Episodes
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Hey folks, it’s Jackson and today I’ve got a bonus episode of Collab Farm with Mike & Armonda of Rose Hill Farm Stop in Bloomington, Indiana. I attended a session with them at the Organic Association of Kentucky conference '23 and was really impressed. You’ll see why in a minute...
Now, you may have heard the last episode of The No-Till Market Garden Podcast with the great Alex Ball speaking with the owners of the Argus Farm Stop in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and thought, 'yeah, yeah, yeah... that’s great you can do that there, but probably not here.'
That is exactly why I love Rose Hill Farm Stop. They spent some time at Argus and have adapted the model to be a producer coop and replicated it in a more rural area with a lower median income. We talk about how they got the idea off of the ground, how it functions as a producer coop, how they have solved some of the logistical challenges, and what the farm stop looks like a little more than a year into operation.
You can support our work by picking up a copy of The Living Soil Handbook, becoming a Patreon member, joining our free online growers community, or just sharing this episode with another farm friend you’d want to start a producer coop with? Just sayin'...
Remember, many hands make light work.
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Tianna Kennedy is a founding member and 1/3 owner of Star Route Farm in New York and owner/coordinator of the 607 CSA. She talks about how Star Route Farm began as a partnership, how/why they incorporated a third owner and how it’s multiform CSA component split off to form a whole other organization which she now coordinates.
Now, the 607 CSA includes dozens of producers, hundreds of members, and covers a not small region of New York State. She gets into how it grew from a simple two-farm-veg-CSA into a sprawling network of producers and eaters and the relationship-based assets and logistics that make it all work. I found Tianna as a part of the SKYWOMAN project and she talks about her experience there, as well.
Also mentioned in the show...
The 607 CSA farmsite with producer/delivery maps, income calculators, and cool AF shirts.
GrownBy, Local Line, & Fellow Farmer online sales platforms
Signal app for communication
Thank y'all so much for listening. This podcast is brought to you by Certified Naturally Grown. It's also brought to you by growers like you. If you got something from this podcast, or any of our podcasts, you can support our work for a few bucks a month at notillgrowers.com/support. Please rate/review, follow us on Instagram @collaborativefarming or @notillgrowers, share this podcast with your farming friends, and let us know who/what you'd like to hear on The Collaborative Farming Podcast.
Remember, many hands make light work.
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Missing episodes?
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The Full Plate Farm Collective began in Ithaca NY nearly 20 years ago when Chaw Chang & Lucy Garrison-Clauson’ of Stick & Stone Farm and Nathaniel and Emily Thompson of Remembrance Farm came together to offer a joint veg CSA. Since, it has grown to about 700 members and is now a substantial part of their farm revenue, enough to have a full time coordinator (ie. Molly Flerlage), and brings in product from dozens of other farms and value added producers throughout the region.
Molly and I talk about her role as the CSA manager, how full plate operates at-scale to afford an awesome CSA manager, and how they have leveraged the CSA to help new farmers and address food insecurity. Stick around after the credits, because she reached back out to add some honest thoughts on how scale can provide better long-term solutions to CSA challenges than third-party CSA management platforms.
Thank y'all so much for listening. This podcast is brought to you by Certified Naturally Grown & Growing for Market Magazine. It's also brought to you by growers like you. If you got something from this podcast, or any of our podcasts, you can support our work for a few bucks a month at notillgrowers.com/support. Please rate/review, follow us on Instagram @collaborativefarming or @notillgrowers, share this podcast with your farming friends, and let us know who/what you'd like to hear on The Collaborative Farming Podcast.
Remember, many hands make light work.
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Author, academic, and podcaster David Bollier! David works with the Schumacher Center for a New Economics and has studied and written extensively on commoning for the last two decades. For those who aren’t familiar with that word, commoning is simply the act of managing shared resources like land or information.
We talk about how he came to study the commons as an alternative for change after being disillusioned with the political system, can’t say it’s gotten any better, starting from where you are, however small, and examples of commoning in our everyday life that we simply don’t have words for, and often overlook.
You can find his writing, books, and podcast on his website.
