In Montclair’s Third Ward is a tiny farm with big community value.

In the summertime, Montclair Community Farms transforms its less-than-10,000-square-foot lot into a space with something for everyone: a garden education program for children, a job training site for teens, and a pop-up produce market for Essex County residents.

“People really love being here,” said Lana Mustafa, executive director of Montclair Community Farms. “It’s really developed into something really beautiful and productive and community-oriented.”

On a breezy afternoon in early June, bunches of lettuce, bok choy, parsley, and garlic scapes begin to sprout and ripen. Some are even ready to harvest. Mustafa and her team are preparing inventory for their Monday farmers market, where several dozen shoppers use their SNAP or WIC benefits to buy fresh produce.

READ: How to apply for food aid and assistance in New Jersey

But Mustafa said serving Essex County residents isn’t easy when governments don’t consider urban farming as a viable solution to bring affordable, fresh food to food-insecure communities.

To do so, the state must confront its complicated history of farming and pair it with long-term municipal investments – steps that some argue New Jersey has yet to take.

“We need the state of New Jersey to take urban [agriculture] seriously,” said Mustafa.

Again and again, Mustafa says, red tape has hindered her small farm’s ability to serve its community. Because she doesn’t have at least five acres, her application to join the federal Senior Farmers’ Market Nutrition Program – which would have enabled her to accept food vouchers from low-income seniors – was denied four times. It was only after extensive advocacy with other community groups that the U.S. Department of Agriculture approved her application in 2023.

The high cost of a permit (up to $5,000 annually) forced her to end her composting program this spring.

“What happens to this food waste now that we can’t accept it? It has to go back to the landfill,” said Mustafa, whose farm collects more than 8,000 pounds of food waste annually.

Emilio Panasci, co-founder and executive director of the Urban Agriculture Cooperative, said it’s no coincidence that urban farms located in and around Essex County’s seven food deserts get little to no municipal support.

READ: How Essex County falls short on food access (and how you can help)

“Consumer food access mirrors our patterns of segregation in this country, and that is a political as well as economic choice,” said Panasci. “It’s no accident that outside of a few struggling small farms and pop-up markets in the South Ward of Newark, there is very little if any high-quality, fresh food options – and those are available at premium prices – in our neighboring Maplewood or South Orange.”

A photo of Montclair Community Farms’s garden beds, storage sheds, and community gathering area. Lana Mustafa said her farmer’s markets have grown from serving ten to hundreds of residents on federal food assistance programs in recent years. Photo by Kimberly Izar

Segregation in farming

While the practice of growing food can be traced back to Indigenous and Black agricultural practices, it was white farmers in New Jersey who benefitted the most from an agricultural economy built on slavery.

In the 1700s and 1800s, farmers in the “Garden State” relied on enslaved people to herd and slaughter animals, grow crops, maintain their meadowlands, and construct their farms. Even after slavery was abolished in New Jersey in 1866, white farmers created their own form of sharecropping called “cottaging,” where former enslaved Black people would provide labor in exchange for shelter and crops.

In her book Farming While Black, Leah Penniman details what happened next for farmers of color after Jim Crow and the passage of civil rights legislation.

“Urban farmers of color removed rubble, planted trees, installed vegetable beds, and built structures for community gatherings,” wrote Penniman about the rise of Black and Latinx farmers reviving agricultural traditions in the 1960s and 1970s.

Still, the legacy of segregation persists. A 2022 report from Rutgers University showed that urban farms in New Jersey tend to be clustered in areas with higher SNAP participation, where residents are more likely to be Black or Latinx. And in a county where white people make up less than one-third of the population, they own three-quarters of all urban farms in Essex County, according to a 2022 U.S. census of agriculture.

Fallon Davis, chair of the Black & Brown, Indigenous, Immigrant Farmers United (BIFU), said these inequities are “systemic by design.”

“We have to understand the system was never designed for Black and Brown people to live this long. It was never designed for us to thrive, survive, have families, and be these beautiful land beings.”

They explained the lack of support for urban farmers disproportionately targets Black neighborhoods in Essex County and perpetuates segregation.

“New Jersey hasn’t prioritized advocacy for urban farming, which would protect and feed Black folks,” they said.

Farming with no water on borrowed land

Several miles from Montclair Community Farms, Keven Porter’s farm in Newark has faced a slew of setbacks typical for urban farmers. For starters, he still lacks basic farming infrastructure – like running water.

More than a decade after establishing Rabbit Hole Farm, Porter is still trying to get the city of Newark to supply consistent water. For years, he’s had to call in favors from neighbors or ask the fire department to deliver water gallons.

“They’re just ignorant to the fact that we are a benefit,” said Porter, a Black farmer and Newark resident.

Porter and his partner co-founded Rabbit Hole Farm in 2013 through Newark’s Adopt-A-Lot program. Today, Rabbit Hole Farm is a 6,000-square-foot community hub in Newark’s South Ward that provides herbal education, wellness programs, and cooking classes to Newark residents, where more than half of its public school students are eligible for free or reduced lunch programs.

Porter’s farm faces another common challenge: he doesn’t own his farmland. Through Newark’s Adopt-A-Lot program, residents can use the city’s vacant lots but not own them, regardless of how long they’ve been tending to them.

Fallon Davis of BIFU also has a farm in Newark, run by their youth education nonprofit STEAM URBAN. They said Adopt-A-Lot is “a flawed system because [the city] can take it whenever they want.”

Both farmers have been working with the Trust for Public Land to explore how they can acquire their lots in Newark.

“If we figured out how to get people land ownership, if we taught people how to grow their own food, if we taught people how to advocate for themselves, it would single-handedly change our communities and they don’t want that,” Davis said.

Herbalist Yaquana Williams hosted a Juneteenth plant exploration class at Rabbit Hole Farm in June 2024. Image from Rabbit Hole Farm’s Instagram.

Solutions focused on permanency

Panasci of the Urban Agriculture Cooperative said that long-term solutions that allow for food growing and local food markets in an urban environment are key.

“Our zoning is different here. Our density is different. When you combine that with the fact that we lack a cohesive urban agriculture policy at the local level.. it’s very hard for a farmer or farmer’s market to maintain land over time and … build infrastructure on it,” said Panasci.

On Fridays, Panasci and his team prepare farm boxes filled with kale, escarole, mushrooms, honey, and eggs. His organization sources inventory from more than 30 growers across the state before the team distributes the boxes to schools, food pantries, hospitals, and senior centers with limited access to fresh foods.

Urban Agriculture Cooperative staff prepare its farm-to-family boxes one afternoon in June 2024. Photo by Nikki VIllafane

Panasci emphasized that municipal support is critical for urban farms, which are especially vulnerable to gentrification and displacement from developers.

“Farming is hard in general, but urban farming when there’s not necessarily a real city system for it… it’s almost set up to not work [and] to really undermine you,” said Panasci.

Urban Agriculture Cooperative distribution bags are loaded onto a pickup truck at their warehouse in Irvington, N.J. in June 2024. Photo by Nikki VIllafane

In the past few years, several bills have been introduced aimed at formalizing urban agriculture policies and sustaining the sector.

