Andrew Adamski, or walkie talkie callsign gopher, is one of the farmer owners of Full Circle Community Farm in Wisconsin, the land of coops in the US. He came back to his generations old family farm in 2017 after college, along with his now wife heather, to not only continue the family farming tradition, but diversify both its production and member…

Kelly Maynard is a cooperative development specialist at the university of Wisconsin center for cooperative development and we're going to get into some practical advice and tools you can use when thinking about going into cooperative farming, yourself, or yourselves, as it were. This is the second coop development person, or forth depending on how…

Welcome back to Collab Farm, the podcast where we talk about all the ways small- and mid-scale farmers can work together, even in big $10 million food system rebuilding kinds of ways. Like this conversation that I had with Lexi Close from Appalachia Regional Cooperative Development and the Appalachia Producers Co-op. Now, Lexi is involved with much…

I’m going to be real honest with you, I’ve been working hard lately. If you’re listening to this, I bet you’ve been working hard, too. Case in point, I JUST got our garlic in the ground in down here in zone 7, but better late than never I suppose. So, I thought I’d seize this opportunity to bring back an old episode, the very FIRST episode of colla…

In the spirit of collaboration, I'm gonna do something a little different. A couple weeks ago I did a field day with OAK--that's the Organic Association of Kentucky--If you're listening to this and live in Kentucky you should totally be a member. We and acouple of dozen other farmers and farm professionals walked through our gardens. We talked abou…

This roundtable with Jameson Parker of the Moonlight Collective, William Crenshaw of the Nashville Food Coop, Rhianna Michelle of the Waterbear cooperative land project, & Lexi Close of the Appalachian producers co-op offers different perspectives on starting a cooperative business and was recorded at the '23 TN Local Food Summit. A special thank y…

Emma Busby used to be the former Chapter Coordinator for the Southeast TN Young Farmers and has since moved on to be a board member of the Alabama Sustainable Agriculture Network. We met back at the ’23 TN Local Food Summit whose focus that year was "cultivating cooperation" and she had some really interesting work and insights to share, particular…

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 podc…

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 wh…

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 Gard…

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 inclu…

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 coo…

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 t…

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 Toget…

"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 fa…

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 list…

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 …

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…

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 pro…

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 …

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-exist…

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 t…

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 lis…

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 g…

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/dis…

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…

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…

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,…

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 …

Hilary Martin is a member of Digger's Mirth, a five member collective farm at the Intervale Center in Burlington VT, and talks about how the collective has evolved over its thirty year history from an informal to a somewhat more formal structure, how the Intervale has fostered collaboration between farms and markets, and the balancing act of stayin…

Lane Selman of the Culinary Breeding Network joins the podcast to talk about bringing the celebration of Sagra to the States, Wild Garden & Smarties Seeds, the power of open-pollinated peppers, her raddicio expedition (check out this rad zine), NOVIC!, and the Gusto Italiano Project from Uprising Seeds. If this woman has a super-power, it's bringin…

In our first episode of The Collaborative Farming Podcast, we talk with Chris Bodnar of Close to Home Organics, a part of the Glen Valley Organic Farm, in Abbotsford, BC in Canada. We get into their simple and adaptapable cooperative model, the history of modern cooperatives, and the long-term implications for family and finances... and rhubard pie…