Joyner himself was a late convert to both farming and environmentalism. He grew up on the outskirts of Greenville, North Carolina, one of 13 children to parents who worked as sharecroppers. His father, who always kept a garden and some livestock, loved to farm and was especially good at it. But the landowners always cheated him of his earnings, and that soured Joyner on farming.
When he finished high school, Joyner joined the U.S. Army and later the National Guard. He studied chaplaincy at Shaw University and started working as a chaplain at WakeMed in Raleigh and at Nash General Hospital in Rocky Mount. He initially worked with patients who had HIV, the AIDS virus, and later with mothers in labor and delivery. Finally he worked as a hospice chaplain, and that’s where he said his own sense of spirituality was cultivated.
In 2004, he became the pastor of Conetoe Chapel Missionary Baptist Church at the prodding of his mentor, who in his dying days transferred the leadership of the small church to Joyner. Many of the church’s members were suffering from preventable diseases, including diabetes and high blood pressure.
At the time, Joyner was still working in hospice care, and he watched their slow demise and later presided over their funerals.
Convincing members to change their diets and begin exercising was not easy. He said he came to it reluctantly after learning there was no chance a major grocery chain would locate in such a small town, population 671, a classic example of a food desert.
In 2005, Joyner found three property owners willing to let him use their land for a community garden. The first garden was on two acres located a quarter mile from the church.
Church members resisted the idea. Those with painful personal memories of the legacy of Black exploitation working the land were especially suspicious of farming.
But he was able to win over the children and eventually the adults, too. The gardens grew to encompass a wide range of crops, in addition to 30 beehives. (The honey is sold locally.)
Joyner won several awards for his burgeoning community farm, including a 2014 Purpose Prize, which recognizes social innovators older than 60. The farm partnered with several universities to study whether food-as-medicine interventions work on people with chronic diseases. It also started a health kiosk on the farm where people can contact health providers online. CNN did a feature story about the enterprising pastor and his community farm. More recently, the Conetoe Family Life Center built a kitchen on the farm where people can learn to prepare plant-based nutritious meals.
Church members caught on.
“I was very heavy into the meat in the vegetables that you cook and I have almost completely gotten away from that,” said Betty Jones, a retired high school cafeteria manager who is a church member and takes advantage of the fresh vegetables from the farm.
She acknowledged, “There’s one last food that I have not gotten away from the meat yet — and those are my collard greens — but everything else, I’m doing it without the meat in there, and they taste good.”
