Fighting food insecurity
Student Experience
Ben Mayes spent much of the summer before his junior year on a farm in Midlothian, Virginia. Supported by the Richmond Guarantee, Mayes interned with Shalom Farms, a nonprofit that raises and distributes fresh vegetables and fruits to community food pantries and through mobile markets. He worked with other volunteers to harvest tomatoes, peppers, squash, collards, and other produce.
@urichmond For Ben Mayes, '26, a summer internship at Shalom Farms has yielded hands on experience, deeper knowledge, community connection, and a whole lot of fresh produce, too. 🚜 He has learned new skills around agricultural practices, and seen up close how the work the farm is doing helps bring food justice to Richmond. Where there are food deserts around the city (urban areas with little to no access to fresh food), mobile markets bring Shalom Farms' harvests to meet need. Volunteers (and interns like Ben!) make Shalom Farms what it is, harvesting, planting, packaging, and delivering over 600,000 servings of fresh produce all around town every year. 🌱 To learn more about the nonprofit farm and food justice organization, visit shalomfarms.org! #shalomfarms #urichmond #summerinternship #rva
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The excitement of a new experience and the active, outdoor nature of the internship appealed to him.
A typical day on the farm would find Mayes with a group of volunteers planting vegetables on a rotating basis to allow for enough food to be delivered to the community daily. He worked in the afternoon to help set up irrigation, create weed barriers, and handle maintenance tasks around the farm.
"We partnered with other organizations to cater our products to local tastes rather than supplying generic bulk products," Mayes said. “I was surprised how many community initiatives and partnerships existed to spread Shalom’s reach. For instance, hospitals like Bon Secours issued vouchers to their patients.”
Shalom Farms adjusts what's farmed each season based on community needs, producing what residents prefer, Mayes said, including sweet potatoes, romaine lettuce, bell peppers, and cucumbers. They then distribute the yield through food pantries and schools and sell some of the food items at pop-up farm stands at apartment complexes, libraries, and other locations across the city. Nearly all the produce is distributed free to food programs for vulnerable families, with less than 10% of the crop sold for profit to support the organization's programs.
"I was unaware of the level of food insecurity in many parts of Richmond, where access to local, fresh produce is limited and even non-existent," said Mayes. The produce grown at Shalom Farms serves approximately 10,000 people in the community every year through the organization's food programs.
Mayes is a philosophy, politics, economics, and law major, with minors in geography and data science. He expects to tap into this summer experience when he begins working in his future career in environmental law and consulting, where he'll need to partner and coordinate with grassroots nonprofit groups. "This experience gave me an understanding of how they operate, that I couldn't gain through research," he said. “It also helped me with the discipline and strength to push through all kinds of difficult work whether it be physical or mental.”
And the experience, he said, has provided a new understanding on how people are affected by policy. "I can now appreciate how policy affects agriculture. I have a grounded perspective of the weight and impact of legal decisions on real people's lives."