A long-awaited farming education and outdoor recreation site in Durham County has received funding for its first three years.
The Farm Campus, a 129-acre lot the county purchased in 2024, has been in the works for more than a decade. But on Monday, county commissioners put the project in motion, approving $475,000 in funding from Golden LEAF, a North Carolina-based nonprofit that funds projects in the state’s rural and tobacco-dependent communities. The money will go toward hiring a farm manager and building basic infrastructure.
Donna Rewalt, the county’s cooperative extension director, said the Farm Campus is “a wonderful opportunity to preserve land” inside the county’s urban growth boundary. The site has 40 cleared acres that could be suitable for farming, in addition to four ponds and a wooded area, she said. Eventually, Rewalt said the campus will have public use spaces, such as trails.
“The Farm Campus, conceptually, is the idea that we’re going to have an opportunity to provide a more robust opportunity for education and practice for farmers and growers in our community, and that is an exciting opportunity,” Rewalt said.
The site reached its first milestone in May 2025, when the county completed its feasibility study that determined the project was viable. The study broke the next steps for the project into three phases, planned over several years. The first phase involves building infrastructure and transforming the farmland into incubator plots. The second phase will involve additional capital upgrades and expansions; a final phase will see the construction of a food facility, a healing garden, a trail system, and other recreational areas.
While the farm campus works through its first phase, planned for three years, Rewalt said the county is creating a capital improvement process to help plan for the entirety of the property for its 10-year timespan. The Farm Campus is the first of its kind for Durham County, she said.
“We do have a lot of pressures from urbanization, and we want to see our county develop and our city develop, but we also want to, at the same time, make sure we have land available because having land is also healthy and good for our community in so many ways,” Rewalt said.
Ashley Troth, a county extension agent who specializes in horticulture, has been part of the Farm Campus project since she started her position in 2018. In the first phase, Troth said the hope is to “get everything growing and have all the tools and all the infrastructure you need to be able to teach classes and really engage with people.”
First on the list is hiring a farm manager, which will likely happen this summer.
“When you have a farm manager, and you have this dedicated person and these dedicated funds to do the work, you can just move so much more quickly and so much more efficiently, which is really what Golden LEAF has kind of allowed us to start moving toward,” Troth said.
Troth said the first phase will also be about developing “market garden crops”—produce you might find at a farmer’s market.
Raina Bunnag, the county’s food security program coordinator, said the Farm Campus has been “a vision of many departments in Durham County and community members” over the years, and added that the ability to teach farming techniques on site will also help increase the amount of food produced locally—which became evident to county residents when food was harder to access during the COVID-19 pandemic. The Farm Campus is simultaneously taking off as the county is creating a 10-year food security plan.
“This will really be a place where… our established farmers, and then new farmers, as well as food producers, can come together to learn technique, together, learn from each other, and have that peer support,” Bunnag said.
That is particularly important for the county because it has an aging population of farmers and is losing traditional farm land, she said. The Farm Campus will be able to help raise a younger generation of farmers, she said, as well as provide educational programming.
“I think often there is a gap in understanding just what it takes to produce food,” Bunnag said. “Being a farmer is a really tough job, and so—beyond training and offering that training and support for our farmers and food producers—we’re also really excited about Farm Campus being a place where food eaters can learn more about the people that work so hard to make their food.”
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