Mentioned in the show...
Think Like a Commoner (book)
Frontiers of Commoning (podcast)
Elinor Ostrom's 8 Principles of Managing a Commons
My two favorite episodes of FoC...
Treating Food as Commons, Not Commodity
Why Ivan Illich Still Matters
Thank y'all so much for listening. This podcast is brought to you by Certified Naturally Grown & Growing for Market Magazine. It's also brought to you by growers like you. If you got something from this podcast, or any of our podcasts, you can support our work for a few bucks a month at notillgrowers.com/support. Please rate/review, follow us on Instagram @collaborativefarming or @notillgrowers, share this podcast with your farming friends, and let us know who/what you'd like to hear on The Collaborative Farming Podcast.
Remember, many hands make light work.
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What does it look like to give Burmese and Bhutanese elders and families, and by extension immigrant and refugee peoples, meaningful growing opportunities?
Today, I chat with Tallahassee May, the farm director of Growing Together Nashville. First, let’s just agree that Tallahassee May is one of the best names we’ve ever heard. Second, Growing Together Nashville is a part of the Nashville Food Project. It leases a couple of acres of church land in inner city Nashville to Bhutan and Burmese farmers, most of them elders, so they may grow produce both for their famalies and community, make a supplemental income, and have meaningful work.
After the conversation, stick around because Tally asked some of the same questions to the farmers through a translator. Not only is it important to hear the voices of the farmers themselves, you can hear the birds, the trains, the inside jokes lost in translation, the airplanes, the laughter, it’s just a great listen. Let it play.
I just cannot get over the amount of gratitude these people have simply for the opportunity to grow.
The Growing Together CSA Farmsite
Follow Growing Together in Instagram
Mentioned in the show...
The Nashville Food Project
Faithlands, an Agrarian Trust Toolkit
No-Till Growers video w/ The Treehouse Farm Collective
Thank y'all so much for listening. This podcast is brought to you by Certified Naturally Grown & Growing for Market Magazine. It's also brought to you by growers like you. If you got something from this podcast, or any of our podcasts, you can support our work for a few bucks a month at notillgrowers.com/support. Please rate/review, follow us on Instagram @collaborativefarming or @notillgrowers, share this podcast with your farming friends, and let us know who/what you'd like to hear on The Collaborative Farming Podcast.
Remember, many hands make light work.
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"Liberation Farms is food justice in action. It is a demonstration of the success that is possible when marginalized communities have the opportunity to organize and lead themselves."
Today, we hear from Lana and Muhidin, the farm manager and executive director respectively, of Liberation Farms in Lewiston, Maine. Liberation farms is a 200+ acre farm in the Little Jubba Agrarian Commons. Sound familiar? This was one of the first farms moved into the agrarian commons framework by the Agrarian Trust (listen to my conversation with them here).
Lana and Muhidin tell us how the farm and commons began, how the land is used to meet the personal, economic, and cultural needs of the Somali Bantu community, the ways in which the farmers self-organize into iskashito groups, a little about access to farmland in Somalia, and how they are working to bridge the agricultural divide between Somalia and the US as well as current and future generations of Somali Bantu farmers.
Follow Liberation Farms on Instagram
Check out their very informative website & contribute to Liberation Farms
Mentioned in the show...
The history of the Somali Bantu peoples
The Seed Growers Podcast w/ Dan Brisebois
Thank y'all so much for listening. This podcast is brought to you by Certified Naturally Grown & Growing for Market Magazine. It's also brought to you by growers like you. If you got something from this podcast, or any of our podcasts, you can support our work for a few bucks a month at notillgrowers.com/support. Please rate/review, follow us on Instagram @collaborativefarming or @notillgrowers, share this podcast with your farming friends, and let us know who/what you'd like to hear on The Collaborative Farming Podcast.
Remember, many hands make light work.
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A conversation I envisioned since the beginning of this podcast, I talk with Brent Lackey of the Kentucky Center for Agriculture and Rural Development about cooperative development, step by step.
Mentioned in the show...
