According to the American Immigration Council, women slightly outnumber men at over 23 million female immigrants in the U.S. But while immigrants move by choice, refugees have been forced to flee their homes due to violence, war, hunger and climate change. Some need items as basic as shoes. At MAKE, these women are offered not just support, but a launching pad to their new lives in the US. 

MAKE Projects, which stands for Merging Agriculture Kitchens and Employment, is a spin-off of the International Rescue Committee, a refugee resettlement agency, and provides the women three months of paid worker training through a community garden, kitchen and 16-table café.

“While not all refugee and immigrant women have a strong connection to farm, everyone has a strong connection to foods that evoke memories, nostalgia or just an important sense of cultural identity,” says Anchi Mei, MAKE’s executive director and founder.

Mei launched the nonprofit in 2017 to address the lack of workforce development opportunities for refugee women with English language and cultural barriers, who can find themselves isolated and trapped in poverty. 

“Over time, we have come to understand that access to employment is more than financial. It is personal, emotional, social and benefits not just the immediate family but the whole community.” 

Mei’s program for women and youth, which has built partnerships with local colleges, community organizations, employers and customers, is a necessary bridge.  

Weekly English coaching provided by volunteers helps smooth the path for the newcomers. But it all begins with the universal language of food, in all its worldly flavors. The first two weeks are spent on the farm.

MAKE Farm, a roughly quarter acre plot, uses low-till practices to improve soil health and nutrient density in crops, along with intercropping – growing two or more crops close together – and integrated pest management. Fish and kelp meal are the main fertilizers. Throughout the grounds, pollinator plants and bird habitats promote cross-pollination and a more complex ecosystem.

The resulting bounty travels to the kitchen side, but it loops back to the farm in leftovers to nourish new plantings. “We promote living soils with a robust composting system using our restaurant food waste and regular applications of compost teas,” Mei says.

Farm Program Manager Robbie Wilcox chooses a diverse planting mix. A winter CSA mix contained Taiwanese chrysanthemum greens alongside more familiar customer favorites: spinach, radishes, beets and sweet potato. The produce goes into several dishes at the cafe, like the MAKE Market Salad and Wellness Soup Bowl, tailored by chef Renee Fox around whatever is fresh and abundant that week. 

As the women plant, prune and prep vegetable boxes for subscribers, they ease into the many skills needed to enter the workforce. And when they begin the next phase of the program by working at MAKE’s cafe in North Park, they continue to hone their culinary and hospitality skills serving up such fare as Afghan chicken, cardamom crepes and toasted milk bread; recipe ideas the women share from their own experiences. Several graduates have gone on to work in food service at local hospitals.

“We are a better San Diego with more different voices, flavors and faces at the table.”

Not all choose to work with food, however. Gulnara, who is originally from Kazakhstan, found a job in finance and operations at a local nonprofit. Others work in local hospitals and schools, like Nejat, a recent graduate from Ethiopia.

The farm to table training is a unique way to enter the American workforce, Mei says. Students learn essential job readiness skills and expectations as they transition from the farm to a more intensive work experience in MAKE’s restaurant. And with participants who have hailed from over 30 countries since the program began, it’s a cultural dialogue that enriches the entire San Diego community.

Last year, she says, “was epic.” Thanks to a large workforce development grant, they expanded their facilities and scaled up the adult trainee program, allowing them to work with many more refugee and immigrant women of all different English speaking levels, and educational and professional backgrounds from their home countries.

This year, they are preparing to move to a more permanent address, as they work through the permitting for a new MAKE cafe in San Diego’s Normal Heights neighborhood, not far from their current location. It’s expected to open before the end of the year. In addition to the existing farm in Mission Valley, the new cafe will add its own 2,000 square foot garden on-site. 

Mei says they won’t be deterred by the roiling political climate, as another round of the Trump administration again takes aim at immigrants. After all, they survived the first go-round, and forged their way during COVID, the toughest of times.

“We will continue to be nimble, resourceful and resilient, much like our participants,” she says. Fortunately, MAKE has a strong community of local supporters that believe in their mission. 

“We are a better San Diego with more different voices, flavors and faces at the table.”

The post Spotlight On an Urban Farm Helping Refugees and Immigrants Build Community appeared first on Modern Farmer.

As the dietitian and marketing coordinator for Lake Travis ISD, Bell is responsible for ensuring students have medically and culturally appropriate foods to eat from the school cafeteria. This means ensuring meals are safe for students with allergies and dietary restrictions, as well as appropriate for students with religious and cultural restrictions on certain foods. 

While many of the pandemic supply issues have been resolved, there are still hiccups in the food chain. Lisa Quinn, director of child nutrition at Deshler High School in Tuscumbia, Alabama, says many schools are still dealing with this problem. 

“I may order wheat bread, but they ship us white bread or no bread at all,” she says. “That forces us to either change our menu or go to a local grocery store with a purchase order to get what we need to meet those government nutrition guidelines.” 

To deal with these ongoing challenges, Bell’s school district decided to join a local nonprofit called the Sustainable Food Center and the Good Food Purchasing Program, which allows smaller schools to join together, pooling their resources and purchasing power. 

Bell says the school’s big purchases can support the local economy, turning money that previously had been funneled to producers far away from Texas into fuel for the nearby community. 

“We’re spending lots and lots of money as a school district on food compared to a family that goes to the store. Schools have the opportunity to really use their big budgets for public good.”

While the benefits of buying local help school staff do their jobs better, there are also benefits for students. These benefits go far beyond putting calories in kids’ stomachs. 

“School food is a huge lever for change, because almost everyone goes to school. Our most vulnerable populations are funneled through the school district at some point, and it’s an opportunity to capture those students and make sure that they have the same access to healthy and good food that everyone else has access to. It’s really a foundation of health equity,” says Bell. 

She remembers an encounter with a student at the grocery store after one of the school’s regular fresh fruit and vegetable tasting days in the lunchroom. One of the vegetables offered for students to try was sugar snap peas. 

“I heard these little footsteps running up to me, and one little girl just jumped right in front of me, and she said, ‘I saw you today, and we were tasting fruits and vegetables and guess what? I’m here to buy sugar snap peas,” says Bell, describing a student interaction at the grocery store. “That was probably the most enlightening moment I’ve had in this role thus far. These kids, they go home and they bring it to their families, and it changes family dynamics. That’s the potential of this.”

While changing school food at Lake Travis has been beneficial for both students and the school, Bell says there’s a long way to go to making school lunch more sustainable and more nutritious. 

The regulatory barriers in place keep schools from being able to simply buy food from local farmers. For Lake Travis, this means buying food in collaboration with other local school districts. This way, schools can get bulk discounts on foods and ensure that the food they are buying meets regulatory standards. However, this method of purchasing limits the school’s options. 

“Larger school districts can specify things like a geographic preference, or somewhere within a certain mile radius, or they can ask for organic options. In our situation, if we’re the only school district asking for that option, and among 100 other school districts, that product is not going to make it on the bid,” says Bell. 

Looking forward, Bell says the school will continue to interact with community farmers about becoming school food suppliers and working with organizations such as the Good Food Purchasing program to meet those regulations. 

