Black Butterfly Teaching Farm

🌿 Founded 2021

The Farm Alliance of Baltimore proudly operates the Black Butterfly Teaching Farm as part of our mission. Located in Farring-Baybrook Park, the farm site is owned by Baltimore City’s Department of Recreation and Parks. It is a total of 6.7 acres of mostly pasture and trees nestled between 2 schools, Benjamin Franklin High School and Curtis Bay Elementary Middle School. The space will serve as a backbone in the demonstration and education components of the Black Butterfly Urban Farm Academy, providing a location for each cohort of trainees to gain farming experience.

There are plans for 5 different agricultural production styles to be demonstrated on this site. A micro-scaled market garden producing dozens of varietals for direct-to-consumer marketing, bulk crops for storage and small-business collaboration, high tunnel production, small-scale grain raising plots and an apiary (a honeybee yard). The vision for the farm is to create a multi-use urban farm training site with up to 1.5 acres in production using chemical-free and regenerative agricultural techniques that will provide inspiration and guidance to aspiring farmers and growers. Other plans include a post-harvest handling shed, a greenhouse to support our members’ transplants needs, high tunnels for season extension, community composting to support our soil health programming, communal gathering space for visitors and neighbors and an outdoor natural playspace.

The site was provided to us by the Department of Planning’s Office of Sustainability. We prepped the site by taking several soil samples and investigating site history. We were pleased to find healthy soils! In 2021, we signed a 15 year lease on the space. We planted our first crop at the farm in October 2021 and have been building healthy soils through cover cropping and composting. We are excited to see the space grow!

We are developing this site to provide the following: