Growing A Better Dallas.
Watch our collaboration with the American Heart Association and DART to bring fresh produce to North Texans every Wednesday during October. Featured by #SomethingGood.
Want to see your money grow?
Want to see your money grow?
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Get A GroBox. Join the Box Brigade!
A GroBox is our amazing little engine of change. In practice, it’s an easy-to-use planter box to grow your own fresh food. But it also helps fund our work to train new farmers, feed the community affordably, and ultimately reimagine our broken food system.
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Donate & Help Grow A Better Dallas
Your donation goes a long way with us. You help fund the next generation of local farmers and entrepreneurs while helping restore justice, dignity, and connection within South Dallas and beyond.
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Check Out Our Accomplishments
We’ve come a long way in a few years but it’s our mission to transform and empower even more.
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Find Us on Social Media
The absolute latest about what we’re up to.
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Meet Grozilla & Her Microgreens!
Grozilla is our state-of-the-art CEA growing machine at Fair Park. Controlled Environment Ag is a big component of our future.
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Home Herb Garden!
So simple, so delicious. Grow your own herbs right at home and be ready to spice up any dish with the freshest toppers, grown by you!
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Relive Our Fall Fundraiser 2021
See how we partner with top organizations and influencers to help build, scale, and fund our work to create a vibrant, sustainable farm system.
What’s DIGS? The Dallas InnerCity Growers' Summit, a collaborative forum for producers and food system stakeholders looking to improve the way our region feeds itself. The summit features networking sessions, expert speakers, workshops, and more. LEARN MORE
DALLAS, TX
It’s Always GroBox Season.
Get a GroBox (or three) and your Plant Starts today!
Home delivery available.
ALREADY HAVE A GROBOX? Get your Plant Starts at the link above and/or new premium soil, compost, pesticide, and more HERE.
(And thank you for being a proud member of our Box Brigade!)
GroBoxes are easy-to-set-up, portable planter boxes handmade by our staff & volunteers right here in Dallas. 100% of your purchase goes back into our training, hiring, and growth. Our soil mixture and seed starts are chosen specifically for the North TX climate.
Learn how to care for your plant starts: Click here.
What are we up to every day? Check out this great video about how we’re Growing A Better Dallas with the help of organizations like the USDA’s Natural Resource Conservation Service (NRCS)
Please consider a tax-deductible DONATION and read about our Accomplishments to see why we are unique & worthy of your support. We are a 501c3 nonprofit.
Your donation will go to support paid hands-on vocational training and the production & distribution of heathy fresh food for our community. Please take a moment to become part of our community and help us expand our work to Grow A Better Dallas. Thank you!
The Mission of Restorative Farms
is to foster a vibrant and viable community-based urban farm system in South Dallas, TX, a community that most needs fresh food access and employment.
Our goal is to create a self-sustaining, professionally-run farm system (what we call an “agrisystem”) to: Grow and sell fresh, local vegetables; build and sell GroBoxes, seedlings, and soil; and provide meaningful jobs as well as farming and entrepreneurial training.
We believe that professionally run, efficient, small-scale agriculture can be an integral part of local economic growth as well as environmental and health equity.
Restorative Farms arose from the notion of restorative justice where a community and its citizens work cooperatively from within to repair the harm done by crime and injustice.
South Dallas, TX, is one of the most impoverished and resource depleted areas in the country. Add to this the fact that it sits in one of the largest food deserts (an area with a lack of access to fresh, healthy foods) and the need for restoration is apparent.
Together, we can “solve” the three main issues that most urban farms face:
1) providing healthy, affordable produce to the community;
2) creating income for the community growers and producers with profits from the production and sales of this food;
3) providing community members training, work, entrepreneurial and leadership experience as well as other opportunities that will allow them to break the cycle of poverty and resource depletion.
(image courtesy of D Magazine)
Our Agrisystem Approach.
It’s not just about maximizing our yields on the farm, we are a systems-based solutions-oriented organization dedicated to creating a self-sustaining, profitable, community-centric connected series of farms and people, rather than a singular farm.
The GroBox: Tiny Engines of Change.
Our goal is no less than recreating the “success” of the World War-era Victory Garden wherein tens of thousands of homes grew their own food right in their yards in order to “help the war effort” as the industrial agriculture system turned to providing food for the thousands of soldiers around the world. Today, food often travels hundreds if not thousands of miles to get to the grocery store necessitating a lot of handling and fossil fuel consumption. With a GroBox you can get your own veggies, herbs, plants, and more right outside your door!
We sell GroBoxes as one of our main source of funding. Please consider DONATING a GroBox (or three!) to a school, business, place of worship, community center, or anywhere that could benefit from fresh, healthy food and beauty.
GroBoxes not only help support our work but also help us all be more environmentally friendly and food safe.
Tito’s Vodka (Texas-based!) has come on board as sponsor of the GroBox project and we welcome their generosity and inclusion in their Love, Tito’s philanthropic outreach.
Growing New Farmers & Entrepreneurs.
A main tenet of our work is training new farmers and those who want to be involved in running a farm business. Our first urban farm, Hatcher Station, located in South Dallas, is not only the first produce growing farm in our agrisystem, it’s also our key training center. It’s where we’re figuring out how to not only maximize land use but educating entrepreneurial community members through a certified training program so they can go out and become extended members of the Restorative family.
Community, Community, Community.
The success of Restorative Farms relies on members of the local community actively taking up leadership roles, spreading our message, and being the catalysts for change. We are a nonprofit entity with every dollar going directly into farm infrastructure, hiring and training community members, our GroBox enterprise, maintaining a seedling farm, and outreach.
Join Us. Change Dallas. Then the World.
We welcome anyone — farmers, gardeners, fellow citizens — to become part of our growing team. If you want to volunteer on our many projects, outreach, and/or training, get in touch. If you have ideas, knowledge, or connections you think would help us even further — bring it. We are a collective that only gets stronger through awesome people power.
CLICK HERE to Power your home with clean energy from Green Mountain Energy. They’ll double your impact and purchase a GroBox on your behalf!
Thank you to our amazing partners and supporters
The American Heart Association awarded us with its inaugural 2020 Foodscape Innovation Award. (selected out of a panel of 26 national food innovators)
Whole Foods Market
Make a donation.
We are a 501 (c)(3) and 100% of your donation goes directly into our work to produce great, fresh produce, train new farmers, and Grow A Better Dallas!
