Meet Your Farmer

Tierra Fértil Coop is an Hispanic, worker-owned farm cooperative in Hendersonville, North Carolina. Members Delia and Maria talk about how this project stemmed from personal and collective dreams of promoting access to resources and the capacity to produce food and stimulate food justice and racial equity in the local food and agricultural system.

The video is in Spanish with a translated transcript below.

Delia: It means that we are a land that regardless of where it is is capable of producing many things and to generate benefits and advantages. So I think that our communities are fertile communities, they are communities that produce a lot, that work a lot and that are capable of change.

Maria: My name is Maria. I am originally from El Salvador. My mother was a single mother, with 11 children, in the countryside.

Delia: Cooperativa Tierra Fértil was born—well, this is something that we talked about among the members at the time. One of the things that came up is that for us, we immigrants are fertile ground. So I think that our communities are fertile communities. They’re communities that produce a lot, that work a lot, and that are capable of change. And in my 44 years, I understood that one of my purposes was to reconnect with the earth, to reconnect with something that is essential in our lives, as Hispanics, as indigenous people, as immigrants. 

No, no, I didn’t want to be a farmer! Because sadly in our countries being a farmer, being a peasant was always a disadvantage. But I understood that success is late, that success has nothing to do with money, nor with belongings, nor with things, but it has to do with whatever generates you peace, with whatever brings you well-being, with what generates you joy.

You can’t stop planting corn if you are Hispanic, that is to say, that is a determining factor, because corn, besides being essential in our cooking, in our food, it is also essential in our roots. Corn represents my childhood, my history, my family, my community. But a great lesson we learned this year is that you have to protect the corn, in the sense that we do not cultivate with pesticides or with any kind of fertilizer. Therefore, corn is more vulnerable mainly with the birds, which is what happened to us. We planted corn twice and both times the corn was eaten by crows. Generally from August to October you can have corn so that you can eat it fresh or eat it dry.

The Hispanic community is growing not only in size, but also in diversity. That is, we come from different backgrounds. I’m talking about Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua. Many people from Colombia, Venezuela. So I see a community with a huge potential, but with very few opportunities for development and with tremendous barriers that are associated to your academic your academic level, your immigration status.

The role of our farm is just to do a little bit to transform the way the community looks at us. How the Hispanic community can be autonomous, independent, can change the situations or barriers that you encounter. So yes, I do, I believe that our role in food and providing quality, especially for fertile land for us, is to become the first farm that can produce our own compost, that we have animals to take care of.

Other than producing food, we have other small programs in the community. We have a program called Abundancia, that provides fresh food to the community, and we have another program which is our baby, which is called Escuela Campesina, which is a program of education that has as its purpose to connect our community with what it means to produce food, with what it means to eat properly, with what it means to eat together, that food is an investment we make in our health and well-being.

Maria: It was not easy, but I have a lot of dishes that I have invented. I make pupusas of everything. Little by little I’m going to try it from the carrot leaf. I’m going to try it with cheese, with plenty of seasoning to go ahead and make our dream come true, which is to bring more members. Why not join together for the welfare of the community?

This video was created as part of ASAP’s Growing Minds Farm to School program. Resources for including these as part of a classroom curriculum are available on the Growing Minds website.

Farmers Danielle Keeter and Mark McDonagh are co-owners of Mighty Gnome Market Garden in Waynesville, NC.

Danielle: We really wanted to emphasize how a small market garden can have a big impact on the local food community. 

Mark: Mighty Gnome is the name we came up with. Our belief is that a small market garden can have a tremendous impact on their local food economy. We thought a gnome being more of like a garden-sized shape, but having to be a mighty gnome because we want to be sure that we’re really churning out a lot of produce to our community every week. 

Danielle: I went to school to study environmental science, so not a direct path to farming. After working in a lab inside for a little while I found an opportunity to apprentice at a farm and knew pretty much right away that that’s what I wanted to do.

Mark: I didn’t study agriculture in college. I got a degree in graphic design. I got a summer job working at a ranch out in Wyoming, which piqued my interest or my curiosity and led me to a passion for the local food movement and just sustainability in general. For us, everything is just done by hand. We’re not riding on the back of a tractor or anything. 

