The Collaborative Farming Podcast

Sarah K. Mock has written two books that I absolutely love and have had a profound effect on how I view my own farming outside of just growing better carrots,  Farm and Other F Words and Big Team Farms, about how we can begin to chart a path forward by… you guessed it… working together. She has a substack, People Eat the Land, and a much better podcast than this one, The Only Thing That Lasts.

Folks who support Collab Farm

Peaceful Valley Farm & Garden Supply is your one-stop shop for cover crops, soil amendments, tools, and more. Save 20% on your first order now with code: NOTILL24. Apply for a commercial account for year-round savings and dedicated support! Visit Groworganic.com/notill

Harnois Greenhouses are engineered to face any North American climate, ensuring unparalleled brightness, agronomic performance, faster return on investment and lasting durability. Harnois Greenhouses, a leader in turnkey solutions for local growers.

The OSC Pack Pact is a collective action campaign that works to reduce single-use packaging in the natural products industry. Receive a discount code to shop select products from leading natural products brands that you love. Click the link in the show notes to join the Pack Pact!

Ian McSweeney & Kristina Villa, co-directors of The Farmers Land Trust, are responsible for creating and supporting farmland commons, a vehicle for preserving farmland and ensuring its dedication to regenerative agriculture in perpetuity while respecting both the farmers and the communities they feed. I mean, what's better than that? If you like what you hear, are a farmer or a landholder, and want to know more, you can reach out to them at the thefarmerslandtrust.org   Folks who support Collab Farm

Peaceful Valley Farm & Garden Supply is your one-stop shop for cover crops, soil amendments, tools, and more. Save 20% on your first order now with code: NOTILL24. Apply for a commercial account for year-round savings and dedicated support! Visit Groworganic.com/notill

Harnois Greenhouses are engineered to face any North American climate, ensuring unparalleled brightness, agronomic performance, faster return on investment and lasting durability. Harnois Greenhouses, a leader in turnkey solutions for local growers.

The OSC Pack Pact is a collective action campaign that works to reduce single-use packaging in the natural products industry. Receive a discount code to shop select products from leading natural products brands that you love. Click the link in the show notes to join the Pack Pact!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

"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.

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.

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.