Kelsey Shoemaker
From a quarter acre of land to the mouth of the community, the Fort Worth Farm Company digs its roots deep with its resourceful garden.
After seeing her dad and grandfather routinely dig their hands in soil for the sake of growing plants, Addie Baker fell in love with gardening and started her first garden almost a decade ago. Years later, at the start of 2020, she rolled out the tarps and planted the first seeds of what would become Fort Worth Farm Company.
“I started Fort Worth Farm Company out of a stirring desire to share how I could give back to the community,” Baker says. “That’s why I started it. I started it to be able to grow organic food to donate to people who needed it most. I needed to figure out how to make it work and make sense, so some different things fell into place, and I decided to make a business out of cut flowers to offset the costs to donate the food.”
Within the garden’s plot of land, Baker grows everything from vegetables to fruits to flowers and even has chickens to produce eggs.
“Lots of people are adamant that they have a black thumb and can’t grow anything,” Baker says. “That’s not true; you just have to go for it. Just start with one tomato plant or one cucumber plant. It’s the same as anything when you take on something new — don’t go all out. Start small and learn your way from there.”
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It’s Baker’s sole purpose to encourage others to grow, so she began sharing her own expertise through social media. People have dropped into her direct messages asking for advice, and she has provided each question with an answer.
“At the end of the day, the more that you’re able to source locally, the more food secure you are,” Baker says. “Shopping organic produce has been gaining more momentum the way that I see it, especially in the last couple of years within the pandemic. The more locally you can source things and know your farmer who’s growing and raising things around you is the first step to realizing what is going on in the food system.”
With Earth Day here, Baker preached that green thumbs aren’t a necessity to go green. Ten decades ago, gardening started out as a hobby but has since turned into a passionate business model.
“The knowledge of being able to make and produce your own food is more powerful than anything else,” Baker says. “I would definitely urge people to grow something themselves. If people think they can’t, just try it. I urge people to look around locally. Google and find out who’s growing within a 2- to 3-hour radius. It is a different world from going to a grocery store and having no idea where that came from.”