“We find that a lot of the local vendors also support these other values in the Good Food Purchasing program. And it’s easier to justify the local purchase because it’s an initiative of the government,” she says. “Until the system of purchasing changes, or until our regulations allow us to prioritize local purchases, it’ll be programs like Good Food Purchasing that’ll be really what helps us get it on the menu, but we still have a long, a long way to go.”

Quinn hopes to receive more funding to buy and prepare delicious homemade, healthy meals for students. She says she hopes Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s promise to “get processed food out of school lunch immediately” will lead to more funding for food and more employees in school lunchrooms. 

This school year, Quinn has challenged her staff to pitch one new homemade meal every week and to create a plan for how to prepare it for school lunch. 

“I have them tell me one meal every week, and then we decide who will be in charge of the meal,” says Quinn. “They tell me the ingredients they need to prepare it and I make sure those ingredients get purchased.”

The post Spotlight On One Texas School District Revolutionizing School Lunch appeared first on Modern Farmer.

The apiary they are building will produce honey for their secret recipe plans for the statewide Kalo Challenge, which is the culmination of their nine-month program that centers the ancestral practice of cultivating the Hawaiian staple crop kalo (taro), and serves as a competition where they do presentations on their cultural education, as well as present innovative recipes for competition. 

Naʻau ʻŌiwi, which means “native gut,” is in its third year at Kohala High School, as part of the Hawai’i Department of Education’s Alternative Learning Programs, which partners with 33 schools across the islands and trades the conventional classroom for ʻāina (land)-based cultural education, where students can earn the same credits for graduation.

The students of Naʻau ʻŌiwi like to call this AlterNATIVE Learning and follow the ‘ōlelo no’eau, or Hawai’ian proverb “A’ohe pau ka ‘ike ka hālau ho’okahi,” meaning not all knowledge is taught in one school.  

Three years ago, the program started with only two students; now there are 12. They spend each day at a different farm, ranch, or cultural learning program area throughout rural Kohala with various organizations. At each location, they have plots with different varieties of kalo.

The first year, they won with kalo pizza. Last year, they presented them with “kalo-min”—which was a creative take on saimin—a side dish of hō’i’o (fiddle-head fern) salad, and deep-fried panko-breaded kulolo, a kalo-based dessert, that was accompanied by coconut ice cream and a haupia drizzle.

Even more impressive is that through their partnership with Hawai’i Land Trust, they harvested a kiawe tree log at Mãhukona and made stunning trays on which to serve the food, and chopsticks for the judge’s utensils. 

In Māhukona, they built beehives under the tutelage of instructors from Ho’ōla Honey, a Native Hawai’ian-owned beekeeping business and rescue. There, their partner organization is Hawai’i Land Trust (HILT), which recently acquired the coastal lands to protect and conserve the area, that much like the rest of Hawai’i, has deep cultural significance to many generational families, and is also a historic training area for traditional Hawai’ian navigators who traveled by wa’a, or canoe.

According to Keone Emiliano, the land steward and educator for Māhukona with HILT, when the students aren’t building beehive boxes, they have been planting native plants, like the kukui nut tree, along with tending their kalo patch.

“It’s not just about what they tell us to do [with planting], it’s learning about the place, about its history, the people that used to be there, what they did, the way they lived and what they used it for, the tools and canoes, and cultivating the land,” says Alex Faisca, who is in his second year with Naʻau ʻŌiwi.

Faisca adds that his parents say he is very lucky that he and the other students have this program, because they never had anything like it growing up. 

In fact, when their lead teacher Aoloa Patao was growing up, the only thing he learned about being Native Hawai’ian was what he saw in the Adam Sandler film 50 First Dates, and he wouldn’t learn more until college. He then had to learn on his own afterwards. 

Many were in this boat. Due to colonial influences in the late 1800s, Hawai’ian cultural education in public schools was suppressed for many years, until the cultural renaissance of the 1970s, when there was more demand for the reinstitution of this kind of education in schools and colleges. Despite the state’s constitution being amended to mandate it, instruction was limited; however, more initiatives started happening over the years, particularly after the establishment of the Office of Hawai’ian Education in 2015 alongside the development of the Nā Hopena A’o framework. 

Nā Hopena A’o is a department-wide framework to help guide the public education system based on Hawaiian values, culture, history, and language, as well as aiming to develop skills and behaviors that honor the qualities and values of the indigenous language and culture of Hawaiʻi.​ 

Patao is happy to be part of remedying that issue for the students. “It makes me feel good about their potential and the future of our community, and that they are in a better position to know who they are and not have to try to figure it out on their own,” says Patao.

Other partner organizations are the voyaging nonprofit Nā Kālai Wa`a—where the students learn to connect the relationships between traditional sailing and kalo—LT Ranch, which prioritizes cultural learning for Native Hawai’ian youth, and ‘Iole Hawai’i, a new Indigenous learning lab on 2,400 acres, that combines ancient wisdom and modern technology for sustainability solutions. 

“All this stuff, it helps in life. It’s not about what you are doing, but how you are doing it, with patience, perseverance, and problem-solving skills.”

“All this stuff, it helps in life. It’s not about what you are doing, but how you are doing it, with patience, perseverance, and problem-solving skills,” says fellow senior Daylan Kaitoku, adding that it’s almost like a college setting, because he gets to learn about weather stations, pH testers and soil testers. “And on top of that, there’s a cultural aspect to it,” he says. 

Each year, the students have also created an educational component for the area’s elementary kids.

In the first year, the first two students had never heard the origin story of kalo until they were juniors in high school, so to make sure the younger generation didn’t have to go as long as they did to connect to it, they made a children’s book about the backstory, which is the Native Hawai’ian mo`olelo (story) of Hāloa, which involves the birth of the Hawai’ian people and the connection Hawai’ians have to kalo, not just as a food source but as an ancestor. 

They passed the book on to the elementary school children, with the Department of Education backing them by printing 200 copies. The following year, the students developed a card game called Go Kalo, inspired by the classic game Go Fish, featuring all 22 parts of the kalo plant.

“It was a good idea, because instead of just matching the cards [like in Go Fish], you can learn,” says student Ihilani Leong, who did a lot of the design. Each card tells what part it is, its location on the plant, and what it looks like. 

Much like the plans for this year’s Kalo Challenge, what they are doing for the youth is still being formulated. However, out of all the things they are doing with the program, Kaitoku hopes “that the seed that’s planted grows into wisdom, knowledge, and hope for the next generation.”

The post Spotlight On the Students Growing Kalo in Hawai’i appeared first on Modern Farmer.

In reality, Austin Bicycle Meals (ABM) is some combination of both.

The group rides around Texas’ big, quirky capital with coolers of water and food in clamshell to-go containers, all for the city’s unhoused community. Some cyclists carry backpacks of hygiene products. All the riders have been alerted to which of the many coolers holds the popsicles, one of their most requested food items.

For co-founders Kelly Wourms and Claire Harbutt, the volunteer-based program is a way to give back to the community they call home, a place where a soaring cost of living and rapid gentrification is increasingly pricing many of its residents out of survival essentials. Climate-monitoring reports indicate that Austin’s residents are dealing with more and longer “hot spells”—or consecutive days of temperatures over 102.5 degrees Fahrenheit. 

