Even when she lived near an urban area, Toniekia Poole said, she grew vegetables, had backyard chickens, made her own soap and lived a holistic and minimalist lifestyle. Now that she’s relocated to the Danville-Pittsylvania area, she sees more opportunities to be a good steward of the earth — and share that experience with the community.
Poole and her husband, Tim, are in the process of building a family-owned regenerative farm and agritourism business in the Dry Fork area of Pittsylvania County. She hopes to officially open the business, Native Roots Farm, next summer, but she’s already begun the work of raising livestock, raising crops and navigating a seemingly endless development process.
Especially in rural areas, agritourism is a growing trend in the tourism industry.
As the term would suggest, it’s a combination of agriculture and tourism that provides educational, recreational and entertainment opportunities for visitors at farms and other businesses.
But Native Roots is more than just a business, Poole said.
“This is absolutely carrying on a family tradition,” she said in a phone interview. “This is history, this is our roots, this is food security. We want to build something that’s going to outlive us for many generations to come.”
Poole grew up in Greensboro, North Carolina, about 45 miles from Danville, where her parents were born. She spent her childhood summers in Danville with her grandparents, witnessing how they lived off the land.
She said her grandmother would cook wild game, brought to her by local hunters, and her grandfather would fish and bring his catches home for dinner. They also maintained large gardens and practiced a self-sufficient lifestyle, she said.
Poole said her Native American heritage — Occaneechi Saponi — taught her to view land as a relative, not as a commodity.
Poole and her husband moved to Dry Fork from the Roanoke Valley last year and purchased almost six acres of historically Occaneechi land that will become Native Roots Farm.
She said she hopes the farm will create food sovereignty and security, making farm-fresh food available to the community. The main products that Native Roots will offer are pasture-raised meats, poultry, pork, lamb, eggs and seasonal produce, like corn, beans, squash, lettuce, tomatoes and watermelon. There will also be herbs for sale, but that will vary seasonally since the farm will rotate crops as part of its regenerative and conservation efforts.
Prices will fluctuate with the market, Poole said, and it’s difficult to set pricing today for future farm products, but she and her husband follow market reports for hay, oats, wheat, feed and other products.
Poole also wants Native Roots to offer an experience to the community — workshops, activities, school field trips and, eventually, campsites.
“We want to service and reconnect with our community,” Poole said, “and we want to develop an agritourism destination that combines food, fun, education and cultural preservation.”
The family behind the farm
When she was a young adult, Poole said, the ways of her grandparents stayed with her. She continued to visit Danville, and on one trip, she said a cousin introduced her to her husband.
Toniekia and Tim Poole were married in Danville in 2003 and moved to the Roanoke Valley. They had their daughter, Avy, who is now a junior farmer and part of the Native Roots effort.
“She’s just 11 years old, but she is so passionate about this because this is all she’s ever known,” Poole said. “She’s already passionate about animal husbandry, she comes along with me for agricultural workshops, and being homeschooled, she’s also learning the business side of it.”
Poole said Avy brings “cultural preservation and youth ambassadorship to our operation already.”
Reaching local youth is part of the mission of Native Roots, Poole said, since so many farmers are aging out.
“We’re hoping that she [Avy] can help educate and inspire young people, because farming is not glamorous, and unfortunately, there are a lot of barriers in place to new farmers,” Poole said. “I want to be a good, positive representation of a farmer too, because there’s not a lot of women farmers, and certainly not a lot of women farmers of color.”
When the Pooles moved back to the Danville area last summer, they stayed with Tim’s parents at his childhood home near Tunstall High School. His family has lived on that land for generations, Poole said, raising chickens, goats and hogs and growing most of their own food.
Native Roots is about five minutes away from that land, Poole said.
“This is a full-circle story for us,” she said. “This is where our love story first began. This is where our family first began to take root, with my husband and I. So to return back home at this stage of our life, it just absolutely means everything to us.”