In January 2024, Assemblywoman Annette Quijano reintroduced a bill to establish an urban farming pilot program for emerging urban farms. Senator Teresa Ruiz and Senator Nellie Pou also reintroduced a bill that would establish an urban farming grant and loan program. Neither bill has made it out of committee for further consideration.

Jeanine Cava, executive director of the NJ Food Democracy Collaborative, points to the Massachusetts Healthy Food Incentive Program (HIP) as a potential model for what’s possible in New Jersey. This state-funded program reimburses SNAP users when they buy food from eligible HIP vendors.

“Right now, we don’t have dedicated state funding specifically for those kinds of incentives that incentivize people to buy locally produced food,” she said about the lack of permanent funding.

Davis of BIFU emphasized that Black and Brown farmers need to be at the center of any urban farming solution. BIFU’s statewide collective of 40 members plans to release their policy resolutions later this summer, which will include recommendations for land ownership and state funding for BIPOC farmers.

“We also need to give [politicians] some of the language of our ask… the community does need to do some work,” they said. “If you want your community to change, you gotta also advocate for your community.”

Learn more

Learn more about Montclair Community Farms and Rabbit Hole Farm’s upcoming programs and events.

You can also get involved with Urban Agriculture Cooperative, Black & Brown, Indigenous, Immigrant Farmers United, and NJ Food Democracy Collaborative via programming and advocacy opportunities.

The post Urban Farms are a Lifeline for Food-Insecure Residents. Will New Jersey Finally Make Them Permanent? appeared first on Modern Farmer.

They represent some of the oldest wines in North America, as the vines arrived in Italian immigrant Joe Busnardo’s suitcase in the late 1960s. Busnardo planted those Pinot Blanc and Trebbiano vines at Hester Creek Winery, and those vines are still producing fruit today. 

According to Kimberley Pylatuk, public relations coordinator at Hester Creek Estate Winery, Busnardo went through official channels. He grew up on a farm in Italy’s Veneto region; when he came to the Okanagan Valley in 1967, he saw a landscape that looked like home. He wanted to bring 10,000 vines, but the federal and provincial governments said no. They allowed him to import two cuttings of 26 separate varietals in 1968. Adding to the red tape, the government quarantined the vines before they released them. Luckily for Busnardo (and his cuttings), he was patient. 

Oliver Osoyoos Wine Country. Photography by Leila Kwok

By 1972, he had more than 120 different varietals planted on the property, all Vitis Vinifera, and long before the BC government offered grape growers $8,100 an acre to pull out the Labrusca grapes and plant vinifera—a move credited with changing the tide of the wine industry in the region.

“We consider British Columbia a new wine region. But when you look at the people that live here, there are French winemakers, Australians. People bring their knowledge, their legacies and their traditions growing grapes and making wine,” says Pylatuk. “People like Joe back in the 1960s started that. He knew how to make good wine, how to grow grapes and how to pick the right vineyard property. We look at the ancient Romans who knew to plant their vines on a hillside because of cooler drainage, and look at the spot Joe chose—it speaks to ancient traditional knowledge.” 

Oliver Osoyoos Wine Country. Photography by Leila Kwok

Busnardo sold the property in 1996 and winemakers have puzzled over where some of his vine originated since then. “We call block 13 Joe’s block. We know they came from Northern Italy, but we don’t know exactly what they are. We sent them to UC Davis and McGill University on more than one occasion and they’ve come back inconclusive,” says Pylatuk.

A few months ago, Hester Creek’s winemaker made the trek over to Vancouver Island to ask 90-year-old Busnardo directly. His response? “I’m taking that to my grave.” 

Oliver Osoyoos Wine Country. Photography by Leila Kwok

“Forty years ago, the original owners of Road 13 [Golden Mile Cellars then] identified their site as akin to what they had at home in Europe and probably thought, who’s going to check my suitcase for a couple of plants? Let’s take it back to the Okanagan Valley and see if it grows,” says Jennifer Busmann, executive director of Oliver Osoyoos Wine Country.

Lest you think Busnardo was the only vine smuggler to arrive on BC’s shores, rest assured other folks have gotten around customs laws as well. According to Alfredo Jop, assistant guest experiences manager at Road 13 Vineyards, the Serwo family brought German vines carefully wrapped in a damp towel in their luggage when they moved from Germany (where they grew grapes) to Canada in the late 1960s. There are also Chenin Blanc vines around the region that can be traced to other suitcases and intrepid travellers. 

Oliver Osoyoos Wine Country. Photography by Leila Kwok

The variability in growing seasons and diverse micro-climates of the Okanagan Valley allow many varietals from around the globe to flourish. As a result, many of the 200-plus wineries in the region have similar luggage lore. Okanagan winemaking is not just a story of pioneering farming practices but of immigrants journeying to new homes with a piece of their heritage tucked into their luggage. 

Visionary immigrants like Busnardo and the Serwo family may not have understood what they were starting at the time, but they planted the seed that grew into a wine region that produces half of British Columbia’s award-winning wines across almost 50 wineries. Busmann adds, “I believe that vision from those growers and winery owners set us on our path.” 

The post Packing Light appeared first on Modern Farmer.

“I started from a young age, when I was about six years old,” says Ayvar de la Cruz, recalling her earliest experiences of harvesting salt from the area known in the vicinity as Las Salinas. “I began with my parents, then continued with my brothers, then with my children from when they were eight.”

Quintina Ayvar de la Cruz. Photography by Leia Marasovich.

The work of harvesting usually begins in February or March and carries on for three or four months, depending on the weather. The members of the Ayvar de la Cruz family are the only remaining residents of the region to continue harvesting salt in the traditional way, which is done completely by hand with the help of tools made only from local, natural materials, rather than relying on modern equipment. It begins by mixing a rustic concrete from sand and clay to form shallow square basins at the edge of the lagoon. Those lagoons are then filled with both freshwater and saltwater, before lime (in its mineral powder form) is added to the small pools to help separate out the salt from the water. A special rake called a tarecua facilitates this process. There, the mixture dries in the sun over the next five or so days and the salt is collected once the water has evaporated. 

“We start at six in the morning,” says Ayvar de la Cruz. “We start early because when it’s cool, you can move forward without getting so tired. At midday, the heat becomes very strong.” A break is taken from around 11:00 AM to 4:00 PM. When the sun is less intense, the work continues until all the light is gone, around eight in the evening. 

The days are long and the work is hard, but Ayvar de la Cruz focuses on the experience of being in this extraordinary environment. “You feel the fresh air and cool water of the mangroves. It is a feeling of freedom and tranquility.” 

The salt pools where Quintina Ayvar de la Cruz harvests. Photography by Leia Marasovich.

At a distance of 90 years or so, she can still describe with impressive clarity the sensations of that first encounter with the salt flats—the feeling of being carried in her father’s arms and on the back of a donkey as they made the journey there and, later, to the closest town, Petatlán, to sell the salt, as well as its dazzling whiteness when arranged into a mound across mats made of palm fronds after harvesting. 