This makes staying fed and hydrated an even bigger challenge for the city’s most vulnerable population. So, every Wednesday and Saturday, rain or shine, heat or cold snap, ABM rides, handing out hundreds of meals a month.

It’s a Saturday afternoon, which means ABM is headed out on a five-mile ride around the city. They start on South Congress Avenue, near the South Congress Hotel, and make their way into the heart of downtown. They loop around the Texas Capitol, head to the Austin Central Library, and finish up around Republic Square near the US Courthouse. On Wednesdays, their route is much longer, close to 14 miles. They usually head out to the East Side and work along Airport Boulevard on those days. 

Being on two wheels rather than four allows them greater freedom of movement and access to those who rely on them most. While a car would be faster and have more storage space, bikes eliminate fuel expenses and emissions. They also allow ABM to serve people along Austin’s many trails near rivers and through parks, places that cars can’t access. 

Bikes also allow for more visibility; people see the “Austin Bike Meals” vests and friendly faces, and they can relax knowing they’re being approached by allies. 

Wourms, 31, moved to Austin from Los Angeles in 2021. While living in L.A., he was part of a volunteer group called Bicycle Meals, which followed a similar model and delivered meals around Koreatown. When Wourms moved to Austin, he wanted to find a way to carry on the tradition. 

“I was friends with a few cyclists in town, I knew there was a pretty sizable unhoused population, and local laws regarding the unhoused population were pretty hostile,” says Wourms. “So, I thought this could be a good program to help mitigate that.”

Withh Harbutt’s help, Wourms launched Bicycle Meals’ Austin branch out of his own pocket. The duo went on their first meal delivery ride together on Valentine’s Day of 2022. From then on, they would make 50 sack lunches to hand out every weekend—turkey sandwiches, chips, fruit, dessert, and a bottle of water. 

Delivering prepared meals instantly made more sense to Wourms and Harbutt than creating boxes of ingredients the way food banks might. They wanted to deliver food that recipients without access to refrigeration or cooking supplies could eat immediately, wherever they were. 

“I’ve worked with so many food banks where we’d be packing up groceries for people and I’d see volunteers packing boxes with three heads of lettuce, a bag of white bread, and some cookies,” Wourms recalls. “It pissed me off. I always said if I ever ran a food program, I would give out food that I would be excited to receive, and not just crap. Because that’s almost like getting less than nothing.”

After roughly five months of weekly lunch preparation, Wourms and Harbutt recognized early signs of burnout. 

“We were trying to start out, so, most of the time, it was just us, and occasionally some friends we could round up,” says Harbutt. “We were still making all the lunches, Kelly was paying for them, and then we’d also distribute them and it would take forever because no one would come out to help.”

Wourms and Harbutt knew they needed to pivot some of the workload to keep the program sustainable over the long term. So, they made some changes.

Rather than buying and making meals, they partnered with Austin Food Not Bombs and started distributing hot meals from the long-established organization. ABM also partnered with Our Shared Kitchen, a non-profit dedicated to preparing nutritionally balanced meals for Austinites facing homelessness. Our Shared Kitchen also formulates meals that are edible for a wide range of people. “A lot of people we serve don’t have teeth,” says Wourms. “Or they can’t do spicy foods, or sweet foods, or salty foods. It’s tough to create a recipe that can be universally enjoyed.”

While ABM riders will sometimes run into folks with severe food allergies or restrictions, most of the time the food is a huge hit. 

“Ninety-nine percent of people are just happy to receive help and feel compassion,” says Harbutt. “[We just] say we have free food, and ask them if they’d like any. You’ll see these people visibly relax when they realize we aren’t there to harass them, or yell at them for being on a bench we want to sit on. We aren’t there to do harm; we’re there to give them something they might want.”

Today, ABM hands out roughly 500 meals a month. The group is well on its way to hitting its goal of 5,000 meals in 2024, and it already has its sights set on distributing 9,000 meals in 2025. Of course, these numbers wouldn’t be possible without the large volunteer network ABM has amassed. Eight to 12 volunteers show up to most rides, but, sometimes, there are as many as 20, far more than are needed to distribute the food. But that accessibility for volunteers is a key part of the program’s model: It reframes riders’ relationships with their unhoused neighbors.

“I came to a realization one day that, if I’m going to make a difference anywhere, it has to be locally and within the community immediately around me,” says Wourms. “We’ve had volunteers show up and feel so conditioned by how we view unhoused folks in this country, and they’ll do a full one-eighty. Their whole perspective will change. It’s really beautiful.”

The post Spotlight On the Cyclists Feeding Their Community appeared first on Modern Farmer.

“I am so excited I can have this at home,” says Allison Hepworth who just picked up her bag of fish. Knowing how and where the fish was caught makes a difference to Hepworth. Each package of seafood has a picture of the fisher who caught it, and where and when it was caught. It reminds members that when you become a member of Skipper Otto, you not only get delicious seafood, but you have played a role in supporting the livelihoods of small independent fishers.

Founded in 2008, by Sonia and Shaun Strobel, Skipper Otto is named for Shaun’s Dad, Otto. When Otto began fishing in the 1960s, there were thousands of independent small-scale fishers harvesting seafood along B.C.’s coast, and making a good living. Over time, changes in government regulations have allowed massive factory ships owned by large corporations to gobble up fish, which increased the length of the supply chain. In the United States, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) estimates that 70 percent to 85 percent of seafood in stores is imported. Imported seafood can either mean it was harvested from global waters, or caught in the US, but exported to other countries for processing and then returned to the US. This creates a lack of transparency for the consumer on the origin of their food and adds up to lower wages paid to local harvesters.

It’s also risky relying on imported seafood. Shocks such as extreme weather or geopolitical events can disrupt global supply routes and threaten the ability of seafood to be safely traded on a global scale.

“The fishing way of life is endangered, and local fishers are losing access to markets,” says Sonia Strobel.

This is where a Community-Supported Agriculture (CSA) model comes in. Or, in this case, a CSF. Similar to how a CSA model invites members to invest in a local farm and purchase produce before it’s harvested, a CSF model also pre-sells seafood before it’s caught, inviting members to invest in the livelihood of independent fishers.

The pre-sale of seafood removes the uncertainty as to whether they will have a buyer for their seafood and the price they will receive for the catch. Along with guaranteed income, the nature of a CSF and a local food system allows fishers to pivot their catch to match what is available and abundant. “If one year the sockeye salmon return is low and Coho salmon are abundant, then, that is what Skipper Otto members are offered,” explains Strobel.

Skipper Otto’s 8,000 members are supplied sustainability caught fish from 45 fishing families. This growing success over the past decade and a half has made Strobel a strong advocate for independent fisheries, something put to the test in 2021. For decades, independent harvesters in B.C. have frozen tubs of spot prawns in salt water while at sea to preserve them until they return to port.

