Page 1 Page 2 Page 3 Page 4 Page 5 Page 6 Page 7 Page 8 Page 9 Page 10 Page 11 Page 12 Page 13 Page 14 Page 15 Page 16 Page 17 Page 18 Page 19 Page 20 Page 21 Page 22 Page 23 Page 24 Page 25 Page 26 Page 27 Page 28 Page 29 Page 30 Page 31 Page 32 Page 33 Page 34 Page 35 Page 36 Page 37 Page 38 Page 39 Page 40 Page 41 Page 42 Page 43 Page 44 Page 45 Page 46 Page 47 Page 48 Page 49 Page 50 Page 51 Page 52 Page 53 Page 54 Page 55 Page 56 Page 57 Page 58 Page 59 Page 60 Page 61 Page 62 Page 63 Page 64 Page 65 Page 66 Page 67 Page 68 Page 69 Page 70 Page 71 Page 72 Page 73 Page 74 Page 75 Page 76Plough Quarterly • Summer 2015 59 From Small Seeds, Great Things Grow P r a c t i t i o n e r s I n 2005 I realized that too many people were dying young in my home town of Conetoe, North Carolina. In one year alone, I offici- ated at the funerals of thirty congregants under the age of thirty-two. Many of the deaths were health-related: poor diets, no exercise. Nearly two-thirds of the congregation were obese. It started to feel unconscionable to me to see someone one hundred pounds overweight on Sunday morning and not say anything about it. Then they’d die of a heart attack and we’d have another funeral. Although I had been a minister for a quarter century – nearly half my life – only now did I see that my pulpit went beyond the church. Only a third of the adults had jobs. Most didn’t have insurance and lived in poverty. I wanted to find a way to lift up my community and improve its members’ mental, physical, and economic health. Conetoe is a little town in an area once filled with cotton plantations. It has long been a “food desert”: fresh vegetables were rarely available, and even when they were, people couldn’t afford them. I realized we could grow fresh, healthy food for ourselves. That’s when we started the Community Garden and Family Life Center, which began as a summer school program to grow healthy food and keep the children physically active. Farming may sound romantic to some, but it was a painful hardship for me growing up. I was one of thirteen children in a sharecropping family, which meant doing work for another A sharecropper’s son starts a community garden to save young lives. RICHARD JOYNER Photographs courtesy of Richard Joyner