Over the last decade, all other salt producers in the area have modernized the process. One of the most significant changes has been the implementation of plastic sheets as the base for the drying areas, which makes production go more quickly.  

“Salt made using plastic can be sold for much cheaper and it hurts our local market,” says Ayvar de la Cruz’s son, Don Alejandro. “We don’t market our salt as artisanal, but everyone knows around here that we’re the only ones doing it the natural way.” 

Don Alejandro (left) holds the salt his family produces. Photography by Elena Valeriote.

Ayvar de la Cruz laments that the salt flats are now permeated with a “plastic smell” and her son notes that workers often leave their equipment in the lagoon out of season and, when hurricanes hit the coast, plastic pieces can end up elsewhere, endangering local wildlife. The surrounding mangroves are a key habitat for a diverse array of plants and animals, including shrimp, fish, crabs, pink herons, deer and coati (a kind of badger), as well as a type of tree known colloquially as salado (“salty”) because it survives in saltwater. 

In 2006, the Ayvar de la Cruz family was contacted by a new hospitality business called Playa Viva. Its owner, David Leventhal, was planning to construct a resort nearby founded on the principles of regenerative tourism, and he was interested in learning about the local ecosystems and community. Playa Viva hoped that collaborating with residents such as Ayvar de la Cruz could help create a space that would allow visitors to experience the beauty of this stretch of the Mexican coast, while also having a positive social and environmental impact that would linger longer than they would. 

In 2013, Playa Viva instituted the Regenerative Trust, with environmental and social goals that range from restoring ecosystems to raising endangered species for release and donating school supplies to children. Two percent of all earnings from guest reservations are channeled into these local programs.

Salt for sale. Photography by Elena Valeriote.

One of the primary programs funded by the Regenerative Trust is as ReSiMar—short for “Regenerating from Sierra to Mar”—which refers to its area of focus, between the Sierra Madre Mountain Range and the Pacific Ocean. Through ReSiMar, Playa Viva aims to regenerate the entire ecosystem of this watershed. Sourcing ingredients from sustainable fisheries and other small businesses that depend on the watershed, like that of the Ayvar de la Cruz family, is part of this effort. 

Playa Viva committed to buying the salt for its restaurant exclusively from the Ayvar de la Cruz family and, when it started welcoming guests to Juluchuca a few years later, it also offered tours of Las Salinas together during the salt harvest season. This relationship with Playa Viva has been a vital source of support in the family’s efforts to carry on harvesting salt as their ancestors did and it has given them a chance to share their work with foreigners for the first time. 

A mural of Ayvar de la Cruz in her hometown. Photography by Elena Valeriote.

ReSiMar also records vital information about the watershed to understand the scope of their impact and determine which aspects need the most attention. In 2023, the ReSiMar team tracked water quality, focusing on pollution in the form of plastic packaging and glass bottles. From there, they identified a need for improved ecological education and recycling programs, so they focused on bringing students to the watershed and establishing a town community center. “Water studies provide essential baseline data on the quality and quantity of water during both the rainy and dry seasons,” says Levanthal. “We then compare this data year after year to observe changes.”

With nearly a century of memories to draw on from living in this part of the Guerrero region along the Pacific coast, Ayvar de la Cruz also holds within her the history of this place. She knows the plants and animals that are at home in this unique tropical ecosystem, the natural rhythms of the seasons and how to work with them to harvest salt in a way that the local community has practiced for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. For this reason, it is all the more striking that, in 2024, for the first time in Ayvar de la Cruz’s long life, unusual weather patterns caused a rupture in the timeline of this historic tradition. 

“Every year, there is a rainy season and the lagoon fills. Then it empties and the salt flats are left dry, ready to be worked. It’s a natural cycle that always happens,” says Alejandro Ayvar, the youngest of Ayvar de la Cruz’s six sons. He and his brothers, along with their three sisters, have assisted their mother with the salt harvest on and off since their childhood. “This season, the lagoon did not empty adequately and the areas where salt is produced did not get dry enough.” 

Ayvar de la Cruz and family. Photography by Leia Marasovich.

The unseasonably late rains that caused the local estuary system to overflow and Las Salinas to flood during the normal harvest time is just one example of the consequences of the climate crisis as they are being experienced in this part of the world. 

“It’s not the same anymore,” Ayvar de la Cruz says of the local climate in recent years and how this affects the salt flats. “The temperature of the water has changed a lot and it takes more time to harvest the salt.”

As the climate changes and the younger generations of the Ayvar de la Cruz family find more financially stable prospects in other fields of work, the future of this tradition remains uncertain, but Ayvar de la Cruz’s legacy will not soon be forgotten. Her singular connection with this local environment and her commitment to this historic way of harvesting salt is commemorated in a mural on a building near Las Salinas, painted by a visiting artist about six years ago. 

There is value, too, in simply having a conversation about salt, considering its place of origin and the people who harvested it. For as challenging as it can be to create systems that preserve our ancient food practices, it is easy to at least preserve the memory of them. 

“Thank you for coming to make me happy,” Ayvar de la Cruz says at the end of the interview. “To remember is to live again.” 

All interviews have been translated from Spanish into English with the assistance of Ximena Rodriguez, Juan Carlos “Johnny” Solis and David Leventhal.

The post Meet the 97-Year-Old Salt-Harvesting Matriarch appeared first on Modern Farmer.

In 1992, Jeff Ditzenberger walked into an abandoned building near his farm in Monroe, Wisconsin and lit it on fire. His intent was that he wanted to die in there, but as the building continued to go up in flames, he changed his mind and escaped the blaze. 

Later charged with arson, he was able to get help in a psychiatric ward, where he was able to talk without judgment. However, with those he knew, Ditzenberger found it less embarrassing to have a felony on his record than to admit that he was attempting suicide, and he kept it a secret for years. 

In 2014, Ditzenberger, wrote a blog post about those moments for the Wisconsin Farm Bureau to bring awareness to his and others’ struggles. It went viral. A year later, he started an informal support group called TUG.S, which stands for Talking, Understanding, Growing, Supporting. The name was inspired by his time in the Navy on a large displacement ship, where, when things went awry, they would call in a small tugboat for help. He thought: “Why can’t life be like that?”

Now a community nonprofit with a bricks-and-mortar location in Monroe, TUGS works directly with individuals and community groups that emphasize peer connection and support, letting them know that “it’s OK not to be OK.” Due to media attention over the years, the nonprofit receives calls for peer support not just from Wisconsin but from all over the world. 

“Farmers have always been stoic, prideful people that don’t want to talk about stuff,” says Ditzenberger. “The stigma around mental health is what is causing us to not have the conversation. We all need that tugboat that we can call, that can throw a life preserver and pull us to shore safely.”

Part of the work of TUGS is also mental health training to better understand how to handle situations where someone might be struggling. “You don’t have to have a BS behind your name to help people in need; you just need to be able to ask questions.”

Photography via Shutterstock.

At risk

According to the National Rural Health Association, farmers are 3.5 times more likely to die by suicide than the general population. A recent CDC study of occupational suicide risk also found that male farmers, ranchers and other agricultural managers had a suicide rate more than 50 percent higher than the overall suicide rate of men in all surveyed occupations.