Just before the start of the 2021 spot prawn season, a reinterpretation of a government regulation that all catches must be readily available for inspection caused Canada’s Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) to ban the sale of frozen-at-sea spot prawns. Frozen prawns, it was argued, weren’t readily available for inspection. This made little sense to Strobel or independent fishers, especially as they say thawing a tub of prawns took minutes. Strobel and the Skipper Otto team say the policy had the potential to collapse an industry worth $30 million to $50 million annually, and take away the livelihoods of independent spot prawn fishers, perhaps permanently. Strobel turned to Skipper Otto’s vast membership, asking them to sign petitions and write letters in protest. Skipper Otto’s influence played a role in the government reversing the policy.

Continuing to advocate, Strobel has spoken in front of Canada’s House of Commons and sits as a volunteer on the executive committee of Local Catch Network, a North American hub that advocates for local and community-based seafood systems. Through Local Catch’s mentorship program, Strobel was connected with Cadena Ragsdale, owner of Kauai Fresh Fish in Hawaii. When Ragsdale started her business in 2022, it was hard to find fresh local fish.

“We quickly realized there was a demand for fresh local fish and a transparency in where the fish came from,” says Ragsdale. As in B.C., independent fishers don’t always receive fair prices for their catches. That same story can be heard across North America.

In northern Saskatchewan, Indigenous fishers are losing markets for their freshwater catches of walleye and pike. Skipper Otto hopes to add these fishers as suppliers, offering guaranteed sales and fair market value. In Nunavut, Inuit lake fishers drive out on skidoos in the middle of winter to frozen freshwater lakes, drill holes and, using gill nets, pull in by hand their catch of Arctic char. The fish is processed, frozen and available to Skipper Otto members.

Despite expansion, Strobel doesn’t see Skipper Otto as competition with the industrial fishery. “None of us wants to catch the last fish,” she says. What Skipper Otto offers is insurance that fresh local seafood remains available and there is a robust network of small-scale fishers to catch it.

Back at Fisherman’s Wharf, Hepworth completes her order with freshly harvested mussels. At home, she will pull the frozen fish out of her freezer, as needed, and pan-fry it with butter and lemon for her family.

“We are reconnecting people to food,” says Strobel.

The post Spotlight On a Community-Supported Fishery appeared first on Modern Farmer.

Ghiorse had stopped cooking professionally by the time she had moved back to her hometown of Greenwich in 2014; years of cooking at scale had been physically demanding and stressful, and she was ready to expand her knowledge and skills. But she felt she had lost her platform to connect with the food system in an impactful way.

She began learning about the area’s food system and volunteering with local endeavors like the town’s sustainability committee. The committee helps guide Greenwich in advancing sustainable policies and practices that impact its natural environment, economy, and community. As chair of the committee’s food systems sector, she noticed “a gap,” she says, “in general awareness of the deeply ingrained, harmful impacts of our industrial food system.”

So, in 2020, she founded The Foodshed Network (TFN), an educational and convening platform to encourage residents in her hometown of Greenwich, CT, and surrounding Fairfield County to become food system changemakers.

“Our food system is so complicated,” says Ghiorse. “It’s very important to know and understand the impacts of our industrial system and then to understand the huge amounts of creativity, connectivity, and community that happens around food.”

Living in the activist hotbed of San Francisco’s Mission District helped her realize the connection between systemic racism and food access. “It’s fraught with deeply rooted practices of exploitation,” says Ghiorse, “beginning with the enslavement of Africans, the genocide of Indigenous peoples, and extraction of soil watersheds, and natural and social ecosystems.

“I learned about the importance of bridge building, network weaving, cross pollinating between initiatives, and convening people around food, and,” she emphasizes, “using the power of gathering as a lever for social change and healing.”

To address all of these distinct yet intersecting issues, TFN is made up of several sub-organizations, including the Greenwich Food Alliance (GFA), The Foodshed Forum, and a resource library. The GFA is a community of practice, assembling business leaders and government officials in an informal group bound by shared interests and expertise. Members network, share ideas, and learn about issues and advocate for policy surrounding food, such as making SNAP benefits available at nearby farmers markets. The Foodshed Forum is the educational arm, partnering with organizations to host events such as a current three-part lecture series entitled “Heritage Foodways: Seed, Hearth & Taste” at local libraries.

The resource library, available on the website, offers a wealth of information including Thirty Ways to be a Food System Changemaker, concrete suggestions people can take to be changemakers. There’s also a monthly newsletter.

Ghiorse runs TFN full-time; it’s self-funded on a shoestring budget, but she is working towards non-profit status and finding a fiscal sponsor so she can begin fundraising.

Myra Klockenbrick, land and water Sector chair of the Greenwich Sustainability Committee and co-director of Greenwich Pollinator Pathway, credits Ghiorse with bringing up a conversation that is not natural to Greenwich. Although Greenwich is particularly affluent, the town has initiatives such as community gardens and a food pantry, as 29 percent of the community experiences financial hardship.

“She’s really deepened our awareness of the diversity in our population,” says Klockenbrick. “She has this knack and grace of not being on her high horse, but educating us deeply about our food system, both good and bad in ways that aren’t scolding but always uplifting.”

“Ali’s brought this food system conversation to Greenwich,” says Sarah Coccaro, the Town of Greenwich’s assistant director of environmental affairs. “There was conversation around food systems,” she adds, “but there wasn’t any framing or awareness of the food system with a sort of equitable racial justice lens on it.”

Coccaro says food systems topics are being integrated into conversations within the town’s Conservation committee, and that she sees the context that TFN offers helping residents understand the industrial food system’s impact. She mentions a new Grow A Row effort in which community members grow an extra row of food in their gardens to donate. “People are starting to connect dots around food systems and how it needs to change and what they can do on a local level or regional level,” she says, “and I’m proud to see that change happening.”

Ghiorse aspires to create a culture shift where food, land, and seed sovereignty are the norm. That’s “the North Star for me, where people and community reclaim our collective commons,” she sas. “That’s fertile soil, clean waterways, and nutrient-rich woodlands that are accessible and available to everyone as a human right. That’s foundational.”

The post Spotlight On a Network Aiming to Make Everyone a Food Changemaker appeared first on Modern Farmer.

Sherman is no stranger himself to the environmental and economic challenges of running an aquaculture business. Island Creek is a vertically integrated oyster operation, meaning it both farms and distributes its own oysters. But he’s still intent on turning the tides of the canning industry. In July, Sherman announced the launch of his latest venture, the Island Creek Cannery, the first ever single-origin canning facility of its kind in the US.

Long before the pandemic sent American appetites seaward, stoking our interest in convenient, high-end canned fish, Island Creek—a primarily fresh seafood business—had its eye on the tin. “We’ve always been interested in democratizing oysters and shellfish in general,” says Sherman. In 2016, Island Creek opened The Portland Oyster Shop—the company’s first full-service restaurant—in downtown Portland, Maine. But the raw bar-only concept was running lean, and Sherman quickly realized he needed another food option to bulk out the menu that wouldn’t require a setup to make hot food. Taking cues from already-established tin-centric restaurants such as NYC’s Maiden Lane and Boston’s haley.henry, Sherman opted for serving conservas, a culinary delicacy popular across the Mediterranean, whereby seafood is preserved in brines, olive oils, and other flavorful sauces. Conservas store indefinitely and require little back-of-house labor, an operational boon. But would the market find them satisfying? “I was convinced at that point that it was just not going to work, but people really responded to [the conservas],” says Sherman. “That gave us a pretty good indicator that this thing has some legs.”

