Melvin Parson: From Prison to Farmer to Changing Lives

From Crack Addiction to Community Gardens

Melvin Parson didn’t plan to become a farmer. He didn’t even want the vegetable bed that landed in his lap after a friend passed away. “I didn’t ask for the vegetable bed, it just landed in my lap,” Melvin told me when we talked on the podcast. “But what was intentional was that I paid close attention to the soil.”

That soil would change everything. But first, Melvin had to survive 13 years in and out of prison.

He grew up with his grandparents in Detroit, got sent to private school, had what he calls “a good world.” His grandmother was “close to staying to an angel I’ve still yet to encounter in this life.” But by eighth grade, the neighborhood had more influence than home. The crack epidemic was hitting Detroit hard. Young kids were being exploited to sell drugs.

Melvin got caught up in it all. Dropped out in tenth grade. First arrest at 17. “I was addicted to crack cocaine,” he said. “Just spiraling out of control.”

Prison became a twisted rite of passage. “There’s this Hood culture,” Melvin explained. “Jewish folks have bar mitzvahs for their young men as kind of like a right of passage, and Hood culture is almost like you go to prison. A twisted sense of a right of passage.”

The Cycle That Wouldn’t Break

Thirteen years total. Three years combined in county jails. Four years in Michigan Department of Corrections. Six more years in state prison. “I think I was a terrible criminal man. I always got caught,” Melvin said with a laugh.

Each time he got out, he had plans to change. Real plans. But reality hit fast. No money. No housing. No legitimate options that paid enough to survive.

The last time was different, though. His son was only 60 days old when he got locked up. “My mindset was to try to put as much time into doing something positive as I had done doing negative in an effort to be there for my son,” he told me.

When he got out, he worked at a gas station for dollar tips as a “friendly service attendant.” Then something told him to go to Sherwood Forest, a nice Detroit subdivision, and ask people if they wanted their leaves raked. He didn’t even know it was called “fall cleanup.”

Within two years, he had built a landscaping company. Ten grass cutting clients became 100 residential customers, five McDonald’s locations, Detroit Public School contracts, downtown institutional accounts. He had employees.

Then it all disappeared. He was still smoking crack. “That same voice that told me to go out to Sherwood Forest and rake some leaves would say to me, man, if you stop getting high I will continue to bless you abundantly. And if you don’t, I’m going to take it all away,” he said. “And later on that winter, everything was gone.”

The Vegetable Bed That Changed Everything

For years after that, Melvin floundered. Drugs. Homelessness. Thirteen substance abuse facilities. Finally, in 2004, he landed in Washtenaw County at the Delano Center shelter and got connected to an organization called Dawn Farm.

Even then, he struggled for five or six years. “Everywhere you go, there you are,” he said. But something shifted. People came into his life who surrounded him with “confidence and inspiration and motivation and determination and love.”

His goals got smaller and more realistic. “I just tried to do something as simple as keep a job,” he said. “That was my next step. Try to keep a job.”

He was living in subsidized housing, collecting SSI, trying to stay employed when he inherited that 3x15 foot raised vegetable bed. Growing food wasn’t on his radar. “I could spell it, but I tell people jokingly, man, I couldn’t even spell basketball,” he said.

But he paid attention to the soil. Added good compost. Warm compost. Tried to be kind to it. The vegetables that came up were good. Really good.

Then he watched a documentary called Food Inc. and started questioning everything he thought he knew about nutrition. A friend kept sending him pictures of white farmers, knowing it would get under his skin because Melvin champions social justice.

That led him to the farmers market in Ann Arbor, trying to figure out what an heirloom tomato was. “Sometimes I was down there for an hour and I see nobody that look like me,” he said. “And then I looked around at the folks selling me my food and none of those folks look like me either.”

That’s when it hit him. “It felt like the skies opened up and yelled down to me and said hey Melvin, this is where I want you to sit.”

We the People Opportunity Farm

By 2015, Melvin had founded We the People Opportunity Farm, a nonprofit focused on reentry through farming. The soil analogy came to him at the end of his first real farming season in 2017.

Restaurant chefs were raving about his vegetables. Fresh, nutritious, incredible. “I’m happy to hear that, but I gotta tell you that wasn’t my intent,” he told them. His intent was the soil. “It dawned on me the same thing applies to human beings. It’s all about our soil.”

The farm runs paid internship programs for formerly incarcerated men and women. They don’t just farm. They take financial literacy courses, nonviolence communication training, work with Habitat for Humanity on neighborhood rehab projects, get job training through Michigan Works.

“Farming is just the vehicle,” Melvin explained. “Farming is the tool to building trust with people enough for them to allow us to come alongside them and help change some soil in their lives.”

Interns do a “soil assessment” at the beginning, which is really a needs assessment. Throughout the program, Melvin and his team check in: How are you doing? What’s next? Whatever their goals and needs are, they try to come alongside and help achieve them.

Transportation. Housing. Basic life skills that most people take for granted but can make the difference between staying out and going back.

The Biggest Takeaway

Now Melvin gets national recognition. PBS covers his work. Jane Fonda visited the farm. Famous historians and world-renowned chefs show up to see what he’s doing.

“All I wanted was quite not quite a few years ago but not too long ago was just be on SSI,” he said.

I asked him what his biggest takeaway was from everything he’d been through.

“My biggest takeaway is that everything I’ve gone through has led me to be the person that I am right now. My biggest takeaway is to forgive myself. To make peace with myself. Not to blame others and know that one person can do a lot.”

The kids in the neighborhood climb the fence to play basketball near his farm. One day, an 11-year-old asked him: “Hey farmer Parson, you ever been to jail?”

Melvin saw the kid trying to normalize prison because he probably sensed that was his future too. “Hey kid, you know it don’t really matter what I went to jail for,” Melvin told him. “What matters is that you get the best education that you can possibly get so that you can potentially get a good job, maybe drive a car that you want to drive, eat some food that you want to eat. What’s also important is that you treat yourself with kindness and dignity and equally important that you treat others the same way.”

Then he added: “But the most important thing on your agenda is to come over here periodically and check and make sure if I need some help or not.”

That’s the soil analogy in action. Good soil. Good nutrients. The right environment. People can grow.