On a cool Friday morning, Joy Carter made her way into Richard N. Fickett Elementary School in the Ben Hill section neighborhood and down a hall towards a classroom full of students. Under her arm was a box of praying mantises, which were going to be hand-delivered to a garden on the school grounds. That’s if they didn’t find their way out of the box first.
Carter, an Atlanta native and former educator in the Atlanta Public School system for 20 years, and the owner and operator of Bee Free Farm, planned to use the insects to help keep away some of the pests that feed on crops.
“I love it, I love seeing them exploring and learning,” Carter said as the students watched the mantises crawl out of the box and onto the pants below. Other students made their way to the chicken coop to see if there were any eggs that had been laid, while another kid used his laptop to look up the best environment for the mantises. Jr., a brown-skinned boy wearing a thin gold chain, finished his research and learned bushes are the best place for mantises to hide and better be able to eat all of the flies and grubs they can handle.
Directing traffic in the school’s greenspace between the building and the playground, a smile creeps across Carter’s face. She spent decades educating Black children like these and continues to do so in a different way these days.
“My farm is now my classroom,” said Carter, a mother of five who wears her natural hair in curls, and can often be seen in overalls and yellow rubber boots. “I still enjoy seeing the kids want to learn. They get excited about learning to grow things.”
Photo by Donnell Suggs/The Atlanta Voice
Carter started the Sunny Side Up Chicken Hatching Program in August 2023. The idea of the program being that school-aged children, preferably at younger ages, can start learning about the hatching process of chickens in order to better understand where their food comes from. In 2020, while still teaching, Carter got her first chickens and bees from her friend Liz Milagro, the owner and operator of Milagro Farm in Atlanta. Milagro inspired Carter to buy her first bees in 2016 and chickens in 2017.
The Sunny Side Up Chicken Hatching Program has been an overwhelming success thus far, according to Carter. What began with Whiteford Early Learning Academy, as the first school that hired her to bring the program to its campus, has turned into several schools being involved. This year there were six schools during January, and three schools during March. Next month there are three other schools she will be working in.
The bonds that the students and teacher snake with the chickens has been
“I’ve had kids and teachers crying when I come back to pick up the chicks and chickens, ” Carter said. “I try to tell them to not be so attached,” she joked.
After allowing fresh eggs to be dropped off at the schools and then go through the three-week process of hatching by way of a device called the Smart Incubator, Carter takes the chickens back to Bee Free Farm, but sometimes she gifts them to teachers that want to take them home.
One morning at Hollis Innovation Academy, located just a couple blocks away from the Atlanta University Center, Carter came to pick up chicks that had hatched while in the care of a pre-K class. “Y’all not going to take the chickens, right,” asked a 5th grade student who was walking past Carter in the hallway. She believes teaching the children at a young age will make farming education a lot easier. The children that she is educating on what came first, the chicken or the egg, might never set foot on a farm in their lifetime.
“I have been learning along the way and listening to the children and the teachers about what they are seeing,” said Carter.
The pre-K students and their teachers named the five chicks that were born in their first-floor classroom. It was Sprinkles, Money, Sasha Fierce, Coco, and a blonde chick, Hollywood.
Carter said when she started the program she didn’t expect the kids to take a liking to the chickens like they have.
“When you talk to kids they give you their purest thoughts,” Carter explained.
In May 2023 Joy Carter, a graduate of Frederick Douglass High School and Virginia State University, a Historically Black College and University (HBCU) in Petersburg, Va., decided to totally shift gears and change her career path. At 48, Carter, a mother of two sons, “decided to say goodbye” to Georgia’s largest public education system and hello to another way of life: farming.
“My passion for agriculture was bubbling over and I wanted to teach this to children,” she remembers. “I want them to see the purpose behind it and how important it is for their lives.”
A psychology major in college, Carter has always been interested in the thought process behind work. Becoming an urban farmer, her farm, Bee Free Farm, is located just off of Flat Shoals Road in College Park, would allow her to teach something that doesn’t come with a statewide test or national equivalency requirement, and be able to teach it where she grew up.
Carter grew up in Atlanta, but spent summers on her grandparents property in Linden, New Jersey. She credits her late grandfather, Edmond L. Carter, Sr. with being the spark that began her farming interests. He remembers him telling her, ‘Always plant things early enough to give them time to grow.’ Asked if he would be proud of what she is building at Bee Free Farm, which is named after Carter’s free nature, “and I have bees,” she said, “He would be extremely proud.”
At Bee Free farm she bottles honey, and even has an organic cayenne pepper flake-infused bottle for sale. She wants to make farming a lifelong venture, not just a reprieve from being a teacher. “I want to be able to achieve financial stability through what I am doing,” Carter said. “Whether that is through grants is also a possibility.”
Along with the Sunny Side Up Hatching Program, Carter has a couple ideas up her sleeve for 2024. One being the “Cooped Up” program, which she plans to start in April. That program will be used to teach people about how to properly keep chickens on their property. She also plans to start hosting field trips to Bee Free Farm. The first one is scheduled for later in the spring. All of these plans are for the future of Bee Free Farms and Carter’s uncle Wayne Carter believes her move from teacher to farmer was a positive one.
“It’s a great idea. We as a people, we need to grow our own food,” he said. “I’m hoping that she can develop some generational wealth for her boys.”
The seeds for that generational wealth are indeed being planted at Bee Free Farm.
