[upbeat music] - I love this area.

I love living on the island.

Even after Sandy and my house got destroyed [chuckling] and my restaurant got flooded, I wasn't leaving.

So we got peach, blueberry big pie.

That's what we should call it.

So many things you can do around food that really can make people's lives so much better.

I own Steve and Cookies restaurant in Margate, New Jersey.

We're going into our 25th year.

I love to feed people and I love to see people happy.

This isn't just about feeding people that want organic and want to eat better that have the means to do it.

We really need to, as a community, as a society, work to educate people that just have no access to the food or any idea that what they're eating could be hurting their health.

[upbeat music] [rooster crows] This farm started as a dream about five years ago, I used to come out to the farm when it was Reed's Farm.

It was a family-owned farm for 75 years.

And every time I drive up here, I was just so blown away by the beauty of the place and just how close it was to the island.

March of 2020 that dream started to take form.

We were able to take this land over, 78 acres, and start building from there.

Just when things were starting to getting scary, three weeks later my restaurants closed, the whole world shut down.

And it was so therapeutic because I didn't know what to do with myself, but I could be out here.

And then it just became like, wow, this is what we need, we all need to know where our food comes from.

We need to know how to grow food.

And that's what people started to embrace during COVID.

The land is not easy.

We're finding out just how hard it is.

You can't just say you're going to farm organically after land's been farmed conventionally for 75 plus years.

Some of our crops failed the summer, it's just really our second year.

We're really trying to regenerate this land.

This isn't soil, it's dirt, [laughing] but it will be soil.

[soft music] This is our chicken bus.

The pecking and eating and pooping is magic for the land.

They're like one of our biggest helpers.

[hens squawking] We need biomass on the land to start getting life back into the soil.

They're part of this whole regenerative process.

Now that we have a plan, it's exciting.

We could be an outreach to so many different underserved populations.

Food deserts aren't just about putting a supermarket down in the middle of a city and go, okay, everybody's good now, we can leave.

It's not like that, people are still gonna eat the wrong things because there's so much advertising around sugar and carbs and dead food.

You have to start thinking about things different.

Food is a vehicle to help kids just realize their potential.

We started a program in the schools called "Harvest of the Month."

Every month we highlight a farm and talk about the vegetable and then we make something together and everybody tastes it.

A lot of these kids never been off the island, let alone seen these animals, get their hands in the dirt, see where things grow.

[peaceful music] Everything revolves around food, for me.

It means a lot to me to be able to acquire this farm and have this be a resource.

People that walk on the farm, you can see what the potential is when you look, when I look in their eyes and what it does for people already, and seeing the beauty of our areas through the agriculture.

We have programming with special needs.

Autistic community has been very supportive, workforce development going on, people in recovery coming.

People that need to do community service coming out.

They're finding something that speaks to them here.

That's what the dream has been for this place.

[upbeat music] Feel it, the farm is about empowering people, opening their eyes to just how cool it is to watch things grow, it's like magic.

New Jersey, we are the garden state, we should elevate that.

That is what I would love to see in my small world of Atlantic county, us getting together and just figuring out how we just raise everybody up.

[upbeat music]