To meet the newfound customer demand for tinned fish, Island Creek began importing, distributing, and co-branding its own line of conservas for Conservas Mariscadora, a collective of independent female shellfish harvesters—or mariscadoras—in Galicia, Spain who harvest fully traceable seafood from the waters of the Cantabrian Sea. While relatively new to the US market, in Spain, conservas are ubiquitous. “The Spanish eat a ton of seafood,” says Sherman, who began traveling the country researching sustainable fish farms on an Eisenhower Fellowship in 2018. “When we eat french fries, they’re eating shellfish.” Thus, canning became a necessary innovation, entrenching itself into Spanish culture. Sherman noticed this most starkly while shopping at El Corte Inglés, where tin after tin of conservas stocked four full aisles’ worth of grocery store shelves. “The octopus section was bigger than the soup section at most American grocery stores,” says Sherman.

That’s when things began to gel for Sherman. For Island Creek, a company familiar with the challenges of manufacturing a seasonal product, packing seafood in tins presented a shiny solution. By canning stateside, they could pack their seasonal product at peak quality while creating inventory that could be sold year-round at a good value. Additionally, the growing popularity of conservas in the US meant the demand for high-quality fish aligned with the company’s own standards.

Located in the historic fishing community of New Bedford, Massachusetts, the Island Creek Oyster Cannery is a small operation with big ambitions. Blending Island Creek Oysters’ already established brand of sustainable aquaculture with the American market’s newfound hunger for high-quality, shelf-stable seafood, Island Creek is resurrecting a dormant US tradition that’s existed since the 1800s—albeit repurposing it with Mediterranean ideals to meet the needs of the contemporary market.

While Island Creek has built an entire business out of fresh oysters, it hasn’t yet canned any. “Oyster supply has been pretty tight,” says Sherman, which drives the prices up. “They’re also the most difficult shellfish to can well.” Instead, the company is focused on farming clams, as well as sourcing from other New England seafood producers it’s met and vetted, such as Cherrystone Aqua-Farms in Virginia. “We’re definitely branching out, but we’re trying to keep everything single-origin, single-producer, and we’re trying to keep everything working with responsible harvesters and farmers that meet our standards,” says Sherman. The term “single-origin” is used broadly across the specialty food and beverage space (think chocolate, coffee, and whiskey) and refers to foods from a specific farm, location, or source. The same is true in aquaculture. It’s a strong marker of fish and seafood traceability—and thus, quality.

Having a cannery in the US that sources seafood exclusively from American shores presents a significant opportunity for American seafood producers. Island Creek is confident that this venture will support coastal communities across the United States by providing a stable, year-round supply of seafood. This steady inventory will benefit the numerous seafood-related businesses that are a major part of the East Coast’s fishing economy.

“Since we’ve publicized the cannery, I’ve had half the medium- to small-scale seafood producers in the Northeast reach out to me about handling their product,” says Sherman. “We just now need to connect the dots and make the demand there as well. I think we’re doing that, but it’s brick by brick.” To boost the lowbrow reputation of canned fish that still dominates much of the US market, Island Creek is choosing to can in European format tins—generally wider and shallower than a typical tuna or cat food tin—which he hopes will telegraph the quality of the product and justify the premium price point.

With little in the way of tradition in the United States, the tinned fish market is still finding its sea legs; Sherman notes there is “some chaos in the market” with tinned fish prices ranging anywhere from $4 to $30, but the company is making strides towards its goal of democratizing shellfish. “I didn’t think we would sell to 800 chefs around the country every week…but honestly, we sell a ton of tin fish to chefs and restaurants that aren’t tinned fish restaurants. They’re using them as an ingredient in a pasta dish, or on rice. And they’re using it because they don’t have the labor and the shucking and the steaming and the sauce making,” says Sherman. He is confident that other canneries like his will follow suit, especially along the East Coast where fish stocks and shellfish farms are abundant.

However, Sherman is candid about the challenges that lie ahead: In countries such as Spain and Portugal, where most canneries are run by generations of families, labor costs are a fraction of those in the United States. Nevertheless, canning has long been, and continues to be, a revolutionary process with a significant impact on ensuring sustainable aquaculture practices and preserving local fishing communities that rely on canning during the off-season. It also benefits consumers, who can enjoy high-quality seafood at a more reasonable price point than fresh seafood. Says Sherman, “We’re blazing the trail—for better or worse.”

The post Spotlight On a Cannery Trying to Revive A Dormant Fishing Tradition appeared first on Modern Farmer.

The selection has not only introduced Martinez to new ingredients, such as eggplant, but she’s learned to cook with them thanks to her children, who receive free classes through their school. “They make broccoli soup. They like cauliflower,” she says. “You don’t think of kids liking Brussels sprouts and these kids love them now.”

The pantry is just one location in Second Harvest Food Bank of Orange County’s network of nearly 300 distribution sites; the 41-year-old organization serves an average of 430,000 people per month who are experiencing food insecurity.

About three years ago, the southern California food bank added something novel to its system: a 40-acre farm. 

At Harvest Solutions Farm in Irvine, fresh produce is grown specifically to be distributed to Second Harvest’s partners such as the school pantry. Since its inception in August 2021, the property has produced more than five million pounds of nutritious food for the surrounding community.

“There is a symbolism in the fact that we are growing [locally] , that we are growing food right here that is going from farm to food bank to table in 48 to 72 hours,” says Second Harvest CEO Claudia Bonilla Keller. “Those that need the most help are getting some of the best food that we could ever hope to procure.”

Most food banks operate by gathering unwanted and donated food and distributing them to food pantries and other programs so the people who need the sustenance are able to access it. But those donations can be tenuous. Recently, inflation and supply chain issues have made it even more difficult to maintain operations—particularly at a level that addresses the rising need. 

Seventeen million US households experienced food insecurity at some point in 2022, according to the US Department of Agriculture, a number that grew as a result of the pandemic. 

Harvest Solutions Farm, which operates on University of California South Coast Research and Extension Center (REC) land, grows various crops throughout the year—from cabbage and broccoli to zucchini and watermelon—that is then harvested and driven two miles to the food bank’s warehouse, allowing the organization to quickly distribute the perishable goods throughout the county. 

It’s a symbiotic relationship. Second Harvest gains access to free land (the organization pays for water use and some equipment), and the soil health of UC’s otherwise unused plots is supported. Because the farm relies primarily on volunteers—an average of 170 per week—there’s also an educational component: The community has the chance to connect with farming and food in a way that shopping at a grocery store can’t offer. “People are losing touch with agriculture,” says Darren Haver, director of the REC system and interim director of South Coast REC. “This partnership allows a lot of volunteers that would have never set foot in an agricultural field to actually experience it and learn about it and have a greater understanding of that.” 

Volunteers, in turn, help make the project economically feasible. “The most innovative thing about it is the produce is affordable to a food bank, to us, because the labor is done by volunteers and that allows us to take [the food] in at prices that are competitive with the state co-op, (under 30 cents per pound on average, on par with the California Association of Food Banks),” says Keller. “It’s a relatively small part of our supply chain in all honesty, but it is one that we 100 percent control.”