From raw land to regenerative agriculture
The six acres on Cross Stitch Road in the Dry Fork area of Pittsylvania are slowly but surely becoming Native Roots Farm.
Before this venture, Poole worked as a business and human resources consultant for years. Pivoting from the corporate world to agriculture management hasn’t been the hard part, however, she said.
“The difficult part is that we arrived to raw, undeveloped land, and now we have to do every single step,” Poole said. “I’m talking land excavation, pulling permits for land disturbance, getting the driveway put in, getting the home site leveled, getting the septic put in.”
It seemed like every time they were ready for the next phase, there were delays and complications, she said.
“We couldn’t even get the electric lines put in for seven months,” Poole said. “It took us seven months to track down the neighbors to be able to get approved for easements so Danville Utilities could run our power pole.”
Still, progress is happening. There’s a main pasture area and a livestock area, where there are rabbits, guinea fowl, chickens, roosters and muscovy ducks. There’s also a small starting flock of five sheep, four ewes and a ram, that will eventually become a breeding operation.
Last fall, the Pooles raised pigs in a 2.5-acre paddock that is a mixture of pasture and wooded area.
“They weren’t raised up in confinement,” Poole said. “They were able to forage grasses and insects and black walnuts that fell. We raised them up from little babies, and they were humanely harvested. Because I’m indigenous, we have protocols for when we process meat.”
She’s been setting up shop at the farmer’s market at the Olde Dominion Agricultural Complex in Chatham, and she plans to have a bigger presence there and elsewhere once meat and produce production expands.
Poole is also working to get authorization from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to accept food assistance funds through electronic benefits transfer cards.
“In the future, we want to be able to provide farm-fresh goods to populations under the poverty level who rely on EBT,” Poole said.
Still, there’s a lot of work ahead.
She has aspirations to create an agroforestry plan for the untouched forest area of the land, so she can harvest pine needles for basketry and donate them to other farms and community markets. She wants to diversify the farm with native plants like elderberry and other crops. She wants to develop rotational grazing, build better fencing and a manure storage facility to create fertilizer, and create a creekside primitive campground.
“I’m really just reaching for the sky, and I’m hoping that I grasp onto a star while I’m up there,” Poole said. “It’s been the most challenging thing that we’ve ever done, but it’s also the most fulfilling and rewarding thing that we could have imagined.”
Agritourism
Poole said she hopes that the campground will be one way that residents — and visitors — reconnect with nature and learn about sustainable agriculture at Native Roots.
“We also hope to construct an amphitheater or covered space that we can use collaboratively with wellness practitioners like yoga instructors, to offer community events so people can come out and engage with activities right there on the farm, and also tour the farm and interact with the animals, and maybe even visit our gardens and benefit from the produce,” Poole said.
Because Poole is a public speaker and educator, connecting with school systems is important to her too, she said, and she wants to help organize field trips at Native Roots.
In October, she represented Native Roots at the Career Choice Youth Expo for Pittsylvania County Schools, a yearly event to introduce students to potential careers. Poole organized games and challenges to expose students to regenerative agriculture, connecting with about 3,000 kids, she said.
She’s also a tourism ambassador with Danville’s Office of Economic Development, helping to promote the Visit SoSi region.
SoSi, or the Southside Virginia region, is experiencing a tourism boom, bringing in about $415 million in visitor spending in 2025, a 51% increase over the previous year, according to data from the Virginia Tourism Corporation.
Agritourism is part of that growth, said Lisa Meriwether, Danville’s director of tourism.
“Today’s travelers are looking for experiences that are authentic, hands-on and connected to nature,” Meriwether said. “Agritourism combines all those elements, allowing visitors to enjoy the beauty of our region while learning about the people and traditions that make Southside Virginia unique.”
Native Roots will play a role in Danville’s growing tourism economy, Meriwether said.
So far, the Pooles are doing this work without an investment firm, bank loan or development team.
“We’ve been doing it family style,” Poole said. “Reinvesting what we have worked for and earned, learning more as we go and putting our own hands into the work ourselves.”