Danielle: We follow organic practices, so you’re not going to see any conventional pesticides, herbicides, fertilizers used here. We grow watermelon. It’s one of the few fruits we actually grow on the property. Watermelon is in the cucurbit family so it’s related to cucumbers and other melons. It has the highest amount of lycopene, which is an antioxidant. Outside of just cold, fresh watermelon, grilled watermelon is kind of a unique way to enjoy it. Not a lot of people think to do that. It actually holds up on grill really well. For me the unique and special thing about our farm is that it’s just the two of us doing all of this. 

Mark: The size of the farm is definitely unique to this area.

Danielle: Right now we are selling primarily through our CSA [Community Supported Agriculture] program, where we have both a farmer-selected option and then a custom online shop where you can pick exactly what you want each week. And then also at Haywood’s Historic Farmers Market. 

The effort with Haywood Christian Ministry is one of the most incredible things that’s happened to the farm since we started it. It is a local organization that distributes food to people who can’t normally access food at the farmers market. That has been a really powerful change to be able to provide for people locally who can’t normally get to a farmers market on a Saturday morning. It’s enriched my experience of being a farmer here in the community. 

Mark: People really appreciate being able to pick up at the farm. This is a pretty rural area. The closest grocery store would probably be like a Dollar General. So I think for people to have access to fresh produce that they can physically see as they come and pick up and talk to us about it, I think is important to them. We’re looking forward to becoming more and more of an integral part of the community. 

Danielle: The organizations that we are a part of include ASAP. They’ve helped us with just about every aspect of the market garden that I can think of, from packaging to finding and applying for grants to being able to attend markets. They have been a huge resource for us, so thank you ASAP.

Mark: We’re just going to try to keep getting better and better at what we’re already doing for the foreseeable future. Then in the long term it would just turn into more produce available for longer periods of time—whether that means through the winter or earlier season tomatoes or earlier season eggplant, pushing those extremes. 

Danielle: My favorite thing about running the market garden is is a toss-up between eating really great food, which is a definite plus, and the community that has surrounded us here.

This video was created as part of ASAP’s Growing Minds Farm to School program. Resources for including these as part of a classroom curriculum are available on the Growing Minds website.

Chloe Moore is the farm manager for Southside Community Farm, an urban food space in the historically black Southside neighborhood in Asheville, NC.

My name is Chloe Moore. Welcome to Southside Community Farm. This neighborhood is a historically Black neighborhood and there’s a big diversity of people racially. It is also a neighborhood that has a lot of low-income public housing. This neighborhood has a lot of elders. A lot of people are aging in this neighborhood. And a lot of families. We’re really focused on community food, a lot of free food, our community farmers market, and things like that that are really focused on the neighborhood. 

Being a farmer is a great way to impact your community. It’s a way to impact your environment and to take care of the land but also to take care of people through giving people food. There’s no grocery store in this neighborhood so it can be hard for people to access fresh food. That means that a farm like this is really important and it’s a really great way for people to access healthy food.

I started farming when I was 16 years old. I worked on a small farm in my hometown and that’s when I really fell in love with it completely. I went to Warren Wilson College and I really loved it. It’s a great school for sustainable agriculture. So that’s how I got to the Asheville area, and then I stuck around. I’ve been here for 10 years. There’s so many good things about being a farmer, but I think the best part is that you don’t ever do the same thing twice. You’re always having new problems, new solutions, new things that you’re exploring. You really get to pay attention to fun little things. You always see like a cool bug or like a neat flower and stuff like that. That just like brings me a lot of joy and connects me to nature. 

So one special thing about our farm is that a lot of the produce we grow we get to give away for free to our neighborhood. One way we do that is through our free fridge. That’s open all the time and people can just come and get free fresh food for their families. 

