Taylor MacDonald has spent several years thinking about how to make Death Farm produce food. Eventually, another question presented itself: What would he do with all of it?
Over two years, MacDonald and volunteers planted 1,800 trees across the 20-acre Chickamauga farm. As its food forests mature, he expects their output to grow dramatically, projecting that Death Farm could eventually produce as much as 400,000 pounds of food a year.
That kind of abundance was always part of the plan, but selling what the farm produced wasn’t.
“My wife asked, ‘What are we going to do with all this produce? Are we farmers now? Are we going to farmers markets?’” MacDonald recalls.
His answer was emphatic.
“Not even one inch of me wants to spend a second at a booth at a farmers market.”
Instead, MacDonald began thinking about experiences he’d had much earlier in life. Growing up, he volunteered at a food bank, where he saw plenty of donated food but little fresh produce.
Death Farm, he realized, might eventually help fill that gap.
In 2024, MacDonald and Collins formed Eden’s Harvest, a nonprofit intended to distribute fresh food grown at Death Farm to people in the surrounding community. The name reflects what MacDonald hopes the property will become as its thousands of plants and trees mature: a place where nearly everything growing around you produces something edible.
“The idea is that this will eventually be Eden,” MacDonald says. “After the food source is fully built, almost everything your eye touches will be edible in some way, shape or form. We’ll be able to create the bounty of Eden from here and give it to our local community.”
The farm isn’t producing anything close to MacDonald’s projected bounty yet. Many of its trees will need years before they reach maturity, and Death Farm itself remains a work in progress.
But some of the food is already finding its way beyond the farm.
During the school year, Eden’s Harvest provides weekly boxes of fresh produce to students at Chattanooga School for the Arts & Sciences – an early foretaste of what MacDonald hopes will happen on a much larger scale.