The farm also reinforces Second Harvest’s mission to provide dignified access to food and nutritional security, which is not only making sure people like Martinez and her family have consistent access to food but ensuring that the fare is truly healthy. “It’s something that is not only going to feed your family but nourish your family,” says Keller.

Although Harvest Solutions isn’t the first of its kind (other farm-to-food-bank programs exist across the country, including at Seeds of Hope in Los Angeles, South Plains Food Bank in Texas and Golden Harvest Food Bank in Georgia), the scale of the farm is unique. And it’s something those involved think can be replicated elsewhere, particularly with strong partnerships in place.

“The model that we’ve had around the country and almost around the world is that our expired, rejected, quality-impacted foods are made available to food banks at discounted prices or for free and we pat ourselves on the back thinking that we’re addressing waste,” says A.G. Kawamura, the former secretary of the California Department of Food and Agriculture and chairman of the nonprofit Solutions for Urban Agriculture. Kawamura, a farmer himself, started other, smaller versions of Harvest Solutions and was integral in getting the project up and running. Within a season, he says, efforts like this one can “really attack the problem of hunger head-on and make such a big dent in it immediately.”

This matters to community members such as Martinez, who was homeless with her five kids for about two years. Some of the food banks she visited would give her canned food, for which she didn’t have the ability to open, eat or cook. She would return to the places that had fresh produce.

The family has been settled in an apartment for two years, and the school-based pantry has been incredibly beneficial to her, both for the convenience (it’s accessible year-round) and the quality and variety of the produce. Her kids sometimes walk straight to the kitchen to show her their latest cooking skills. The weekly box also allows her to stretch her budget to other necessities, such as proteins beyond chicken, which is what her budget limited her to before. “This program,” she says, “has helped me tremendously in a lot of ways.”

The post Spotlight On the Community Fridge and Pantry Growing Its Own Produce appeared first on Modern Farmer.

This story is part of our Future Farmers series, highlighting the joys and hurdles of a career in agriculture today. 

Graeme Foers

Farm Name: Lost Meadows Apiaries & Meadery
Location: Essa Township, Ontario, Canada
Age: 33
Years Farming: 13

Tell us a bit about your farm: 
My farming season begins early February with the maple syrup season. I make maple syrup more traditionally with buckets and flat pans over fires outside. The season then turns to bees with my first queen graft right at the beginning of May. I produce around 100 queens per week for 12 weeks which are sold to beekeepers across Ontario. My queens are bred for a number of traits, but the most important being hygienic, mite resistant and overwintering ability. Aside from the queens my 200 hives make honey from around mid may to September. I keep the honey separate from each meadow and each month. This makes a huge range of different tasting honeys based on what was blooming and in what quantities when the bees collected it. I try and keep my bees away from commercial agriculture to help minimize the impact it has on my bees and also on influencing the flavor of the honey. I also own a small meadery on the farm with my sister, we use the honey from my hives to make the mead and have won several awards for it at the Royal Winter Fair in Toronto.

Why farming? What drew you to it as a livelihood?
I want to work at something that I find meaningful in life and that I feel I can leave behind as my contribution to society. For me that is through beekeeping and specifically breeding queen bees. My first beehive I had died and I was devastated. I decided that if I was going to have bees again I never wanted another hive to die, so I would have to be the best beekeeper I possibly could be. This lead me to queen rearing and eventually queen breeding and finding bees that are resistant to varroa mites, and other brood diseases, that are gentle and can thrive in this changing climate.

What advice or insight do you have for young people interested in farming?
Don’t stop believing in yourself, and try and be around people who believing you. Don’t be afraid to be part of the change even if a more experienced farmer tells you that’s not how to do it or its not the conventional way of doing it. Doing it your way may be the small difference you need to have customers buy your product and gain market share.

What are the barriers to being a young farmer, and how are you dealing with or overcoming them?
The biggest barrier for me is the extreme cost of everything from equipment to land and anything else involved like fuel and gas. I have had family members lend me some money for equipment purchases and I try not to expand too much at one time so I don’t stretch my resources too thin.

Greg & Amber Pollock

Farm Name: Sunfox Farm
Location: Concord, NH & Deerfield, NH
Years Farming: 5 years at Sunfox and total of 17 years of experience farming

Tell us a bit about your farm: 
Sunfox Farm is a small family operation in Central New Hampshire with a focus on sustainable and environmentally responsible agricultural practices. We specialize in growing sunflowers for oilseed production. A huge part of our business is agritourism, with our Annual Sunflower Bloom Festival being a quintessential summer event in the capital city of New Hampshire. We love reuniting people with the land and encouraging them to bring the whole family out to the farm! We grow using organic practices, and we’re currently working towards organic certification. We believe that by taking care of the earth, we can produce delicious and nutritious food that nourishes both the body and the soul. 

Our 2024 Sunflower Festival is August 10-18th. We have live music, local food trucks, and an artisan craft fair, with over 20 acres of sunflowers! In addition to the festival, Amber is a professionally trained chef and orchestrates seven-course, fine dining, farm-to-table meals in the sunflowers.

Why farming? What drew you to it as a livelihood?
There’s something truly magical about working outside and growing nutritious food for our community and family. It’s rewarding to see something through from start to finish—watching someone taste our sunflower oil for the first time and seeing their eyes light up makes us so proud. The work is hard, the days are long, our hands and feet are callused, and we wear our farmer tans with pride. We’re drawn to farming because it’s honest work, and it feels good to do it.

What advice or insight do you have for young people interested in farming?
You learn so much by doing. If you’ve never grown pumpkins, try it. If you’ve never set up an irrigation system, try it. If you’ve never changed the oil on a tractor, try it (with a little help from the owner’s manual). Farmers are jacks and jills of all trades, masters of none. It’s a perfect career for the curious mind. If you have even the slightest interest in farming, try it. The things you can learn are endless and it will always keep you on your toes. Farming isn’t ever perfect, but you can always find joy in the life of a farmer.

What are the barriers to being a young farmer, and how are you dealing with or overcoming them?
The biggest barrier we face as young farmers is land accessibility. Our dream is to someday own our own property, however, as of now we’ve only be able to secure leased or rented land. Finding a place to farm can make the adventure nearly impossible for many young farmers.

Another barrier is funding for equipment and infrastructure. Something that helped us was having a solid business plan. Within a year or two of starting our farm, we were able to provide well thought out projections and accounting documents. Being confident while discussing these items was integral in helping us acquire a loan to purchase our own equipment.

Sean Pessarra

Farm Name: Mindful Farmer
Location: Conway, Arkansas
Age: 36
Years Farming: 15

Tell us a bit about your farm: 
Mindful Farmer emerged from my desire to empower, educate, and equip the next generation of growers with appropriate technologies and tools tailored to small-scale farmers and gardeners, as well as sustainable and productive techniques. This inspiration struck when I worked at Heifer International and witnessed the challenges faced by small and mid-scale farms in the Southern US. Many struggled to find regional supplies and resorted to expensive shipping for products from distant sources. I also noticed that existing tools were often unsuitable for small-scale and beginning farmers, including many female farmers who make up a majority of newcomers to the field. In response, I designed multifunctional, scalable, high-quality tools with inclusivity in mind, setting the foundation for Mindful Farmer. I also set out to design high tunnels that were more affordable and approachable for beginning farmers.