We grow a big diversity of stuff on this farm. Now it’s just getting into summer, so we’re growing tomatoes, peppers, okra, squash. We’re also growing collard greens and lettuce and beets and carrots. We grow onions and garlic and lots of herbs. Green beans like lots of sun. They like it to be to be warm. They’re a summer crop and they need well-drained soil. So an interesting fact about green beans is that they’re not all green. There are purple green beans, red green beans. Today I’m going to plant some green beans that are going to be green with purple spots. 

We only sell our produce in one place, and that is at our own farmers market. We have a BIPOC farmers market once a month. We sell produce here and we also invite other vendors, farmers artists, craft people to vend. Our role is to be a green space in a neighborhood that’s urban. So it’s a place that people can come and can enjoy being outside. It’s a place that people can get free food and it’s a place that people can come together and access community and connect over food. We definitely see our farm growing in this community. We would love to access more plots of land and have a developed develop a patchwork of urban agriculture. We would love to be able to both sell more food and give more food away. One way we really want to do that is through a mobile market and have like a truck or a trailer and be able to drive around the neighborhood and sell or give away produce that way.

This video was created as part of ASAP’s Growing Minds Farm to School program. Resources for including these as part of a classroom curriculum are available on the Growing Minds website.

The Liar’s Table farm and market occupies what was once an iconic greasy spoon in Avery County, North Carolina. The restaurant was home to the “Liar’s Table,” an open table where anyone could pull up a chair, order a cup of coffee, and be sure to hear some tall tales. Learn how farmers Amos and Kaci Nidiffer started their farm as a hobby and how it grew to support their community.

My name is Kaci Nidiffer and this is The Liar’s Table farm and shop. We are in Elk Park, North Carolina in Avery County. The shop when we bought it used to be an old greasy spoon diner. They had a big long table when you walked in where just anybody could sit down. Kind of a communal table. And they had a big sign over it that said, “The Liar’s Table” because a lot of the old-timers would sit there and tell stories and exaggeration was very common in these stories. So that was the origins of The Liar’s Table. 

When we were both in college we both got interested in growing our own food. The farm is just something that we kind of started doing as a hobby, as something we want to do for ourselves, and it kind of grew into this bigger thing, wider thing to share with the community. We’re really really happy it turned out that way. We love it. 

The best part of being a farmer is eating! I think I feel spoiled, you know, just all the good stuff we get to eat. I feel like a lot of people set aside times to go be in nature and get refreshed by that and we get to do that all the time. 

It’s incredible the skills that we have acquired over the years, number one being just taking care of the soil. That’s like our main thing that we do as farmers. Distribution and marketing and sales and knowing what your customers want, knowing what they don’t want. That’s just a lot of trial and error and of being in your own community and listening to people and seeing what works and what doesn’t work. Just being flexible is a really big part of being a farmer. 

We chose to grow broccoli because number one I love it. It’s one of my favorite veggies. A big part of it was it’s just hard to find around here. There’s not a lot of growers growing broccoli in Avery County. The variety we grow is a sprouting broccoli. It’s a spring and fall crop. It is extremely flavorful, extremely tender. You can use the whole plant. None of it goes to waste, from the stock to the leaves. It’s just one of our favorite things to grow. We love it, chefs love it, our CSA members love it, and people that shop at our store love it. It’s kind of a treat. The ideal condition for the variety we grow are cool evenings, so that’s why we can only really grow it in the spring and in the fall. In the summer it just gets too hot. One of the most interesting things about this broccoli that we grow is even when it flowers it’s still edible, and so it’s a really beautiful food. We use the broccoli leaves as well. You can use them like collards. 

We grow a lot of cherry tomatoes. In our high tunnels we grow a ton of greens all year round. We’ve got lots of different types of kale, chard. We grow a lot of cabbages. We grow a lot of squash and zucchini, a lot of winter squash, pumpkins. We do asparagus. We do rhubarb. 

There’s a Food Pantry located in Newland which is just up the road from us and they offer food to anybody who is in need of it We supply fresh vegetables for them to offer. We sell our produce at our farm shop which is just down the road from our farm, The Liars table, and then we also sell through our CSA members. We sell to lots of local restaurants in the area our community Elk Park here. We’ve really been able to be more visible in in our little small village from opening our shop. It’s just a lot more convenient for people and I really feel like that’s opened up a lot more conversations and more collaborations with people in the community. So it’s been great. 

