Today’s featured farmer: Alice Melendez. Alice has found in Plowshares for Appalachia the chance to tie together threads from her life– learning and teaching, love of the earth, farming heritage, and practical interest in the social structures and cultural tendencies that have set us on a course to destroy so much of what is precious. She has returned to her rural Kentucky roots and the management of the family farm after a 10-year odyssey which took her through extended stays in and study of Central America, Dartmouth College and the “Ivy League” experience, tense times in Philadelphia at the height of the recession, and five years in the “PetroMetro” Houston, Texas where she worked both with established community development and refugee resettlement organizations and with post-Occupy activist groups- particularly focused on anti-extraction work. Today, her two small kids, Ana and Severo, and her husband, Emilio are all happy to be living with wild space and gardens, gone country again. And Alice now has the chance to join her mother, Laura and the other partners in the farm, on the project of making the family farm work– economically, ecologically, and socially. This program was brought to you by Heritage Foods USA.

“It takes more hands on the land to manage land for a profit.” [07:00]

–Alice Melendez on Greenhorns Radio

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