Farming and ranching are physically and emotionally demanding jobs with high risks of chronic stress, anxiety and depression due to a number of challenging factors—many out of their control—including extreme weather, outbreaks of pests and diseases and market volatility. Many deal with the stresses of potentially losing farms that have been in their family for generations. 

With all of these pressures, there are also several barriers to getting help, including stigma and many producers feeling like they should be able to handle the situation themselves. Along with a lack of anonymity in small towns, there’s also often a lack of access to proper providers or support in rural areas. According to a survey from the American Farm Bureau Federation, 46 percent of farmers and farmworkers surveyed said it was difficult to access a therapist or counselor in their local communities. The rest of the survey also revealed barriers due to cost prohibitiveness of treatment and embarrassment. 

As a response, Ditzenberger’s organization is one of many across the US that has emerged to provide mental health training and peer-to-peer support in person and online.

Seeds of Wellbeing at the 2023 AgrAbility conference.

Prioritizing peer-to-peer

In January, the Farm Family Wellness Alliance, a coalition of organizations including the American Farm Bureau, announced the availability of Togetherall, an anonymous, clinically moderated online peer-to-peer community with a special section for farmers and ranchers. Typically expensive, the alliance came together to make Togetherall free for farm country.

“In a peer-to-peer community, you seek that sense of belonging and that sense of being able to express yourself without judgment,” says Jessica Cabrera, staff lead for the American Farm Bureau’s Farm State of Mind campaign. 

Clinicians monitor posts 24-7 and are available to talk privately if necessary. If support needs to be escalated, they will be referred to someone who specializes in agricultural support. 

There are also courses for self-assessment, as well as access to services outside the platform, including consultants that handle legal, financial, childcare and many other concerns. “It’s important to keep working to break the stigma around mental health challenges and just encourage people to reach out for help,” says Cabrera, who adds that the American Farm Bureau has already seen a 22-percent shift in farmers being more comfortable talking about mental health. 

Learning to speak the language

Learning to take on the mental health challenges of farmers is a specialized and intricate process. In 2003, a group of rural nurses formed AgriSafe to offer that training to health-care providers. 

“People in ag tell us that they don’t want to have to explain their work,” says Tara Haskins, who oversees Agrisafe’s Total Farm Health initiative and mental health programming. “They don’t need to get advice to take a couple [of] weeks off, which is self-defeating.” The organization created training that gives health-care professionals a peek into the agriculture field and the challenges that come with it. They can then better understand what drives the mental health crisis.

The nonprofit has since partnered with the University of Kentucky to develop agriculture-centric training in QPR (Question, Persuade, Refer), a suicide prevention training program. AgriSafe has done the training on webinars with more than 2,000 people all over the US and Canada. 

Haskins says anyone who is connected with somebody in agriculture could benefit from the program. People are often afraid they might say the wrong thing to someone who is suicidal, but training helps develop those skills. She also says farmers they’ve interviewed who either attempted suicide or thought about it wished for someone to reach out. 

A workshop held by Seeds of Wellbeing.

Cultivating community

“Ultimately, it’s about preventing suicide, but we don’t want to wait until that happens. We want to go all the way upstream, and that takes both skill and effort,” says Dr. Thao Le.

Le is the project director for Seeds of Wellbeing (SOW), a farmer wellness initiative through the University of Hawai’i Manoa, which provides peer-to-peer support through a growing Ag Mentor training program. 

The program, which started more than two years ago, began with a survey of more than 400 farmers across the archipelago to study the state of mental health in Hawai’i’s agriculture scene. The results that came back showed that many were under a lot of pressure, with one third suffering from depression. 

Le wanted to start a project that builds relationships and creates safe spaces for that to unfold.

The program has 62 mentors across the Hawaiian Islands. The mentors can be reached individually, but they also hold regular meetings on their respective islands for community workdays and potlucks. There is also an additional Ag Navigators program that requires navigators to visit two farms monthly for six months to build relationships.

Le says the program allows the mentors to become role models with their willingness to be open and vulnerable. “[This] is the crisis of our time,” says Le. “We really do need a solution to help build community and leaders to help us navigate.”

“Everybody struggles with basic needs, the frustration to navigate the bureaucracy, policy and legislation, the crazy financial restraints,” says Le.

Le is waiting to hear about a $2.5-million federal grant from the Department of Health and Human Services to fund the next three years, which involves not just training for farmers but also first responders.

“We need to have more innovative ways to do this, because we will never have enough mental health professionals; there [are] never going to be enough first responders. Each of us needs to cultivate being a place of refuge for other people.”

The post Farmers Face a Mental Health Crisis. Talking to Others in the Industry Can Help appeared first on Modern Farmer.

Kiawah River is an “agrihood”—a planned community with a working farm at its center. Residents may work or volunteer at the farm, or they may participate in a residents CSA program or visit their own farmer’s market. Kiawah River worked with established farms to begin its agrihood, building a community around preexisting farmland. Its farm partners include fourth-generation Freeman Farms and second-generation Rosebank Farms, along with several others.

Other agrihoods establish farms as central hubs when planning the community. Chickahominy Falls is located outside of Richmond, VA, in what is known as the French hay district, an area that has traditionally been farmland. The agrihood there is for residents 55 and over, and 10-acre Woodside Farms provides a gathering space, volunteer and working opportunities and a CSA.

Tiny Timbers is a small agrihood in St. Croix Falls, WI, a small city on the border near Minneapolis, MN. Its agrihood model uses tiny homes as the residences, with 11 families currently sharing the responsibilities of gardening and caring for the chickens, honey bees and orchards. The community was started by a husband-and-wife team, inspired by a passion for tiny homes and good food. They broke ground on their first houses in the spring of 2023, and they will complete their agrihood with 16 homes.

“Unlike many agrihoods that have a farmer on the edge of the development, ours is all resident operated,” says Melissa Jones, founder of Tiny Timbers. “So, they are personally getting their hands dirty.”

The Tiny Timbers agrihood model uses “tiny homes” as the residences. (Photo courtesy of Tiny Timbers)

Agrihoods are not a new phenomenon, but their presence has grown in the United States in recent years. According to a report by the Urban Land Institute, in 2018, there were more than 200 agrihoods in 28 states. The concept may seem similar to a commune, but agrihoods are not based around shared politics or religion but focus on fresh food and strong communities. Participation requirements on the farms vary. Many agrihoods offer volunteer opportunities on the farm for residents, but they do not require any participation in farming.

The Urban Land Institute considers agrihoods a valuable trend, helping to solve several issues within the US housing market. With 73 percent of Americans considering access to fresh and healthy food a priority, agrihood living puts residents in the middle of healthy food production. An agrihood’s investment in farmland can help save a family farm and keep more farmland in production. Revenue from the sales of agrihood properties can directly support farms when an agrihood is established, and even working farms near agrihoods that are not involved in the communities can see the value of their farmland rise when an agrihood is built nearby. Building a community around a farm will also save farmers shipping costs and reduce greenhouse gas emissions as produce no longer needs to be transported over long distances.