We sell through the High Country Food Hub out of Boone. They do a lot of marketing and a lot of things on the behalf of the farmers, so we can actually focus on farming They worry about the distribution and we worry about the growing, and it works out great. We also work with a couple of food pantries here in Avery County and also in Watauga County. 

We work with the ag instructors and educators at Avery High. We work with their kids in the FFA (Future Farmers of America), and we also work with local elementary school. They come and do tours of the farm and then they also get to do pizza making classes with us over at our shop. We hope that people will be able to access some fresh food here. Especially in Elk Park we don’t have a grocery store. A lot of people that come into the shop are interested in growing their own food and that’s amazing. We’re all about empowering people to do that for themselves as well. 

One of our visions is to definitely expand upon our shop that we opened. It’s just been one of those things that has opened up a lot of doors that we never even thought of. We’ve had a lot more interaction with people than in the past and that’s been great.

This video was created as part of ASAP’s Growing Minds Farm to School program. Resources for including these as part of a classroom curriculum are available on the Growing Minds website.

Lee’s One Fortune Farm is a small, family-owned farm in McDowell County. The Lees are part of a community of Hmong farmers, many of whom came to the United States from Laos and Vietnam as refugees after the Vietnam War. Western North Carolina is home to one of the largest Hmong communities in the United States. Lee’s One Fortune Farm specializes in growing Asian produce, which they sell at farmers markets and to restaurants.

Chue: My name is Chue Lee.

Ariel: My name is Ariel Lee.

Tou: My name is Tou Lee, and we’re here at Lee’s One Fortune Farm. We grow all sorts of Asian variety fruits, vegetables,including rice. From the time that I was a young boy able to hold a hand tool, I always worked on a farm. The best part about being a farmer is the warm happy smiles you can receive when you also share that with friends and family.

Chue: The best part for me would be you know when you put something in the ground you’re going to receive something at the end. That’s the best part.

Tou: You have to have patience, lots and lots of patience.

Chue: We grow a lot of vegetables, the Asian greens like Asian kale, the Chinese broccoli Tokyo Bekana. All the greens we grow here. 

Tou: We grow things that are not found in this part of the world, and rice is one of them. We also grow things like cassava, which is a root vegetable that you can also use the leaves as a green and that is uniquely different in this area as well. Snow peas and sugar snaps are primary staples in the Asian community, when it comes to stir fries and stuff like that. Sugar snap you can grow in a little bit warmer season, let’s say early spring on out. Snow peas you can tolerate a little bit cooler weather so if you have some shelter you can grow snow peas just about all winter. You don’t have to have bees to pollinate them. If you plant them in a greenhouse, all you have to do is go in there if you have them trellised shake the vine and it self-pollinates. So it’s like a strawberry, snow peas and sugar snaps are a prelude to your other vegetables in the summer.

Chue: We have a lot of preorder, restaurants, folks that know about us will come by and pick up at the farm or at the house.

Tou: We want to make a impact with the Asian produce into the Eastern Area here in this region because everything that’s Asian produce it’s coming from outside of the United States or all the way from California. There’s nothing really at a large quantity produced in this area at all.

Chue: We plant a lot of different vegetables and fruit for the community. We teach them different things about our fruit and vegetables that they have never known before. We teach them a lot of the stuff that we grow has different flavor, also is unique.

Tou: We’re able to bring to the local community and to a lot of local restaurants the things that they have never seen before. We’re a part of ASAP and we sell out all their local tailgate markets that they have open and we’re proud supporter of them in any which way that we can. Eventually, when this becomes a place that is well established, we’re going to try to develop a teaching center that’s going to be set in a cultural setup where we will teach the things that our community, the Hmong community knows and grows in this area. And by doing that is the hope that we can also teach the the community as a whole that they can also grow the same things that we grow here. And by doing that create an area here in Western North Carolina that is highly sustainable be a wonderful liaison to the food community.

