About
Petersburg Oasis Youth Farm sits at 535 Beech Street in Petersburg, Virginia, on a 5.2-acre community farm next to Pleasants Lane Elementary School. Tyrone Cherry III, a science teacher who spent more than twenty years in Petersburg classrooms, built it from the ground up. It started in his own front yard. After he began tutoring struggling students, he and six of those boys built six raised beds in his lawn and opened the garden to the neighborhood. The yard kept growing until it became a farm.
Petersburg was identified as a food desert in a 2019 Virginia Commonwealth University report, which means fresh food is hard to reach for many residents. The farm answers that directly. It grows affordable produce, accepts EBT, and sells on the land and at the local River Street and Power of Produce markets. Cherry had worked as a farmhand on this exact parcel for years before the community bought it through a land trust, so the place he now stewards is land he once only worked for someone else.
The farm is also a classroom. A quarter-acre youth farm sits inside the larger five-acre community farm, with a chicken coop, a compost station, beehives, an herb garden, and a space built for children. Cherry runs a youth group, the Petersburg League of Urban Growers, that grew out of his original tutoring circle. He held Teen Town Halls gathering around twenty students a week to talk through the city's problems, and the talk kept returning to food. In 2026 the farm hosted school field trips, including a group of fifty students from a nearby elementary.
Beyond the food and the kids, the farm gives land to people who have none. It is one of several farms held by a central Virginia community land trust that puts land-less and beginning growers, many of them Black, onto ground they can actually farm. Cherry built all of this in a small city most people drive past, and he documents it himself across the farm's accounts. The audience is local and the post counts are quiet, which fits a place whose real life happens on the soil rather than the feed.
Highlights
- Started as
- Six raised beds in the founder's front yard
- Now
- A quarter-acre youth farm on a 5.2-acre community farm
- Where
- 535 Beech Street, Petersburg, Virginia, a mapped food desert
- Youth
- School field trips, a youth growers' club, and Teen Town Halls
- Land
- Community-owned through a central Virginia land trust
Deeper Dive
The front yard is the whole idea. Cherry did not start with a grant or a five-acre plan. He started with six beds and six teenage boys he was already tutoring, and let neighbors come in. That sequence matters: the youth came first and the farm grew out of them, not the other way around. It is why the programming is not an add-on to a farm but the reason the farm exists.
Owning the land changes the math. Cherry had farmed this parcel for previous owners and had wanted it for six years. Buying it through a community land trust means the ground is held for the community rather than by a single owner, so the work cannot be priced out or sold from under the people who use it. For a project meant to outlast its founder, that ownership structure is the quiet engine underneath everything visible on the surface.
The capitalization is deliberate. Cherry writes the farm's name as CommUNITY, capital U-N-I-T-Y inside the word, and explains it as a reminder that the place only becomes an oasis when people work together. It reads as a small thing and functions as the project's thesis. The naming is his, not a consultant's, and it tells you the work is as much about repairing a community as about growing vegetables.
The reach is modest and the ambition is not. The farm runs school visits, a youth club, beekeeping, markets that take food stamps, and an incubator for new farmers, all in a city carrying a food-desert label and all documented on accounts whose individual posts draw a few dozen likes. The gap between what the place is attempting and how loudly it is heard is wide. That gap, not the follower count, is the point of the place.
In Their Words
“Me and those six boys, we built six raised beds and we put them in my front yard, and opened it up to the neighborhood.”
“We recognized Petersburg is a food desert and we recognized one of the solutions was community gardening.”