The agrihood model may harken back to communes or even colonial villages, but if you find yourself wondering “why now?”—the answer may be as simple as reliable access to great food.

“The people here are so kind and fun,” says Danna Berg, a resident of Kiawah River who moved to the agrihood from St. Petersburg, FL in 2021. “I had heard of an agrihood before, but I wasn’t really familiar with the concept. When I stepped foot on the property, I knew it was for me.”

Berg volunteers in the gardens and on the farm at Kiawah River. Every resident we spoke to indicated that the fresh produce was a huge part of the appeal of Kiawah River, from the honey and eggs to the fresh produce and goat’s milk. 

Kiawah River worked with established farms to begin its agrihood outside Charleston, South Carolina. (Photo courtesy of Kiawah River)

In some ways, agrihood living is an idealized version of farm life. At many agrihoods, you won’t have to shovel waste or dig in the dirt if you don’t want to, but you can still enjoy the benefits of local, organic produce grown right outside your door. Even when the residents are involved in the running of the farm, an agrihood can still present a more appealing option than beginning a farm on your own.

Those interested in growing their own food to any scale need to invest in farmland, and access to suitable and affordable farmland is the greatest barrier to young farmers getting started. In an agrihood, access to the land is guaranteed and does not come with the risks of beginning a new family farm.

“A lot of people want to live a healthier lifestyle and be involved with where their food comes from,” says Jones. “But farming can be a lonely, overwhelming task. So, having a community where people can learn from each other, tackle the areas of the agrihood they are skilled in, it helps everyone have a healthier, more fulfilling existence—and make friendships along the way.”

“The eggs are simply amazing,” says Lindsay Cobb. She and her husband Charlie moved to Kiawah River in 2021. When they moved, they had not heard of an agrihood, but they loved the idea of living near a farm and being part of the community events that Kiawah River hosts. 

“Access to the fresh vegetables is so unique,” Cobb adds. For farmers, access to fresh vegetables may be a given. But for many Americans, the opportunity to enjoy fresh produce is indeed unique. According to the Urban Land Institute report, 16 percent of Americans say that fresh food is not available in their communities.

The majority of agrihoods in the US today are marketed towards a more affluent demographic, with the average home price in an agrihood around $400,000. However, the model can be applied to lower-income housing and more urban developments. Agrihoods opening in Santa Clara, CA and Denver, CO are committed to offering affordable housing as part of their planned community. At Tiny Timbers, the tiny house model allows most residents to own their homes debt free.

Eleven families currently share the responsibilities of gardening and caring for chickens and honeybees at Tiny Timbers in St. Croix Falls, WI. (Photo courtesy of Tiny Timbers)

The farms around which agrihoods center face the same challenges as any other agricultural establishment. They can be adversely affected by weather, pests and predators, impacting their ability to supply the community. Some agrihood farms choose to focus on vegetable production to avoid the smells and noises of livestock, which can limit diversity of agrihood-produced goods. 

As they address housing needs in a local area, provide healthy food to residents and foster a connection between people and food production, agrihoods seem to offer solutions to numerous challenges. And while a healthy diet often brings residents to an agrihood, residents say that community is what makes them love agrihood living.

“The community here is top notch,” explains Barbara Viverito, who has lived at Kiawah River agrihood since August of 2020. “I have never seen a group of people so friendly.”

While they come in all shapes and sizes, the future of agrihoods may be with individuals like Melissa and Shane Jones at Tiny Timbers. Five years after purchasing a plot of land in 2017, they decided to do something more than just homestead for themselves.

“We have a tiny cabin that we love,” says Melissa Jones, “and my husband has a passion for homesteading—so why not combine those things and create a place where people can live lightly, often debt free, and have the ability to grow healthy, organic food? They can live a healthier lifestyle and be around people that have similar interests.”

The post Moving into the Agrihood appeared first on Modern Farmer.

Almost 9 in 10 Americans eat turkey during this festive meal, whether it’s roasted, deep-fried, grilled or cooked in any other way for the occasion.

You might believe it’s because of what the Pilgrims, a year after they landed in what’s now the state of Massachusetts, and their Indigenous Wampanoag guests ate during their first thanksgiving feast in 1621. Or that it’s because turkey is originally from the Americas.

But it has more to do with how Americans observed the holiday in the late 1800s than which poultry the Pilgrims ate while celebrating their bounty in 1621.

Did they or didn’t they eat it?

The only firsthand record of what the Pilgrims ate at the first thanksgiving feast comes from Edward Winslow. He noted that the Wampanoag leader, Massasoit, arrived with 90 men, and the two communities feasted together for three days.

Winslow wrote little about the menu, aside from mentioning five deer that the Wampanoag brought and that the meal included “fowle,” which could have been any number of wild birds found in the area, including ducks, geese and turkeys.

Historians do know that important ingredients of today’s traditional dishes were not available during that first Thanksgiving.

That includes potatoes and green beans. The likely absence of wheat flour and the scarcity of sugar in New England at the time ruled out pumpkin pie and cranberry sauce. Some sort of squash, a staple of Native American diets, was almost certainly served, along with corn and shellfish.

A resurrected tradition

Historians like me who have studied the history of food have found that most modern Thanksgiving traditions began in the mid-19th century, more than two centuries after the Pilgrims’ first harvest celebration.

The reinvention of the Pilgrims’ celebration as a national holiday was largely the work of Sarah Hale. Born in New Hampshire in 1784, as a young widow she published poetry to earn a living. Most notably, she wrote the nursery rhyme “Mary Had a Little Lamb.”

In 1837, Hale became the editor of the popular magazine Godey’s Lady’s Book. Fiercely religious and family-focused, it crusaded for the creation of an annual national holiday of “Thanksgiving and Praise” commemorating the Pilgrims’ thanksgiving feast.

Hale and her colleagues leaned on 1621 lore for historical justification. Like many of her contemporaries, she assumed the Pilgrims ate turkey at their first feast because of the abundance of edible wild turkeys in New England.

This campaign took decades, partly due to a lack of enthusiasm among white Southerners. Many of them considered an earlier celebration among Virginia colonists in honor of supply ships that arrived at Jamestown in 1610 to be the more important precedent.

The absence of Southerners serving in Congress during the Civil War enabled President Abraham Lincoln to declare Thanksgiving a national holiday in 1863.

Turkey marketing campaign

Godey’s, along with other media, embraced the holiday, packing their pages with recipes from New England and menus that prominently featured turkey.

“We dare say most of the Thanksgiving will take the form of gastronomic pleasure,” Georgia’s Augusta Chronicle predicted in 1882. “Every person who can afford turkey or procure it will sacrifice the noble American fowl to-day.”

A second one is that turkey is also practical for serving to a large crowd. Turkeys are bigger than other birds raised or hunted for their meat, and it’s cheaper to produce a turkey than a cow or pig.

The bird’s attributes led Europeans to incorporate turkeys into their diets following their colonization of the Americas. In England, King Henry VIII regularly enjoyed turkey on Christmas day a century before the Pilgrims’ feast.

Christmas connection

The bird cemented its position as the favored Christmas dish in England in the mid-19th century.