Why farming? What drew you to it as a livelihood?
I’ve been in the farming industry for over a decade, starting my journey with part-time beekeeping while working as an environmental scientist in Texas. My passion for sustainable land stewardship led me to transition into sustainable agriculture in Central Arkansas. During this time, I managed organic vegetable production, conducted research, and hosted workshops. Farming, for me, represents a way to positively impact our environment, communities, and health. Witnessing the challenges conventional farming practices posed to our world’s health and the growing emotional and physical disconnect between people, their food, and the natural world, I felt a deep calling to be a part of the solution by promoting sustainable, regenerative agriculture. Farming as a whole is a dying trade, with the average age of farmers increasing and many farms consolidating under corporations and foreign entities. I believe that when farms are owned and operated locally, they are more motivated to steward the land well. This not only benefits the land and the farmer but also the local economy, public health, and the community as a whole.

What are the barriers to being a young farmer, and how are you dealing with or overcoming them?
Just as with the housing market, inflated prices, high-interest rates, and corporate competition have put farms and raw land out of reach for most young and beginning farmers. My wife and I dreamed early on in our marriage of raising our future kids on a farm of our own. Our oldest is 10 now, and we still have a ways to go. Without starting with a large sum of money or family land, the path is extremely steep. There is also a bit of a Catch-22 in that the jobs that give you the most agricultural knowledge often offer little in the way of disposable income to save up for a farm of your own.

Agriculture, especially small-scale sustainable agriculture, is a high-risk and low-margin industry. Most young farmers bootstrap the best they can as financial resources are hard to come by, often growing on leased land or going the route of small and intensive production.

Keaton Sinclair & Alanna Carlson

Farm Name: AKreGeneration
Location: Treaty Six Territory at Fiske, Saskatchewan, Canada
Age: 32 and 33
Years farming:  5 years (20+ years experience as a 3rd generation farmer)

Tell us a bit about your farm: 
We are connected to our family farm and do grain cropping and custom grazing using regenerative agriculture practices that prioritize plant and soil health. AKreGeneration is committed to restoring the land for generations to come, acre by AKre. Using the seven generations principle, we remember whose who came before us, and our decisions are guided by the seven generations that will come after us. Some of the different practices we use include: diverse crop rotation, cover crops, intercropping, low chemical use, biological fertilizer and seed treatment, soil amendments, and livestock incorporation.

Why farming? What drew you to it as a livelihood?
We grew up farming with our families and thrived working on the land and being connected to and learning from the plants and animals and other farmers. We see the regenerative farm as a good way to listen to the land, improve the soil health, natural ecosystem, nutrient integrity of the plants, improve profitability and enhance our lifestyle. We both got educations and live in the city, but are drawn back to the land, and want to farm in a way that is sustainable for us and the ecosystem. 

What advice or insight do you have for young people interested in farming?
Go get your hands dirty and get experience working on the land, any land. You might not get much for clear answers if you directly ask for advice. Build relationships. Join groups and unions. Find farmers that will spend time talking or working with you so you can learn different practices and principles; everyone does things different. Listen to their stories and wisdom and follow what you think is aligned with your plan. Nothing happens in a hurry.

Nick DiDomenico & Marissa Pulaski (DAR) || Azuraye Wycoff (Yellow Barn Farm)

Farm Name: Elk Run Farm | Yellow Barn Farm
Location: Longmont Colorado
Age: All are 33
Time Farming: Elk Run since 2015, over 9 years; Yellow Barn since 2020. 
 

In 2015, Nick DiDomenico set out to farm 14 deeply degraded acres in the foothills near Lyons, Colorado. There was only enough well water to irrigate less than an acre of de-vegetated property. When Nick reached out to the NRCS for advice on how to restore the land to a farmable state, they advised him to find another piece of land; without irrigation potential, there was no documented way to revitalize the land. From that moment, Elk Run Farm became a living experiment in how to restore deeply degraded land in a semi-arid climate without irrigation.
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Today, Elk Run Farm is a thriving oasis in the high desert. Using passive water harvesting contour swales, 1000 trees and shrubs have been planted without irrigation, demonstrating a 79% survival rate across four years. What was a compact gravel parking lot is now five inches of rich topsoil that supports bioregional staple crops including blue corn, dry beans, amaranth, and grain sorghum. An average of 10 interns and residents eat 90% of a complete diet year round from the integrated forest garden, staple grain, and silvopasture systems on site.

In 2015, Drylands Agroecology Research (DAR) took over management of 14 deeply degraded acres on the Front Range of Colorado. The unprecedented regeneration of this land set the stage for our organization to grow.

Established in 1865, Yellow Barn Farms was originally Allen’s Farm– an international equestrian center operating as a large-scale event and boarding facility with over 50 horses and 100 riders. Yellow Barn revitalized the land for low-scale, high-quality food production, community-supported agriculture, and sustainability education. In partnership with Drylands Agroecology Research (DAR), Yellow Barn researches, implements, and practices regenerative farming, animal management, carbon sequestration, soil health, and dynamic/adaptable organizational structures.

For too long modern agriculture has ignored the call of the land, exploiting its gifts and decimating thousands of species — species integral to the health of our ecosystem — to serve a single one.

Now, it’s time to make amends with the land, its inhabitants, and its original stewards. By implementing circular, regenerative, closed-loop systems, we’re engaging in a reciprocal relationship with the land, offering services like composting, workshops, farm-to-tables, indigenous-led celebrations.

Why farming? What drew you to it as a livelihood?
This work is for the future. This work is so that our children can have a future. Not just any future, but a future worth getting up in the morning for. A future to take pride in, to savor, to relish, to enjoy the sweet victory of laughter that glows on late into a summer night. The taste of fruit off the vine. Together with music and the smell of warm food and smiles. That’s what we want our children to remember us by.

In the last 4 years, it has become even more clear to us the distress that so many are facing in this time. It has become even more clear what is at stake. It has become even more clear what we have to gain. But throughout, the original instructions continue to anchor us: take care of our home, this Earth; take care of each other.

The post Young Farmers Cultivating Change appeared first on Modern Farmer.

For young people interested in a career in agriculture, there can be many roadblocks in their path. The price of land continues to rise, grants and educational opportunities can be hard to come by and there’s a steep learning curve for folks who didn’t grow up in a farming family.  

As we kick off our coverage of Future Farmers, we wanted to hear directly from the people facing these impediments: the young farmers themselves. What issues are they really grappling with? Is our perception of the agricultural landscape accurate or do they see a different future playing out? 

Modern Farmer sat down with Sara Dent, co-founder of the Young Agrarians, to talk about issues young farmers face and some surprising ways we can start to solve them. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

Modern Farmer: It seems that there are a lot of issues that young farmers face when starting out: cost, a knowledge gap, land access and more. Do you see a common thread that ties these issues together or does it seem like we’ll have to tackle things individually?