Understanding the Capper Volstead Act
KRS 272 on Cooperatives
Cooperation Works! Development Network
Thank y'all so much for listening. This podcast is brought to you by Certified Naturally Grown & Growing for Market Magazine. It's also brought to you by growers like you. If you got something from this podcast, or any of our podcasts, you can support our work for a few bucks a month at notillgrowers.com/support. Please rate/review, follow us on Instagram @collaborativefarming or @notillgrowers, share this podcast with your farming friends, and let us know who/what you'd like to hear on The Collaborative Farming Podcast.
Remember, many hands make light work.
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As a follow up to last week's Aliments Farmhouse Food conversation, Hannah and Natalie from Ferme Agricola share a bit about what it's like being a member of a producers cooperative from the perspective of the farmers.
Thank y'all so much for listening. This podcast is brought to you by Certified Naturally Grown & Growing for Market Magazine. It's also brought to you by growers like you. If you got something from this podcast, or any of our podcasts, you can support our work for a few bucks a month at notillgrowers.com/support. Please rate/review, follow us on Instagram @collaborativefarming or @notillgrowers, share this podcast with your farming friends, and let us know who/what you'd like to hear on The Collaborative Farming Podcast.
Remember, many hands make light work.
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Aliments Farmhouse Food is a multifarm cooperative of seven farm members co-markting their produce, meat, dairy, and more through a home delivery CSA to some three to four hundred members throughout Ottawa, Canada.
I talk to farmer member and general manager Leela Ramachandran about how it all began and has grown over the last few years, leveraging the low overhead of direct to consumer delivery to reach beyond traditional markets, the balance between standard boxes and efficiency vs customization and complexity, the roles and responsibilities of the farmer members and staff, logistics, and a whole lot else.
Mentioned in the show...
Aliments well designed website
My previous conversation with Aliments farmer member Agricola
TrackPod (app) for delivery optimization
Thank y'all so much for listening. This podcast is brought to you by Certified Naturally Grown, Growing for Market Magazine, and Veggie Cropper crop planning software. It's also brought to you by growers like you. If you got something from this podcast, or any of our podcasts, you can support our work for a few bucks a month at notillgrowers.com/support. Please rate/review, follow us on Instagram @collaborativefarming or @notillgrowers, share this podcast with your farming friends, and let us know who/what you'd like to hear on The Collaborative Farming Podcast.
Remember, many hands make light work.
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Do you grow enough diversity for a full-diet CSA? Or just stick to what you grow well? These are two extremes of the spectrum, but... what if you could do both?
Mikey and Erin of Boxcar Acres provide a multi-farm, full-diet, full-choice CSA in Henry County, KY. They aggregate and distribute veg from their own farm and several others, along with protein, dairy, honey, and value-added goods, all full-choice at a flat rate.
We get into how their entire farming career has been characterized by collaboration, how the full-diet CSA works, the challenges of the model, and we get a bit candid about what it may mean to put the 'member' back in CSA member.
Mentioned in the show...
The past episode with Valley Spirit Farm
A really amazing short video/post, For the Hog Killing, if you're a fan of Wendell Berry...
New Roots CSA & Fresh Stops
Demo how their Google Doc order form works
Thank y'all so much for listening. This podcast is brought to you by Certified Naturally Grown, Growing for Market Magazine, and Veggie Cropper crop planning software. It's also brought to you by growers like you. If you got something from this podcast, or any of our podcasts, you can support our work for a few bucks a month at notillgrowers.com/support. Please rate/review, follow us on Instagram @collaborativefarming or @notillgrowers, share this podcast with your farming friends, and let us know who/what you'd like to hear on The Collaborative Farming Podcast.
Remember, many hands make light work.