One reason for this was that Ebenezer Scrooge in Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” sought redemption by replacing the impoverished Cratchit family’s meager goose with an enormous turkey.

Published in 1843, Dickens’ instantly best-selling depiction of the prayerful family meal would soon inspire Hale’s idealized Thanksgiving.

Although the historical record is hazy, I do think it’s possible that the Pilgrims ate turkey in 1621. It certainly was served at celebrations in New England throughout the colonial period.

Troy Bickham is a Professor of History at Texas A&M University.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The post Why is Turkey the Main Dish on Thanksgiving? appeared first on Modern Farmer.

This is the story that guests at one haunted farm are told when they visit during the Halloween season. Another haunted farm attraction in Alabama promises to bring you closer to the “creatures and killers” of the farm. Another, in South Carolina, invites you to its “desolate farm” where the inhabitants are hoping “to make you this year’s harvest!”

Haunted farm attractions are not homogenous—some are real working farms that incorporate haunted attractions into their seasonal offerings as a way to supplement farm revenue and connect with the community. 

Other haunted farm attractions aren’t farms at all but haunted house businesses that use the idea of a haunted farm to inspire terror. The popularity of this concept is more than a fun seasonal activity, though. It also engages with longstanding narratives about rurality, performing them for a fearful audience.

Haunted houses and cultivating screams

Growing up a theater kid, it wasn’t hard for Betty Aquino to fall in love with farm haunted houses. After college, she found herself working for a haunted house attraction on a farm as a make-up artist. Aquino went on to do her graduate work at George Mason University and completed her thesis work on how haunted house attractions on farms rely on rural tropes that can be both empowering and problematic.

For small farms that face pressures from big agriculture and high land prices, using things such as haunted house attractions to supplement income is a way to adapt. But, in some cases, to make it work, haunted farmhouses often rely on the stereotypes of the rural “other”—the idea that whatever happens on a farm after dark is scary and unknown.

Haunted houses are more story driven than other farm attractions such as corn mazes or pumpkin picking, often relying on a pre-constructed narrative. Capitalism is a driving force in these narratives, says Aquino, informing depictions of gender, race and class and occasionally referencing a community’s own trauma. In one farm haunt she visited in Michigan, Aquino felt that what she saw was representative of the automobile industry’s history in the state. The villain in the story comes to the town and promises jobs, only to use dark magic against the town instead.

“One of their haunts has this narrative of a town that has lost its industry,” says Aquino. “And it is essentially this ghost town that’s very much a mirror of many towns in Michigan.”

The “ghost town” narrative was one Aquino saw a lot during her field research—as was “hillbilly horror.”

“I think those narratives are very reflective of their near-death experiences as farms,” says Aquino. “And they’ve had to pivot and rebuild their businesses.”

A haunted attraction that was once a farm. (Photography from Shutterstock)

The benefits of haunted houses

Although haunted houses existed in some form or another long before this, historian David Skal argues that the popularity of haunted houses in general grew significantly after Disney opened the Haunted Mansion attraction in 1969.

As we wrote a few years back, Halloween is a holiday with deep agricultural roots. It marks both the end of the harvest season and a time of year when the connection to the spirit world is the strongest. Opening haunted houses on farms is a natural extension of this connection.

Perhaps thanks to the associations between Halloween and agriculture, many farms have had success introducing haunted farm attractions into their business. According to the USDA, between 2002 and 2017, agritourism revenue more than tripled. This figure represents more than Halloween attractions, but the fall season is a big draw for a lot of farms.

Kevin McCall, managing partner of McCall’s Pumpkin Patch in Moriarty, New Mexico, says that adding haunted attractions to the farm’s offerings has been a helpful source of revenue. The farm started by introducing a haunted hayride, but “it’s hard to haunt on a hayride,” he says. Then it added a haunted corn maze with about 50 actors and props. In the 2000s, the farm converted its cattle barn into a haunted barn attraction. It’s woven all together with the fictional narrative of a farmer who, in response to an interstate being built through the farm, begins slaughtering tourists.

McCall’s Pumpkin Patch draws visitors from Albuquerque and Santa Fe, and this season, it sold out. This showcases the significant benefit that Halloween haunts can have for farms—McCall says the business it gets from haunting allows more freedom and security with the agricultural side of the business. 

“It’s allowed us to be a very different type of farmer,” says McCall. 

A person dressed up for Halloween on the farm. (Photography from Shutterstock)

The future of haunted farm attractions

In Rural Remix’s new podcast, “The Rural Horror Picture Show,” hosts Susannah Broun and Anya Petrone Slepyan talk about classic films in the folk horror genre and how depictions in horror films such as “Deliverance” and “The Hills Have Eyes” portray rural spaces as scary places where horrors are born. They point out that this narrative has old roots in popular culture. 

When it comes to the future of haunted house attractions on farms, Aquino concludes that these haunts are a space of evolving rural identity. 

As a genre, she says, horror has the ability to critique and interrogate many institutions and ideas. Rural communities are also capable of challenging the status quo—through things such as unions and initiatives such as the Black Appalachian Coalition, which works to fight the erasure of Black people from narratives about Appalachia. Rural haunts can be a space to question tropes about rurality.  

“I hope that there is a return to radical roots in rural spaces,” says Aquino, “and that we continue to see more diversity in the narratives and the people working at these places.” 

Halloween and agriculture have always been linked, and seasonal haunts give us the opportunity to understand that connection in today’s context.

The post The Haunting of the Farm appeared first on Modern Farmer.

Photography courtesy of author.

In operation since 2013, Horchatería Vida is the brainchild of Vicenta Bertomeu Dominica (68), who started the business to ensure a consistent market for the tiger nuts grown by her husband, Vicente Alonso Esteve (74). What began as a single stall outside of their 1880 farmhouse—where Esteve grew up—has evolved into a full-service restaurant. 

Terracotta in color, tiger nuts owe their name to the raised stripes on their surface. These sweet, fibrous tubers, which are high in magnesium, potassium and vitamins C and E, have been heralded as a superfood, but they’ve long been popular in Valencia. 

Every year, Vicente uses half of his two hectares of land to produce tiger nuts, while the other half lies fallow for a year. When harvested, the total weight of the tubers is around 1,300 kilograms (2,870 pounds), but after they have been washed and dried and debris is removed from the haul, there are about 600 kg (1,320 lb) of usable root vegetables. 

Chufa plants in the field. Photography by Shutterstock.

In recent years, Vicente has noticed diminishing harvests. “My initial harvest used to weigh 1,700 kg (3,750 pounds), but that’s no longer the case,” he says. Vicente suspects that the treated water he now uses in combination with the cleaner, but costlier river water, which has to be pumped out of the river and transported to his farm, could be detrimental to his yield. “The treated water is free, but I don’t like using it, because there are contaminants in it that are not good for the harvest,” he says. “The population of Valencia has grown, and there’s less drinking water available for agriculture. The system forced me to change what I was doing.” Increased temperatures are also causing tiger nut plants to die earlier, but little can be done to adapt to these conditions other than watering the crop more regularly, according to Vicente.