Sara Dent: Well, just to start, I’d like to note that I’m on Tla’amin, Klahoose and Homalco Nation land. And I think this conversation is really fascinating, because if you look before colonization, and see how the land was stewarded and the abundance of systems, you look at how colonization came in that it used up a lot of the natural resources. It broke up the people and the ecology of the landscape and parceled it into the British land title system. And now we’re in 2024, we have market failure conditions for agriculture. And there’s a low tolerance at the institutional level for recognizing those market failure conditions. 

When I first started Young Agrarians, it was really driven by enabling coordination in the sector and addressing three main barriers, which is access to land, access to capital and access to knowledge.

The piece that we could start with was access to knowledge and facilitating that through farmer-to-farmer conversations. Farmers are the ones that train new farmers and support new people to get their feet underneath them. We started working on the land access piece in 2016, and now we’re trying to increase influence around the access to capital piece, advancing policy at a municipal, federal and provincial level. But policy is really like a living body. It’s composed of everybody. It’s composed of the eaters, it’s composed of the people growing the food, it’s composed of the banks [that] are lending it to the agricultural space, governments that are regulating agricultural space and creating the eligibility criteria that evaluates the whole sector.

And we are seeing a major decline in agriculture; the farming population in Canada is very low. Indeed, the last census showed that [of the 262,455 farm operators] fewer than 23,000 were under the age of 35.  

MF: So, if policy is the most, let’s say, unwieldy of the areas of influence you mentioned, what are the policy challenges?

SD: One of the big policy challenges for new farmers in the country is that, for a lot of governments, their norm is bigger industry, the policy is really driven by bigger industry, bigger farms. But when you look at new-generation people coming in, they have to start somewhere. So, we often talk about “scale-appropriate” policy.

For young people entering the sector, people that are actually accessing land, how do we support them? And then the people who are in that startup window of your one, two, year five? And they’re all starting at different scales. But we really try to focus with government on talking about scale appropriate. The old market analysis says “the bigger the better.” But a lot of big farms have huge debt margins, and if they have a bad year, it can be really damaging for them. However, what they have going for them is if they own the land, at least they have that equity in the land. 

You can see that smaller-scale models might actually be more effective financially than larger-scale models. New farms today have to figure out what their value proposition is, they have to be really super focused to figure out how they’re going to survive and what their niches are. So, in my mind, one of these big policy shifts is understanding that bigger isn’t always better. 

MF: You mentioned that there are three main areas that new farmers can struggle with: access to capital, knowledge and land. Let’s start with capital. Why is it more difficult for young people to get access to capital or loans?

SD: So, traditional lending is based on leveraging asset as collateral in order to get approved for a loan. If you look at new-gen farmers that are coming in, that don’t necessarily own the land, so they have nothing to offer up as collateral, and they aren’t able to access traditional lending. They can’t afford to buy the property, they can’t qualify for that mortgage and they can’t access the lending. 

What we’re working towards is getting the Canadian Agricultural Loans Act updated so that it allows character-based lending and working capital for farmers, so that they don’t have to own the land in order to access the lending program. There’s a really interesting loan program out of Quebec called FIRA, the originator of which, Paul, has done incredible work. It’s a land acquisition fund, and then they sell it back to the farmer as they get their business underneath them.

But there’s a big lending gap in the country today. For example, there’s no provincial lender in British Columbia that does character-based lending. In Ontario, the Fair Finance Fund has a national fund for BIPOC candidates, because those candidates weren’t able to get their loans from the traditional lenders. For example, First Nations farmers on reserve land, they aren’t the title holder of the land, so accessing that loan capital is just not possible. 

MF: Access to land feels tied into the access to capital issue, as well. Many people just can’t afford to purchase land. 

SD: Yeah, absolutely. Every year, farmland values are published across the country, looking at the per-acre rates, and I always find the per-acre rates a little disingenuous, because you might have a per acre average rate for an entire province, but if you’re trying to buy something in northern BC versus southern BC, it’s going to be completely different per acre. 

But for people who can’t acquire the land, leasing becomes an important option for new farmers who are just getting their feet underneath them—and, you know, making sure that farming is really for them, that they have a value proposition in the business that they’re operating, that they’re working at the right scale. So, we’re running our BC Land Matching Program, putting out resource guides for farmers across the country to help them navigate that leasing space. Because when you’re leasing, you’re at risk of losing the property if the owner sells. Or what if the owner dies, what if the kids inherit the land? How do you negotiate a lease that has all the right terms in it for your agricultural operation? That’s part of the educational resource work that Young Agrarians has been doing over the last decade, to try and prepare new entrants better for leasing properties. We learned a lot from looking at the US models, like Land for Good and California FarmLink. 

MF: And then lastly, there’s access to knowledge. Young Agrarians has an apprenticeship program to pair up new farmers with working mentors to help bridge that gap. 

SD: Yeah, we work with farmers who are doing agri-ecology, who want to do education and train. I think we’ve had something like 70 farms work in the program and a little over 80 young people go through the apprenticeship program, but in the big picture, we actually need about 500 of apprenticeships and farms per province. Right now, we’re running that program in Western Canada, British Columbia to Manitoba. And the question is, will that program work at a national offering? The complexity there is finding the right farms and then also having things like housing and being well suited to being educational. 

It’s really beautiful when somebody comes in and they have this life-changing experience and the light is turned on and they’re in love with farming and that’s their pathway forward. 

MF: It must be so gratifying when it feels like a match between apprentice and farm really clicks. 

SD: That’s why I still do this work. We get notes from people regularly, like someone who took a business boot camp course, and then you talk to them two years later, and they’re operating their business. And there’s a lot of beautiful stories that have come out of the network that definitely keeps the staff going. 

MF: We’ve talked about some community-level and grassroots solutions, like your apprenticeship program. But what might solve some of these issues at a federal or policy level? 

SD: I started doing some national policy writing stuff on behalf of the organization in 2021. And I started to understand that there were a lot of people at the institutional level who were interested in these issues, but the knowledge gap (from the policy makers) was significant. 

One thing I talk a lot about is eligibility criteria for new entrants. I think that’s really important, because new farmers are totally under invested in Canada and arguably also in the United States, in North America in general, perhaps even globally. They’re extremely under invested, so getting people to think about their eligibility criteria is really key.

I could be in a meeting with somebody working on eligibility criteria for a financial loan program and I’ll say ‘could you put a $50,000 greenhouse on your credit card and then wait to get reimbursed months later?’ And many people realize, ‘oh, yeah, that’s right. I can’t do that. I can’t just go out and buy all this equipment on my credit card and wait to get repaid for it.’

So, I’ve been addressing the elephant in the room by going directly for the eligibility criteria. Because without it, the farmers that look at this application form are just never going to be able to access your programs. 

MF: That sounds like a great entry point into this conversation. 

SD: Exactly. And some of the legislation needs to change, and a lot of it is just getting the right people at the table over and over to change the cultural conversation. 

This story is part of our Future Farmers series, highlighting the joys and hurdles of a career in agriculture today. You can read more of this series here. 

The post What Are the Big Issues for Young Farmers? We Asked Them appeared first on Modern Farmer.