A Professional Farmer in the City

You’ve driven past his bright green organic garden shop and eco-friendly carwash on Briarcliff Road in Druid Hills. You may have seen him featured on CNN, PBS and The Weather Channel, or even as a contestant on VH1’s reality show “What Chilli Wants.”

So what’s the back-story on our city’s favorite farmer?

Daron “Farmer D” Joffe attributes much of his youthful experiences to developing a passion for the outdoors.

From founding a “rock club” for fellow neighborhood kids in elementary school to falling in love with nature at summer camp in North Georgia.

From spending time with indigenous and ancient cultures learning the agricultural livelihood at a Kibbutz in Israel to following the Grateful Dead and becoming devoted to our national parks while gaining interesting insight about the food we eat during his “hippie dayz,” all of Joffe's experiences made an impact on who he is today.

But it was at college in Madison, Wisconsin where Daron’s name changed to Farmer D and he became part of a thriving farming and food scene with community based farms.

He was eating a turkey sandwich for lunch one day his freshman year of college when he was suddenly struck by the fact that he had never grown the food he ate.

Joffe started thinking about the source of food.

“I became more interested in the soul of food and got really into biodynamics,” he said.

Biodynamics is a type of organic farming that takes a more holistic approach to agriculture.

“It’s a truly sustainable and closed-loop system that honors and nurtures the Earth,” he said.

This curiosity turned into a passion for farming and teaching people about their food and where it comes from – including the issues, impact and quality of what we consume. He also raises awareness about the toxic chemicals used in conventional industrial agriculture.

Joffe said he is “concerned about the decline of the small family farm and young farmers,” and calls his work a “mission-driven career.”

Farmer D has spent the last 15 years working on solutions to all of these problems. On any given day you could find him working at his retail shop, farm consulting, composting with Whole Foods, volunteering his skills with his non-profit Teach to Grow, producing specialty gardens and updating his educational and retail website.

“Teach to Grow is a seed of an idea at this point for fostering widespread growth of gardens in low income communities as well as partnering with organizations to do work in places like South Africa and Haiti,” he said.

Joffe’s consulting work is with large-scale residential and resort developments, community gardens and urban farm projects such as Long Leaf Preserve and the City of Suwannee.

With Whole Foods, he takes the food residuals from all of the Southeast markets and turns it into compost rather than sending it off to the landfill. He has converted this compost project into the first certified biodynamic compost in the country – available for purchase at Whole Foods and his shop on Briarcliff Road and Lavista Road.

Organics are not a luxury reserved for the wealthy, and Farmer D is working hard to make this practice available across all classes and countries. Over the years he has set up gardens and farms for a youth prison, a boys home, dozens of public schools, Wonderroot, Camp Twin Lakes and Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, among other places.

Inspired to grow your own food now? I am!