Local tiger nuts have also been suffering from xufa yellow dwarf virus. Following research by Instituto Valenciano de Investigaciones Agrarias, Universidad Católica de Valencia San Vicente Mártir and Universitat Politècnica de València, experts have recommended the quarantine of imported tiger nuts from Africa, as this is where the virus is thought to have come from. The Consejo Regulador Denominación de Origen Chufa de Valencia offers tiger nut certification to confirm the Valencian origin. 

The life cycle of tiger nut plants is six to seven months. Vicente sows the tiger nuts with a mechanical seeding machine in April, and it typically takes 10 days for them to germinate. In mid-November, once the plant has dried out, it is burned and the harvest begins. Vicente doesn’t have any employees, but every year he contracts a man with a harvester to extract the tubers. “We use machinery to harvest four or five bushels a day,” says Vicente. 

The tiger nuts are then washed and laid to dry in warehouses from December to April. There, they are  moved daily to reduce their water content and concentrate their sugars, eliminating the risk of fermentation. “In May, we begin using the tiger nuts from the previous year,” says Vicenta. “Freshly picked tiger nuts aren’t sweet. They mature when dried.” 

Photography courtesy of author.

Vicenta makes her horchata in a processing facility off-site, as the couple doesn’t have the funds to invest in the expensive machinery required. The dried tiger nuts are soaked for around 12 hours before being turned into a paste, which is then squeezed and sieved to separate the pulp from the juice. Water is then added to the tiger nut juice, and sugar is an optional sweetener. “From one kilo of dried tiger nuts, you can make five to six liters of horchata,” says Vicente. As no preservatives are used, the shelf life is just two to three days.

Vicente also notes the increased number of abandoned fields in the area, something that is becoming more and more common in their area. Vicente’s family has been farming for more than 100 years, and they have built a loyal customer base since opening their horchatería. Despite the popularity of the business, the future of both the horchatería and Vicente’s farm is uncertain. The couple’s three children currently have no concrete plans to continue the business, but Vicente hopes that at least one of his children will grow tiger nuts in the future. “Sowing the tubers and then finding someone with a harvester to collect them isn’t too much work, so perhaps they’ll keep it up.”

The post Meet the Spaniards Turning Tiger Nuts Into Horchata appeared first on Modern Farmer.

These are scenes from the Iluyanwa Yam Festival. Celebrations of culture, community and life, yam festivals occur throughout West Africa. The festivals are essential events; they mark the passing of another season, honor religious offerings and provide a cultural focal point for a whole town to converge around. It’s a community celebration, supported by local organizations or governments, bringing together dozens, hundreds or even thousands of people every year—all to celebrate the humble yam.  

A scene from the Asogli Yam Festival in Ghana. (Photo courtesy of Ghana Broadcasting Corporation)

Frequently called the “yam belt,” West Africa accounts for 94% of the world’s yam production, with Nigeria alone producing about 50 million tonnes annually, more than two-thirds of the global yam crop. The cultivation of yams began in the region some 11,000 years ago, as a result of a cultural interaction between grain-crop agriculturalists who were being forced southward by the progressive desiccation of the Sahara and gatherers in the forests and savannahs of West Africa, who were eating wild yams but not yet cultivating them. 

The yam is considered by most West African ethnic groups to be a symbol of fertility and the sustainability of life, and it often plays versatile cultural roles, used in inaugural, wedding and naming ceremonies. Yam festivals, which mark an important changing of the seasons, bring the community together to celebrate the harvest and give thanks to the gods.

“The festival is held in commemoration of the gods of the land for a good harvest season,” says Tatiana Haina, who creates food and travel vlogs on YouTube and covers the cultural festivals of her native Ghana. One such festival is the Krufie Yam Festival, celebrated by the indigenous people of Bredi, a community near Nkoranza in the Bono East region of the country. “The people believe the gods of the land have been very protective throughout the year and hence use the festival as a way of showing appreciation to the gods for their guidance and protection into a new bumper season,” she says. 

West Africa produces nearly all the world’s yams. (Photo courtesy of Marthe Montcho)

Over the past decade, the ceremonies have become a significant contribution to West Africa’s tourism, bringing attention and tourists interested in the cuisine. Traditionally celebrated in the open like most food festivals, yam festivals across regions attract both thousands of locals and visitors from the United States, Canada, Netherlands and further afield. “There is usually a lot of chanting, singing, drumming, dancing and costume displays by the local people,” says Jahman Anikulapo, a Nigerian culture activist and archivist. He believes cultural festivals such as the yam festivals unite the community and stimulate a general feeling of camaraderie.

Yam festivals often encourage and reward agricultural production. For instance, among the Ewe people in Ghana and Togo, different farmers present their yams in a competition to be named “chief farmer” or “Yam King.” And because some ethnic groups, such as the Igbo, believe the productivity of the tuber crop to be influenced by spiritual forces linked with the earth, yam festivals become an avenue to offer thanks to the gods of the land. 

In ancient days, the yam was a major crop plant in empire-states and kingdoms such as Ashanti, Dahomey, Nri, Ife and Benin, and before the harvest, festivals were often celebrated to mark a new year. “The festivals are particularly popular in the southeastern part of the country,” says Anikulapo. He recalls his stay in the state of Enugu, where yams were brought to a king’s palace and, after the affair was officiated by a chief priest, instructions were given to plant setts of yams to secure another bountiful harvest in the next year. 

Women pounding yams. (Photo courtesy of IITA.org)

But yam festivals are not only celebrated today among the Igbo, Urhobo, Yoruba and Ijaw people of Nigeria. Outside the country, the festivals are prevalent among the Bono and Ashanti people of the Akan ethnic groups in Ghana; the Fon people of the Republic of Benin; the Ewe people in Togo, and the Ashanti and Anyi people of the Akan ethnic groups in Cote d’Ivoire. 

As the Fon people of Benin have strong ties with the Yoruba of Nigeria and the Akan people in Cote d’Ivoire with their fellow ethnic group in Ghana, the festivals are celebrated with just as much pomp and procession. Traditionally, the newly harvested yams are not eaten until members of a particular group—usually the chief’s household or the chief priests—have partaken of the new crop. But, unlike other ethnic groups, a special celebration of the new yam is held exclusively by Fon women in certain clans, in which, after the sacrifice of a ram and fowl, the new yams are ritually pounded and, after being offered to deities, eaten by the women and children. 

“The festival can be celebrated for a month. It depends on the location and the people involved,” says Haina. Among the Igbos and the Fon people, the festival is usually in late July or August, and it could span days. For the Yoruba people in Ekiti State, Nigeria, the feast is celebrated in August and spans a day or two. 

The Ife king blesses the yams. (Photo courtesy of Ife City Blog)

Yam festivals are usually sponsored by the local community. “Support comes mostly from age grade groups [a form of social organization based on age], other social clubs and even some state governments in southeastern Nigeria,” says Anikulapo who, however, stresses the negligence of the government in supporting these cultural celebrations at the federal level. “There is no cultural policy in the country.” 

