On a steamy, early summer day at Spice Creek Farm in Brandywine, Maryland, tomato plants stretch skyward, eager for structural support. D’Real Graham, who tends the 24-acre property alongside his life partner, Gail Taylor, methodically drives in posts and sets up a wire trellis to train the heavy vines, keeping the developing fruit safely off the ground. Nearby, peppers and squash bulk up under the humid mid-Atlantic sun, while meticulous rows of kale and Swiss chard reach their absolute productive peak. Weaving between the garden beds, Ruby and Ivy—the couple’s energetic Bernese Mountain dogs—happily nibble on stray leafy greens.
This pastoral scene represents more than just a routine summer morning; it marks the realization of a deeply ambitious, equity-driven agricultural vision. While Taylor spent more than a decade successfully cultivating food on a compact, 2-acre urban farm in Washington, D.C., 2025 marks the couple’s first full, uninterrupted growing season on their expansive rural site in Prince George’s County, located roughly 25 miles southeast of the nation’s capital.
Steeped in history and operating under the rigorous principles of regenerative organic agriculture, Spice Creek Farm is the anchor for a broader movement. Taylor and Graham are not merely growing vegetables—they are engineering a cooperative, community-rooted food system. By joining forces with neighboring growers, they are actively laying the groundwork for a burgeoning Black Agrarian Corridor in Southern Maryland. Their remarkable progress toward these goals earned them a prestigious finalist spot for the inaugural U.S. Good Farmer Award, a joint initiative by the Rodale Institute and the Davines Group designed to honor agricultural leaders who make profound environmental and social contributions through regenerative practices.
Detailed Chronology: From Policy Desks to Rural Acreage
The path that brought Taylor and Graham to the soil of Brandywine is as unconventional as it is inspiring, bridging urban policy, grassroots activism, and hands-on land stewardship.
Setting Down Roots
Gail Taylor’s journey into agriculture began far away from the farm. Raised near Albany, New York, she earned a degree in U.S. foreign policy and Latin America from Syracuse University, followed by immersive stints working abroad in Guatemala and Chile. Looking for a tangible way to enact positive change after experiencing burnout from policy work, Taylor pivoted toward agriculture in 2005. She began volunteering at Deep Roots Farm, a sprawling 200-acre regenerative organic farm in Upper Marlboro, Maryland, managed by Gale Livingstone.
Her responsibilities expanded rapidly, fueling a deep-seated commitment to nourishing communities with fresh, chemical-free food. However, the grueling daily commute from Washington, D.C., to Upper Marlboro proved unsustainable. In 2011, Taylor drafted a decentralized business plan, launching a backyard Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) subscription service from her home in the District.
"Three people offered me the use of their yards to grow food, and I set up a greenhouse in mine to raise seedlings for sale," Taylor recalls. "I rode my bike to each yard on Thursdays to collect the harvest, which I put on my porch for the six CSA members."
Breaking Institutional Barriers: The DC Urban Farming Act
Ambition soon outgrew residential backyards. Taylor identified an unused, two-acre plot near Catholic University intended for urban agricultural development. However, she quickly hit a bureaucratic brick wall: local tax laws made leasing urban land for farming cost-prohibitive.
"D.C. had no policy for levying property taxes with agriculture exemptions like you find in so many places," Taylor explains. Refusing to be deterred, she enlisted pro bono legal assistance from American University law students, spearheading a legislative campaign that successfully passed the city’s landmark 2014 DC Urban Farming and Food Security Act. This legislation revolutionized local tax law, permitting the city to lease vacant public and private land to urban growers. Armed with this legal victory, Taylor launched Three Part Harmony Farm on the site in 2015. By 2024, its 64 intensive, 3-by-100-foot beds were yielding an astonishing 7,000 pounds of fresh produce annually.
A Partnership Rooted in the Soil
D’Real Graham arrived at agriculture via an equally deliberate detour. Raised in Michigan with a background in education, he moved to Washington to work for an educational nonprofit. Like Taylor, he found his way to Deep Roots Farm as a volunteer.
"I was ready to pivot from office culture to agriculture, but it was hard," Graham admits. "At first, Farmer Gale only trusted me to weed, but I came to it humbly and was willing to learn."
His dedication paid off. By the end of his first year, Graham was managing the farm’s delivery van operations and running its stands at three weekly farmers markets. After meeting at Deep Roots, Taylor and Graham formed a personal and professional partnership. In 2019, Graham officially joined the team at Three Part Harmony Farm.
Securing Spice Creek Farm
As their collective vision matured, the couple began searching for a larger canvas—a place where they could exponentially scale production and lay the foundation for a regional food hub. In 2022, they leased the initial acreage in Brandywine to supplement their urban yields. Recognizing the long-term potential of the site, they secured a lease-to-purchase agreement in December 2023 with crucial backing from Dirt Capital Partners, an organization that finances regenerative organic land acquisition.
Building on History: Remediation, Resilience, and Land Stewardship
The Spice Creek Farm property carries a profound historical weight. Bordered on one side by Spice Creek—which flows into the Patuxent River and ultimately feeds the Chesapeake Bay watershed—the 24-acre parcel was owned for generations by the locally prominent Baden family. Historically, the fields were intensely farmed for tobacco, and later for conventional corn and soybeans.
Digging into the historical archives of the land yielded sobering revelations. "I researched the history of this land," Graham notes, "and I learned that 110 people had been enslaved here at one time." Understanding this legacy reinforced the couple’s commitment to treating the land with deep reverence and restorative care.
Before a single organic seed could be sown, however, the physical soil required extensive rehabilitation. Decades of conventional management using heavy tractors and chemical herbicides had severely compacted and degraded the earth.
"The soil was so degraded that we brought in seven truckloads of compost in summer 2022," Graham explains. "We rented a skid steer, and I spent three days spreading the compost."
Following the initial soil amendment, Taylor and Graham installed sturdy deer fencing and hand-dug their first intensive crop beds, planting sweet potatoes, white potatoes, watermelons, eggplants, and tomatillos. Over time, they incorporated a walk-behind tractor, installed a drip-irrigation water line, built an efficient harvest wash station, and erected a small greenhouse to propagate seedlings for themselves and local growers.
Expanding the Agro-Ecosystem
Spice Creek Farm is rapidly evolving into a fully integrated, multi-layered agricultural ecosystem. Fields adjacent to the historic brick homestead have been planted with native species explicitly designed to attract beneficial pollinators. The couple is actively preparing to introduce pasture-raised chickens into these fields, with their Bernese Mountain dogs, Ruby and Ivy, currently undergoing specialized livestock-guardian training.
"We’ll also have goats to help with clearing fields when needed," Graham adds. Furthermore, the farm has embraced culturally and historically significant crops. "We’re about to plant cotton and cowpeas," Graham says. "We are growing cotton because we want to learn how to grow it and to restore our community’s relationship to the plant."
Supporting Context & Metrics: Technical Assistance and Scaling Up
Scaling an agricultural operation from an urban backyard to a 24-acre rural farm introduces complex logistical, infrastructural, and economic challenges. To navigate this critical transition, Taylor and Graham partnered with the Rodale Institute consulting team, accessing world-class technical expertise.
Navigating Growth with Rodale Institute
Kegan Hilaire, Rodale Institute’s small farms and diversified vegetable consultant, has worked closely with Spice Creek Farm, advising the couple on everything from pasture management and equipment acquisition to grant navigation and stream conservation.
"When farmers begin to scale up, they need to balance their short-term needs for infrastructure and equipment to keep up with their growth, while staying focused on their long-term plans," Hilaire observes. "A walk-behind tractor can get you started, for example, but it’s not going to be enough when you’re working 20 acres. You also need simple infrastructure for post-harvest preparation and storage that can handle the volume you’re harvesting now, while you save for a bigger cooler and processing space."
Rodale Institute consultants assist beginning and transitioning farmers across the United States with:
Soil building, weed management, and advanced crop rotations.
Navigating organic certification processes, meticulous recordkeeping, and inspection preparations.
Identifying lucrative regional buyers, establishing direct markets, and networking within farmer coalitions.
Accessing financial resources, low-interest agricultural loans, and federal or private grant opportunities.
To date, Rodale Institute consultants have partnered with more than 1,000 farmers across nearly every contiguous U.S. state, successfully transitioning over 45,000 acres to certified organic production as part of their broader mission to convert 1 million acres of American farmland to regenerative organic systems.
Farm Facts at a Glance
Name & Location: Spice Creek Farm, Brandywine, Maryland (Prince George’s County)
Total Land Area: 24 acres
Active Vegetable Production: 3 acres (continuously expanding)
Current CSA Membership: 150 households
Production Cycle: 48 weeks of continuous food production annually
Official Statements and Leadership Perspectives
The driving force behind Spice Creek Farm is rooted in a profound philosophy of shared success, historical reclamation, and community solidarity.
"We want to provide good, healthy food to people, especially children, and we want to be part of a community of farmers," says Gail Taylor. "We are creating a food hub and joining with others to build a Black Agrarian Corridor here in southern Maryland."
The transition to rural farming, however, has not been without structural hurdles. Federal funding shifts and policy cuts in recent years have dramatically reduced financial safety nets for small-scale and organic operations.
"We didn’t bring a lot of capital to this," notes D’Real Graham. "We have depended on grants for funding, and those cuts have had a big impact on us."
Labor shortages present another persistent industry-wide obstacle. Agriculture in America carries deep-seated historical traumas, particularly for Black and Brown communities. To combat this and attract reliable farmworkers, Taylor and Graham are creatively restructuring their property’s housing infrastructure. Currently, a single employee lives with them in the roadside brick house. Long-term plans involve renovating the central property cabin into their private residence, converting the larger brick home into dedicated employee housing to attract passionate individuals eager to learn regenerative farming.
Future Outlook: The Black Agrarian Corridor and Regional Cooperation
Rather than viewing nearby farms as competitors, Taylor and Graham are championing a model of radical economic cooperation. Graham actively meets with a half-dozen neighboring growers in Southern Maryland to coordinate crop rotations and share resources.
"We think it makes sense to rotate in coordination with each other, so we are serving customers without competing to sell the same products," Graham explains. Beyond logistics, this network provides vital peer support: "We like to just sit down to meals together and talk with people who understand our lives."
This collaborative spirit scales upward into their grand vision for regional distribution. Taylor plans to replicate and expand the multi-farm CSA model she pioneered in Washington, D.C., which once pooled harvests from 12 distinct agricultural sources to feed 270 households.
"We want to relaunch that idea here, creating important marketing opportunities for other farmers while offering customers the chance to choose to buy from Black farmers, women farmers, and regenerative organic farmers," Taylor emphasizes. "We believe we can all succeed together."
Ultimately, Spice Creek Farm aspires to be an educational nexus. Beyond cultivating nutrient-dense food and rebuilding depleted soils, the couple plans to host immersive workshops that educate consumers on land stewardship, nutrition, and ecological restoration.
"We aspire to be land stewards as much as farmers," Graham reflects.
"We wake up every day with the goals of building the soil and producing food that’s good for people," Taylor concludes. "We want to get to the point where we can nurture the next wave of beginning farmers."