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Talking cooperative compost company with Nathan and Michael from Tilth Soil, folks. Tilth Soil and Rust Belt Riders have been collecting and diverting food waste from landfills and, as a result, have been making some of the most amazing composts and soils around. When I heard they had officially organized as a worker cooperative, I had to get them on the line to learn more. Not only am I excited to learn more about a worker-owned compost business, I personally want to see more regional high-quality composters across the country. So, let’s do more of that? We talk about their humble beginnings, how they’ve always maintained collective decision making and are now formalizing those processes, how they have left and taken ideas about collaborative effort and growth from other industries, and philosophize a bit about the world changing nature of simply making some good ol’ compost. Mentioned in the show... Thinking in Systems by Donella Meadows (book)
Dr. Elaine Ingham's Soil Food Web Course
The Evergreen Cooperative Model
Slack for company communication
The Knowledge Project Podcast
The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber (book)
On Farm Composting (free ebook)
The Compost Handbook by Robert Rynk (book)
Community Composting Systems by James McSweeney (book)
Financial Intelligence (book)
The Community Composter Coalition
Thank y'all so much for listening. This podcast is brought to you by Growing for Market Magazine and Veggie Cropper crop planning software. It's also brought to you by growers like you. If you got something from this podcast, or any of our podcasts, you can support our work for a few bucks a month at notillgrowers.com/support. Please rate/review, follow us on Instagram @collaborativefarming or @notillgrowers, share this podcast with your farming friends, and let us know what you'd like to hear on The Collaborative Farming Podcast.
Remember, many hands make light work.
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And we're BACK with the next and perinneal season of The Collaborative Farming Podcast. In this episode, Cody & Mel of Speedwell Farm & Gardens and Helen of Farmette Flowers, making up two thirds of The Treehouse Farm Collective, talk about their shotgun wedding farming collectively for land access and their model that respects both their pre-existing individual farm business autonomy while reaping many of the benefits of farming closely with others. Shout out to collective members Nelson and Matt who were present in spirit. Thank y'all so much for listening. This podcast is brought to you by Growing for Market Magazine. It's also brough to you by growers like you. If you got something from this podcast, or any of our podcasts, you can support our work at notillgrowers.com/support. Please rate/review, follow us on Instagram @collaborativefarming, share this podcast with your farming friends, and let us know what you'd like to hear on The Collaborative Farming Podcast.
Remember, many hands make light work.
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BONUS EPISODE of The Collaborative Farming Podcast, a quick conversation with Col Gordon of Inchindown Farm and Farmerama's LANDED podcast series which explores the colonial roots of the small family farm and how understanding the past can change our farming future. It's some of the best three hours of farm podcasting out there and you can listen to it here. Cannot. Recommend. It enough.
Also mentioned in the show...
The Agrarian Trust
Land In Our Names
Soul Fire Farm
Harris Tweed -
Today, we revisit Eric & Jill of Green Things Farm Collective in Ann Arbor, Michigan. I couldn’t think of a better way to end it than with one of the first farm collectives we spoke with last year…
If you remember, I talked with Jill, Hannah, & Michelle of Mega Beauty Farm—there’s and inside joke there you’re only going to get by going back and listening to that one… also check out Eric & Nate on The No-Till Market Garden Podcast. Go back and listen to them because they’ll give a lot of context to this conversation.
Jill and her partner Nate owned the farm for years before forming the collective January of 2020. We talk about how her feelings of it being their own farm to now including other owners have evolved, how they’re doing meeting their financial goals they set, how they’ve structured their work to make time for communication, & Eric talks about how no-till farming has contributed to the farms success over the last year.
Maybe we’ll make it a tradition to check in with them every season to see how things are going?
Thank y'all for listening. This podcast is brought to you by Growing for Market Magazine, Southern Exposure Seed Exchange, and Barn 2 Door. It's also brough to you by growers like you. If you got something from this podcast, or any of our podcasts, you can support our work at notillgrowers.com/support. Please rate/review, follow us on Instagram @collaborativefarming, and let us know who you'd like to hear on the next season of The Collaborative Farming Podcast.
Remember, many hands make light work.
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We’ve heard about land trusts, conservation easements, maybe community trusts before, but what if there was one modeled with the farm and the farmer in mind? The mission of Agrarian Land Trust is to build local agrarian commons to hold farmland to ensure its sustainable and productive stewardship for generations to come. Director Ian McSweeney is going to tell us how agrarian commons work, why they're an important model, and where to begin.
Mentioned in the show...