The yam festivals are even being exported to the diaspora, where they are bringing together West Africans in Europe, Asia and the Americas. Organizations such as ICSN (Igbo Cultural and Support Network) of London, Isuikwuato Community of Qatar and Ndi-Igbo Germany of Frankfurt have kept the celebrations alive outside of the continent. The goal is to maintain tradition: If a rite or ritual is performed by the Bono people in Ghana, the same rite will take place for Bono people celebrating in the US. London’s Igbo community members delight in dancing and singing with the same vigor and splendor as their compatriots back in Nigeria. The celebrations might take place in halls, ballrooms or auditoriums, rather than in the open air, but that allows celebrants to issue invitations to select guests. 

As the West African diaspora grows, yam festivals will travel to further corners of the globe, and include more and more people. More than just a one-off event, these festivals can open crucial dialogues about the balance of food tourism and food sovereignty, as more folks become acquainted with the yam.

The post West African Yam Festivals Celebrate Harvest, Community and Life Itself appeared first on Modern Farmer.

How the seed passed from the Abenaki to white settlers is unknown, but what is known is that the genetic strength of Abenaki Flint is due in large part to the efforts of Abenaki seed breeders. And while the revival of Abenaki Flint (sometimes called Roy’s Calais) is unique, many of our familiar crops share a story of lost lineage. 

Bringing a seed to a high level of performance is not accidental: Instead, it is a years-long process of observation, testing and careful stewardship. All of our most important food crops have undergone this process, yet many of the ties to their original producers have been severed. How we credit this work is a complicated process. 

One of the methods of attributing value to seed creators is through royalties. Royalties are traditionally paid out to seed breeders who file a patent proving that their seed offers a new genetic profile with distinct characteristics from other seeds on the market. But what about the hundreds of years of foundational development before the common practice of patents and royalties? How do we recognize some of the most important seed architects?  

In 2018, in recognition of this question, Fedco Seeds designated Abenaki Flint as “indigenously stewarded,” along with a handful of other varieties, and started allocating 10 percent of the proceeds from seed sales to a donation fund under its Indigenous royalties initiative. 

Nikos Kavanya, seed branch co-ordinator at Fedco Seeds, was responsible for implementing  Fedco’s program. “The impetus came from my sense of justice,” Kavanya said in an email. “For me, honoring our debt to the goodness and beauty of the past, especially for something as vital as seed, is a core value.”  

Fedco was already paying royalties to independent seed breeders, but Kavanya felt that the foundation of some of that breeding work was going unrecognized and unrewarded. 

“We were paying current breeders for seed that they had developed—but which had been bred before by many tribal peoples, whose work had, in many cases, been stolen,” said Kavanya. 

“We exist in an industry that tends to be very pro intellectual property rights,” says Courtney Williams, Fedco Seeds’ co-ordinator and product developer. Of the Indigenous royalties program, she says the company wants to “value [the Indigenous work] in a way that is akin to valuing these intellectual property constructs awarded by patent offices.”

Determining which varieties to designate was the most challenging part of implementing the program. It is difficult to narrow down which crops deserve designation and harder still to confirm the lineage. How do you trace the story of something as complicated as a seed, small enough to fit in a pocket, and—up until recently—difficult to genetically verify?

“A case could be made that all of the seeds we sell were Indigenously derived,” said Kavanya.

Hopi Blue Corn. (Photo courtesy of Fedco Seeds)

The first stage of Fedco’s project was to designate varieties with the most overt connection, such as those with a tribal affiliation in their name, such as Hopi Blue Corn, Jacob’s Cattle Bean and Waneta Plum.

Choosing to call the designation Indigenous royalties was also a decision based on ease of communication, more than precision of the term. “We were already distributing ‘breeders royalties’ to some of the independent breeders whose seed we sell and so it felt like an easy shift for our customers to make,” said Kavanya. 

Royalties traditionally refer to a direct payment made to an individual or company, but in this case, due to the difficulty of determining provenance, the proceeds are pooled. Therefore, Kavanya and her co-workers at Fedco decided to name a single beneficiary: a local project called Nibezun that crosses tribal affiliations to reach a broader constituency. Nibezun is a registered non-profit that operates on 85 acres in Passadumkeag, Maine, with access to Olamon Island, the original home of the Penobscot Nation and Abenaki confederacy. 

Through the allocation of 10 percent of seed sales, along with direct donations from customers, Fedco paid out about $10,000 in Indigenous royalties last season.

In 2018, when Kavanya first started exploring a method to pay homage to indigenous breeders, she met with other seed sellers to brainstorm and explore the practical steps. Following up with those that sat around the table with her, she says she doesn’t see any evidence of implementation.  

“I couldn’t find any of that work continued. It’s disheartening. There was a certain momentum at the time,” said Kavanya. She cites two possible obstacles. The first is with scale. For some companies, “the amount of seeds they are selling is so small, it felt sort of futile,” said Kavanaya. The second is with general opposition to the imprecision of the vocabulary itself.  Using the word “royalties” was an unpopular decision with both sellers and Indigenous groups. 

Because the money from all the designated seed varieties is pooled and not tagged to individual tribal breeders, “it is not terminology that everyone thinks is most representative,” writes Kavanya. An alternate name for the practice, which emerged from the Indigenous Seed Keepers Network, is “Indigenous seed benefit sharing.”

“Terminology is worthy of thoughtfulness, but, hopefully, [it] does not overshadow root concerns, which in this case includes the commercialization of seeds and the unsettled matter of what is adequate compensation for what to some are relatives, ancestors and children,” says Dr. Andrea Carter, AG outreach and education manager at Native Seeds/SEARCH, an Arizona-based seed conservation organization.

Recognition of prior ownership is a first step, but what about returning the seeds? Groups such as Native Seeds/SEARCH and the Native American Food Sovereignty Alliance are working on drafting policies and beginning the work of returning Indigenous seeds to their native communities. They call the process “rematriation,” in recognition of the role women have played in seed stewardship. Returning seed breeding and stewardship to original Indigenous keepers on Indigenous land is an important step in seed sovereignty, which is in turn a foundational step in food sovereignty. 

According to NAFSA (the Native American Food Sovereignty Alliance, which houses the Indigenous Seed Keepers’ Network), “Seeds are a vibrant and vital foundation for food sovereignty and are the basis for a sustainable, healthy agriculture. We understand that seeds are our precious collective inheritance and it is our responsibility to care for the seeds as part of our responsibility to feed and nourish ourselves and future generations.”

“Rematriation of all Indigenously derived seeds is impractical,” acknowledges Kavanaya. It would mean no beans, corn or squash available on the commercial market. But recognizing this does not mean that all Indigenous seeds should be available commercially. Some nonprofits such as Native Seeds/SEARCH are removing culturally significant varieties from their catalog while choosing to leave others readily available. 

Small seed companies provide a valuable service to all gardeners looking to benefit from careful breeding and stewardship, but seeds are not just food: they are also a living cultural legacy. Acknowledging this idea is just the first step toward addressing a complex issue. “It is a larger and much-needed conversation that requires the voices of many,” says Carter.

The post Payment for the Past: Recognizing Indigenous Seed Stewardship appeared first on Modern Farmer.