At the start of her senior year, alumna Katherine Carter was almost finished with the required coursework for her major in film and television production, so on a whim she decided to take a class on environmental justice.
“At the time I was fully expecting to go into film,” Carter recalls. “But the content of the class was interesting to me and I discovered a real passion for it.”
She began exploring the connection between her faith and the work of environmental care. “I learned how God’s first command to humans in Genesis was to care for and steward His creation,” she says. “It’s a calling God extends to all Christians.”
Carter decided to earn a minor in social justice with an emphasis on environmental justice, and after graduation in 2022 she completed an internship at Trevecca’s Urban Farm, a program on campus that supports food production and creation care. This led to two years of working on the farm through the Americorp VISTA program. Then last summer she became the farm’s full-time coordinator.
In this Q&A, Carter shares why she’s come to love her work with Urban Farm and how it’s answering a call to care for the least of these.
I began to see how caring for the land goes hand in hand with caring for our neighbors. At Trevecca, we’re right in the middle of a food desert. Our ZIP code is home to a high poverty and unemployment rate, so many of our immediate neighbors don’t have access to fresh, healthy food. That’s one of the ways we can help our community as a farm and also try to spread this work beyond Urban Farm—by giving people access to food and then the knowledge and skills to be able to grow food themselves.
The main focus of my job is on our market. We harvest produce, make it into products and then sell or donate those products. We have a fruit orchard. Every year we get a couple hundred pounds of fruit from those trees. Some of it we sell, some of it we donate and a lot of it we turn into jelly that we sell or donate through our market. We also have gardens spread throughout Trevecca’s campus, but most of them are in our greenhouse. That’s where we grow produce such as herbs, leafy greens, spinach, lettuce, kale, mustard, peppers, tomatoes and cucumbers. We also raise hogs.
Additionally, I work with kids in our internship program, teaching them how to make products and learning the basics of having a market. And I help with the day-to-day work of the farm—animal care, gardening and harvesting. The other significant thing I oversee is tracking budgets and deliverables for our grants.
We annually apply for a grant from Root Nashville, which funds a significant amount of our tree planting efforts. We also receive a grant through the USDA NRCS that allows us to focus on stream conservation on campus. And through an American Forests Grant, we are planning over the next three years to plant 400 trees in disadvantaged communities throughout the Southeast. The Urban Farm will partner with Nazarene churches in the region and connect with youth, congregants and pastors to help coordinate tree planting at the local level.
In addition to food production, trees provide shade and cooling to urban areas that have heavy amounts of concrete and asphalt. Temperatures can be higher in these areas, and shade trees reflect light and absorb heat. We’re trying to lower temperatures and provide food for people and wildlife. Trees also help with flooding in preventing erosion and runoff.
Planting trees in historically disinvested communities plays a significant role in supporting public health, contributing to job growth and enhancing climate resilience. Trees are nature’s air conditioning and help reduce emissions. That’s why Urban Farm started our TreeCycle effort in 2018. We annually hire about 120 youth who come to weekly tree planting events and bike clinics. The goal is to fill Nashville with youth on bikes who can plant trees. We want to get kids active and not have to use the fossil fuels of a vehicle. We also teach kids to fix their bikes. We do this with youth from underserved neighborhoods near campus.
In a lot of Christian circles, the idea exists that caring about the environment is this liberal, politically divisive initiative that we shouldn’t discuss. There’s also the idea that the earth was made for us and given to us so we can use it as we want to. Yet that’s not exactly how the Bible frames it. Scripture tells us we were given dominion over the earth. But the Greek definition of dominion translates more to stewardship and care rather than lordship and power.
I believe the call of every Christian is to pursue justice. We’re told that in the Bible— to seek justice, love mercy and walk humbly (Micah 6:8). At the farm, the work that we do takes that command very literally. Trying to seek and carry out justice is inspiring and motivating. It gives me a sense of purpose.
One way we try to be faithful stewards on the farm is through addressing both food waste and food insecurity. The American lifestyle is very wasteful. In the United States, about 40 percent of food gets wasted between production and consumption. There are a lot of people who have way too much food—and then there are millions of people who are starving. As Christians, we have a responsibility to feed the hungry. We say at the farm, we produce food but mostly we produce farmers. We’re teaching people here how to grow food and combat issues of justice, policy, industry, agriculture and all these different things.
It has given me such a sense of peace, rest and calm. I’ve also gained a deeper understanding of many of Jesus’ teachings. A lot of His parables are related to farming. He frequently taught through metaphors about planting, growing, harvesting and of course shepherding. I’ve learned what it means to grow a seed, as I’ve actually done the work of putting a seed in the soil, then watering it, tending it and pruning it—all the things that are needed for it to flourish.