Guidebooks & Resources
Agrarian Commons Guide
FaithLands Toolkit
Somali Bantu Maine
Find Agrarian Commons in the USThis podcast is brought to you by Growing for Market Magazine, Southern Exposure Seed Exchange, and Barn 2 Door. It's also brough to you by growers like you. If you got something from this podcast, or any of our podcasts, you can support our work at notillgrowers.com/support
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Rob Smith is the director of Viva Farms in Burlington, Washington. Viva farms is an incubator farm and offers not just access to land and infrastructure that beginning farmers may struggle with, giving them time to build their market before investing in those decisions, but also opportunities for a real on-farm education and on-site aggregation/distribution. If you’re interested in incubator farms and want to learn more about the programs Viva offers, because we barely scratch the surface here, visit their farmsite.
Also check out the Farmer to Farmer land link program.
This podcast is brought to you by Growing for Market Magazine, Southern Exposure Seed Exchange, and Barn 2 Door. It's also brough to you by growers like you. If you got something from this podcast, or any of our podcasts, you can support our work at notillgrowers.com/support
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Ira Wallace and Mary of the Acorn Community and Southern Exposure Seed Exchange in Mineral, Virginia, folks. In disclosure, they are sponsors of the show, but that’s not why they’re here. They’re also an intentional community growing not just food, but also seed crops for Southern Exposure and—on top of that—manage the seed business which contracts with over 70+ seed producers. We get into how the community began, shout out to Twin Oaks who Farmer Jesse interviewed for No-Till Market Garden, community life and decision making, and details about their awesome seed company.
Also mentioned in the show:
The Federation of Egalitarian Communities
On Conflict & ConsensusThis podcast is brought to you by Growing for Market Magazine, Southern Exposure Seed Exchange, and Barn 2 Door. It's also brough to you by growers like you. If you got something from this podcast, or any of our podcasts, you can support our work at notillgrowers.com/support
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Sarah Mock, author of Farm and Other F-Words, talks about some of the systemic failures in our present agricultural system, how our affinity for small family farms is actually counter-productive, and a vision for a path forward to producing Good food, Good jobs, and Good ecology: the Big Team Farm (f-yeah). Order her book RIGHT F-ING NOW and follow her awesome substack.
This podcast is brought to you by Growing for Market Magazine, Southern Exposure Seed Exchange, and Barn 2 Door. It's also brough to you by growers like you. If you got something from this podcast, or any of our podcasts, you can support our work at notillgrowers.com/support
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Double-header with Valley Spirit Farm and The Berry Center in Henry County, Kentucky #represent. Valley Spirit Farm is a two-family partnership farming together "over the fencerow" sharing resources and marketing across seperatly owned, but complimentary enterprises. The Berry Center, alongside a farming program and archive of Wendell Berry's work, is connecting farmers across Henry County with a program in the spirit of the Burley Tobbacco Growers, Our Home Place Meats, of which Valley Spirit is a part.
A few of my favorite works by Wendell Berry...
Think Little (essay)
It All Turns on Affection (reading)
Art of the Commonplace
Unsettling of America
Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front (poem)
Look & See: A Portrait of Wendell Berry (documentary)This podcast is brought to you by Growing for Market Magazine, Southern Exposure Seed Exchange, and Barn 2 Door. It's also brough to you by growers like you. If you got something from this podcast, or any of our podcasts, you can support our work at notillgrowers.com/support
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Narendra Varma is the co-founder and executive director of Our Table Cooperative, a multi-stakeholder cooperative farm in Portland, Oregon. If you don't know what a multi-stakeholder coop is, neither did we. But, you're about to find out, as well as why it's an important model which addresses some of the structural, systemic, and cultural barriers small-scale farmers face outside of production. Check out their awesome website and follow them on Instagram.
Mentioned in the show:
Dynamic Governance w/ John BuckThis podcast is brought to you by Growing for Market Magazine, Southern Exposure Seed Exchange, and Barn 2 Door. It's also brough to you by growers like you. If you got something from this podcast, or any of our podcasts, you can support our work at notillgrowers.com/support
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