As an urban farmer, Cheyenne Kyle’s daily responsibilities are dependent on Mother Nature. “I’ve had to master the art of the pivot,” she says, shaking her head. It’s one of the better late winter days in a season riddled with windstorms that have destroyed crops and caused impromptu closures. Dressed in black yoga pants and a dark gray Obodo Collective T-shirt, her curly purple hair floating on the breeze, Kyle begins a guided tour. Walking through raised beds of chard, mustard greens, arugula, and other winter crops, she stops to inspect a chunky cabbage. “The rule is: Every time you see her, you’ve got to tell her she’s thick,” she says between coos and praises.
Kyle began her venture into food justice through Las Vegas’ kitchens — from hospitals to chain restaurants to fine dining establishments. “I fell in love with food because of my grandmothers, and the amount of care that they would take to prepare a meal for me,” she tells me after the tour. Kyle turned to the city’s hospitality industry knowing that it would give her the level of experience she needed. “The Foundation Room was probably my bougiest (workplace),” she admits. Her ultimate goal was beyond the Strip, where her culinary skills were needed most. Doing community service in tandem with restaurant employment, Kyle says, she “fell into food justice work” after completing culinary school.
Obodo Collective cofounders Erica Vital-Lazare and Brian Dice approached Kyle with an offer to join them shortly after they established the organization in 2020. Vital-Lazare and Dice asked Kyle what she envisioned for their half-acre property, located in a low-income residential neighborhood of Las Vegas’ Historic Westside. She told them, “I would build a farm.” And they answered, “Well, go build a farm.’”
So, she did. Obodo was fully operational a few years later, and in 2024 the farm won the Mayor’s Urban Design Award for Public Places. In those early days, Kyle filled many roles and developed much of the organization’s central programming, which addresses food security, housing justice, and family services. Today, as the food programs coordinator, she considers the farm her largest project.
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“Our day-to-day can vary from general farm upkeep and maintenance, to store operations, to administrative tasks, to teaching at schools,” Kyle says. She harvests crops with her volunteers. They dig ditches when they need to expel frustration. Managing an urban farm in a designated food desert plagued by rising food insecurity is difficult work, but there’s always time for playfulness. On some Thursdays, there’s twerking.
Jahalisha Marzulli, the farm lead and a disabled Air Force veteran, helps Kyle with the workload. Suffering from a traumatic brain injury that “makes it hard for (her) to remember things, especially in the short term,” Marzulli credits Kyle for the comfort she experiences while volunteering. “The way Cheyenne breaks things down and reiterates them makes it very easy for me to understand.”
“I think it’s my obligation to teach everybody everything that I know,” Kyle says. “What good does it do if I’m the only person that knows it? We’re currently operating in a food system where only 2 percent of the population knows how to do what I do.”
The farm has become busier since late February when Obodo, partnering with the Southern Nevada Health District, opened Greengrocer — the store adjacent to the farm that provides fresh produce and prepared to-go items, as well as products made by local Black artisans.
The week after the ribbon-cutting ceremony, visitors gathered on the patio area with congratulatory flower bouquets and petitions to partner with Kyle. Passing pedestrians approached to ask, “What is this place?” or attempted to visit outside operating hours. “It’s a lot,” Kyle confesses later, as tension bunches her shoulders. “I’m learning more about myself, and how I have to adapt to respond in these new situations.”
Zion Urban Farm worker Barbara Brown met Kyle during the pandemic through Brown’s late aunt, Estella Cline. Kyle would help Cline maintain her garden plot at the Doolittle Community Garden. Cline and Kyle learned a lot from each other, Brown says, and when arthritis prevented Cline from gardening, she gifted all her seeds to Kyle, who planted some at Obodo to harvest on Cline’s behalf. Kyle now has a framed photo of Cline hanging on a wall at Green Grocer and plans to establish a seed library, dedicating it to Cline.
“There’s nobody else like (Kyle) in this space and on this earth. She is so forward-thinking, smart, and headstrong,” says Tameka Henry, executive director for Obodo Collective. Henry met Kyle in 2017, when they worked at Vegas Roots, another urban farm. “She has planted so many seeds in the youth who (come here) every Saturday for class, or when people volunteer or have community service. I love the way that she gives them time to be in the space.”
Supporting the community means involving it, Kyle says. She wants to make sure that what Obodo offers doesn’t happen in a silo. “I’m not better than anybody. I’m not more special than anybody. I’m not more blessed than anybody,” she says. “I just didn’t give up. You come to a crossroads with yourself, where it’s like, ‘Can I still look at myself in the mirror if I quit this?’ I couldn’t bear the thought of not seeing something like this through.”