Our First Harvest Hub: Stone Links Park
The City Harvest Journal | Post 2 By Patrick O'Briant, Founder and Executive Director
Every farm starts the same way: someone looks at a piece of land and decides what it could become.
I want to introduce you to Stone Links Park, Cultivation Station's first Harvest Hub.
A Harvest Hub is what we call the sites we select and develop into working growing and teaching spaces. These are properties that are currently underutilized, sometimes overlooked entirely, that we transform into productive land where food gets grown, skills get taught, and the community gets fed. Stone Links Park is the first one.
The site is 10 acres on the eastern edge of North Little Rock, out near Baucum and Galloway. If you drove past it today, you'd probably miss it because it is tucked in among a frisbee golf course. For our purposes now, it is raw, undeveloped land. No beds, no rows, no structures. Just ground and potential.
That's about to change.
This summer, we're breaking ground at Stone Links Park. The plan is to build the core infrastructure a productive growing site needs: raised row beds, irrigation, soil preparation, basic equipment, and the systems to keep it all running reliably. Once the infrastructure is in place, we start planting and we start teaching.
Here's what Stone Links Park will become over time:
A production site. We'll grow vegetables selected for flavor, nutrition, and performance in the Arkansas climate. Seasonal fruits, culinary herbs and spices, and nursery plants will follow as we expand. The harvest moves into the community through direct sales and structured donations to families who need it.
A training site. This is where our apprenticeship and mentorship programs happen. Not in a classroom, but in the field, with your hands in the soil. Apprentices work alongside us through full growing cycles, learning the practical methods that actually produce food: soil health, crop planning, composting, pest management, irrigation, harvest handling. We'll also run workshops and short courses on focused topics for anyone who wants to build a specific skill.
A demonstration site. Every system we install at Stone Links Park is designed to be replicable. Container growing, vertical systems, space-efficient methods, season extension techniques. If it works here, someone can take that method home and scale it to their backyard, their community garden, or their own small operation.
A model for what comes next. Stone Links Park is the first Harvest Hub, not the last. If this model works, and I believe it will, we'll identify and develop additional sites. Each Harvest Hub expands Cultivation Station's reach and puts productive growing space closer to the communities that need it.
Right now, the work is less photogenic. We're in the planning, procurement, and infrastructure phase. Ordering materials. Lining up equipment. Working through the details that have to be right before the first seed goes in the ground. It's not glamorous, but it's necessary.
I'll be documenting the buildout here in The City Harvest Journal as it happens: what we're doing, what it costs, what works, what doesn't. If you want to see a farm get built from raw land in real time, follow along.
If you want to help make it happen, we're raising funds this summer to cover the materials, equipment, and infrastructure Stone Links Park needs to get into production. Every dollar goes directly into building the site. You can contribute at cultivationstation.farm/donate.
Ten acres. One community. A lot of good food to come.
Patrick O'Briant
Founder and Executive Director, Cultivation Station