This video was created as part of ASAP’s Growing Minds Farm to School program. Resources for including these as part of a classroom curriculum are available on the Growing Minds website.

The Forest Farmacy is a 30-acre forest farm nestled in Madison County, NC, in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Kat Houghton and Chris Parker bring together their passions for fungus, food sovereignty, healing, soul, myth, mystery, mycelium and re-culturing.

Kat: I’m Kat. This is the Forest Farmacy and we’re up in Madison County, Western North Carolina.

Chris: I am Christopher Parker. We chose the name The Forest Farmacy because we want to incorporate the farm into the forest, woodland medicinals as well as mushrooms. 

Kat: There was a long history of one family just tending this land, and so we feel really really grateful to be able to have taken that over. 

Chris: I would transplant things out of the forest and around even when I was a little kid and they would just take off. I was kind of obsessed with plants even as a pretty young child. I studied horticulture in high school and that’s actually where I was introduced to mushroom cultivation when I was 14.   

Kat: I grew up in a farm in Scotland. We had sheep and cows on 600 acres on the Scottish borders. So that was that was how I grew up.

Chris: It’s a very independent lifestyle. That’s typically across the planet, most farmers are very independent. They tend to think outside the box because they have to.

Kat: I think the best part of being a farmer for me is being able to be so close to the natural world all the time. You know, we’re very dependent on what the weather’s doing and what the animals are doing, how the plants and mushrooms are growing. I really enjoy that.

Chris: Fungi are such a new thing that we cultivate. Having hurdles and obstacles to overcome in that world has kept my attention for such a long time. 

Kat: Growing up on a farm I learned a huge amount just about, especially about how to be around animal,s how to tend to them. But the mushrooms are a whole different thing for me, so I’ve been learning from Chris. 

Chris: Originally why I got into mushroom cultivation was because it seemed like a very low-input, maximum-yield type cultivation, because I was introduced to log cultivation. So log cultivation is you do a lot of the work up front. You plug the logs and then the logs continue to fruit, oftentimes for anywhere from three to six, seven, eight years. We grow vegetables for ourselves. We grow mushrooms. And we also do forest medicinals. 

Kat: So mycorrhizal fungi are fungi that live in symbiosis with plants. They exchange water and nutrients to the to the plants and they receive sugars from the plant. so it’s a beneficial relationship for both the fungus and the plants. 

Chris: Mushrooms are such a curious group of creatures. Out of estimated five million species on the planet, we know of about 150,000, so there’s still so many we do not know about. And that’s the thing that keeps me excited about this is that you know there’s so much more to be discovered. 

Kat: I’ve always loved mushrooms eating and being disappointed by what’s available in the grocery store. 

Chris: Culinary mushrooms are all medicinal. They all have some type of medicinal compounds. If people are making stuff like bone broth or veggie broth or soups and stuff like that, that’s a really easy thing to do to throw just some mushrooms in there. Run them on low for several hours. They’re extracting those medicinal benefits plus the flavor.

Kat: This sort of tradition in this area of small-scale family farming is really important to us. There’s a great community of local farmers here. I know Chris will exchange mushrooms for different produce and vegetables, so a lot of our food comes from our neighbors. Passing on the knowledge is a significant part of what we do here as well. ASAP has been really helpful. We received a grant from them earlier this year to produce some new marketing materials, so a lot of the signage we have at the farmers market and some brochures and things. They’ve got a great network of other people, conferences that we go to. 

Chris: I think the vision for the farm is to continue you on the trajectory of education. One of the other things I would like to see is to do more research with mycorrhizals. But also just for us to produce as much of the food that we can produce for ourselves here. I know that’s one of our goals. 

Kat: I think part of the vision, too, is reconnecting humans to nature, all with the intention of helping us sort of get back to that the ancient connection that we’ve always had and that we have drifted from in our modern culture. People just spending time here is healing. Being mindful in nature really helps people to to find a place of healing.

This video was created as part of ASAP’s Growing Minds Farm to School program. Resources for including these as part of a classroom curriculum are available on the Growing Minds website.