGA
P
icture a farmer in your head. Tiffany
And yet, over 20 years later, Washington says Dobbin-Kauv is still the
Washington,
only Black-owned farm in the City of Austin.
owner
of
Dobbin-Kauv
Garden Farm, may defy that picture. For
example, Washington doesn’t really like bugs and is unsettled at the thought of most critters. Her husband, Roc, gave her squeamish alter ego a name: Nancy Farm Fancy (which is also now her Instagram handle: @nancyfarmfancy.) Washington has four children, is a Navy veteran and grew up right here in Austin. And if all this isn’t extraordinary enough, she also says that she is the only Black female farmer in the City of Austin.
re-entered civilian life after serving in the U.S. Navy, she was pregnant with her daughter, Raeghan, and suffering from PTSD. She remembers the heaviness. “I was like, I just need to figure out what’s going on. This is not what my life is supposed to be looking and feeling like,” she says. Washington sought the aid of therapy animals, but because she isn't really a dog person, she adopted the next best thing: three tortoises named Pepernacky, Sheldon and Quagmire. This testudine trio required a vegetable-rich diet, and Washington eventually grew tired of buying
It would take an article as long as a new role of drip tape to tell the
produce and started to grow her own. She began with lettuce. She tells
story of why this is so. Farming requires land, and land grants given at
of a call she got from her husband one afternoon, letting her know he’d
the end of the 19th century were only given to white families, and most
just made a salad with the lettuce she grew. She caught the gardening
often men. Other institutionally discriminatory systems made it difficult
bug and began to grow more than just tortoise food.
for Black families to hold onto land they legally owned. Despite this, agriculture became an important economy for Black Americans, and, by the 1920s, 14 percent of farmers were Black. Today, this number is below 2 percent, in part due to discriminatory lending practices by the USDA, which withheld loans, insurance and general support to Black farmers across the country. In 1997, a class action lawsuit was filed by Black farmers against the USDA and resulted in them winning $1 billion.
40 / EdibleAustin.com
Washington found farming through a peculiar path. When she
Soon Washington had requests from her family to transform their backyards into edible landscapes. Cantaloupe and okra blossomed at her mom’s home, and tomatoes and onions grew at her grandma’s house. She needed more space, and a lightbulb went off: Washington realized she wanted to learn to farm. In so many ways, it just made sense. “I think that’s where it translated for me, being a veteran and going into farming. It was a way for me to continue my service. It’s boots on the ground.”
EdibleAustin.com / 41
