Andell Jones didn’t think of it as farming when he was a young child in Trinidad and Tobago raising chickens with his grandfather and catching the crabs beneath their house on the beach. But those early food memories and self-sufficiency lessons stuck with him, and years later he would find himself returning to those roots on a farm in New York.
As a young adult in Brooklyn, Andell started working in website development at a marketing firm. The CEO of the company, Jarrad Nwameme, had a family farm upstate, a small poultry business started by his grandfather, James Minton, who sold eggs to community members in his church. During the Covid-19 pandemic, Jarrad saw an opportunity to grow and hired Andell to manage Triple J Farm’s website and operations. “We thought we could do something like Instacart, but for delivering farm-raised eggs,” Andell said. The farm ramped up their social media as a sales channel and started delivering eggs around New York City.
While this worked incredibly well during the pandemic, the approach wasn’t sustainable long-term, as folks began to return to work and weren’t waiting at home in their apartments for their orders. Andell helped build a connection with Brooklyn Grange, which led to the distribution of 200 dozen eggs on a weekly basis, and the farm began selling New York Grown & Certified eggs to food banks through the Nourish New York program. They secured funding to build a new poultry barn to scale up production to meet the demand. As the business started to grow, Andell and his wife moved to Binghamton to be closer to the farm and, as Andell put it, “I put all my eggs in one basket, and decided to try farming full time!”
Visiting the Triple J Farm website, you can read their mission statement and their greater purpose driven by legacy. “At Triple J Farm, our mission is to build a lasting legacy rooted in integrity, sustainability, and community. As Black farmers—part of the less than 1.4% of U.S. farmers who are Black—we carry the weight of history and the responsibility to create generational change through the land. Despite the odds stacked against us—systemic barriers to land access, capital, and representation—we’ve chosen to lead with innovation, purpose, and resilience.” In their Voices of Legacy podcast, Andell speaks with Jarrad and his grandfather James about the legacy Triple J Farms is working to build.
This year Andell joined the first farmer cohort of the New York Farm to School Institute (NYFTSI) with American Farmland Trust and Farm to Institution New York State. Along with nine other farmers, Andell is receiving training and technical assistance with Terrapin Consulting to grow connections with institutional markets. The cohort and other local farmers were invited to attend a Farmers and Schools Meet and Greet at Mabee Historic Farm during the annual NYFTSI retreat, along with educational sessions during the day led by experts at National Center for Appropriate Technology (NCAT), New York Ag in the Classroom, and New York State Department of Agriculture and Markets.
Andell and other producers network with schools and distributors at the New York Farm to School Institute Retreat
“I didn’t know how to properly package my eggs to sell them to schools, or that schools generally bought their eggs from distributors, not directly from farms,” Andell said. Through this training, farmers learn about the requirements schools have for procurement, and how to position their products and cultivate relationships with buyers. Andell attended the Meet and Greet and spoke with school districts who could become his customers. Looking forward, Andell is eager to host field trips with students at Triple J Farms to introduce young people to agriculture and cultivate the next generation of farmers.