Deconstructing Farmworkers’ Invisibility in the U.S. Food System: A Case Study in the American South | GFF '23

This post is part of Bea Portela’s 2023 Global Food Fellowship. You can also learn more about her knead 2 know presentation from November 2023 here.

Farmworkers are an invisible, but essential, part of our food system. 2.4 million farmworkers, 68% of which are foreign-born and 44% of which are undocumented, prop up our $1.2 trillion food and agriculture industry (source). This summer, I hoped to pull back the veil on farmworkers and the realities they face, in the hope of better educating myself and others in the Yale community. 

This summer, I worked as an outreach paralegal at an organization called Southern Migrant Legal Services. Based out of Nashville, we provide free legal services to farmworkers across Tennessee, Kentucky, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. The day-to-day of my work in the office involved communicating with clients, writing memos, and contributing to active litigation. 

The other half of my time was spent doing outreach to farmworkers in their rural communities. I was fortunate enough to spend time in the tomato fields and rice plantations of southern Arkansas; catfish farms of the Mississippi Delta; tree nurseries and squash fields of Tennessee’s Sequatchie Valley; and the tomato and strawberry farms in the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains. But behind the bucolic country roads was a reality that was anything but romantic. The states we serve are among those with the fewest labor protections for farmworkers. Though the South as a region has fewer farmworkers than some other US regions, this lack of workplace protection is still experienced by over 225,000 people (source). 

Rather than being empirical, my research was experiential. I listened and asked questions to learn from the knowledge of my fellow paralegals and attorneys, some of whom have been in the farmworker law field for decades. I learned by speaking with farmworkers on the ground. My research questions were the following: 

1. What are the sources of farmworker invisibility in the United States? Is it rooted in history, deliberate policy, and/or farmworkers’ own fears? 

2. What are the challenges facing non-profit organizations serving farmworker populations? 

3. What are methods and strategies for farmworkers to feel more empowered? 

I cannot go in depth to answer these questions here, but I do have a few takeaways that I’ll be thinking about for a long time. 

The first is that the law, while it’s an incredibly powerful tool, can often be limited by which laws do or do not exist. Farmworkers have been systematically excluded from many federal labor laws meant to protect workers. For example, farmworkers are excluded from overtime pay provisions in the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA). On small farms with less than seven workers, they’re not entitled to even the federal minimum wage of $7.25. (source) 

To be sure, states can create their own state laws to establish a higher minimum wage, a right to overtime pay, elevated housing standards, or worker’s compensation if injured on the job. However, few, if any, states in the South have crafted these additional state protections. (source) What this means is that legal service providers have less tools in our toolbox to protect workers. We cannot enforce laws that don’t exist. 

Another takeaway is that there are very large and legitimate barriers that keep farmworkers from speaking out against abuse, whether that be through the legal system or not. From my experience, farmworkers fear that if they call out potential violations, they will be fired and/or not rehired by their employers. This is amplified for the many farmworkers who come to the United States through a recruiter who acts as a middleman between the grower/employer and farmworker. Though it is technically illegal, farmworkers are afraid of being blacklisted by these recruiters. Branded as a troublemaker, this blacklisting could keep a worker from getting hired not just at their previous farm, but any farm, in the United States. For farmworkers desperate to provide for their families back home, this is not a risk they’re willing to take. 

My final takeaway is that though it is challenging, the work of farmworker legal service providers is invaluable. I am immensely grateful for the paralegals and attorneys I’ve learned from, all of whom are tireless advocates. By meeting farmworkers where they are, I hope we can bring more dignity to their work by informing workers that we exist to serve them, that they have rights, and that we will work as hard as possible to ensure they’re upheld. 

Endless tomato fields in the foothills of the Smoky Mountains of northeastern Tennessee. 

A tree nursery in Middle Tennessee. The ornamental trees and flowers grown in these nurseries end up in garden centers across the country. 

A trailer park in Tennessee, an example of where farmworkers are often housed. 

Nourishing Abolition | Chewing the Fat Event ft. Jalal Sabur and Mike Capers

Warmed by a crackling fire under the Lazarus pavilion and nourished by miso-broth and toasted cinnamon bread, students and community members from all disciplines— the CT BIPOC food network, the Yale School of Drama, Yale School of the Environment, Yale College, the Yale Prison Education Initiative fellowship— gathered as the sun set over Edwards Street after a 60-degree day, to learn more about Sweet Freedom Farm.

On Thursday, November 16th, YSFP had the honor of hosting Jalal Sabur and Mike Capers of Sweet Freedom Farm for a Chewing The Fat event. The event was co-hosted by the Yale Undergraduate Prison Project.

“Grow Food Not Prisons,” opened Jalal and Mike’s slide deck, as the two began the workshop discussing the intersections of Black land sovereignty and prison abolition. Sweet Freedom's namesake comes from the farm’s maple sugaring practices, which has long been an alternative to cane sugar, sugar whose production historically and presently relies on enslaved labor. Jalal and Mike explained Sweet Freedom’s mission “to positively impact people who are negatively impacted” by the prison-industrial complex, in order to create healing “on both sides of the fence.”

So, how can an abolition framework be actualized? Jalal and Mike elucidated their theory of change, which constitutes “builders, warriors, and weavers,” and layed out four pillars of abolition: divestment from the prison system, investment and nourishment, repair and resilience, and Black land sovereignty.

While Jalal and Mike shared personal and professional experiences throughout their presentation to visualize modes of abolition, their presentation was rooted in the long legacy of abolitionist history. A slide depicted a painting where we could see a pair of hands and a head being braided and wrapped in green leaves and vines. If you look closer, one can see literal seeds being braided into the hair. Jalal shared that the painting is used at Soul Fire Farm, and references that when enslaved people were abducted to the United States, people would braid seeds in their hair, carrying the resources for nourishment across continents. People who were enslaved, Jalal notes, had immense knowledge of the lands they were being taken from.

Photos of Freedom Fighters such as Harriet Tubman soon followed. A photo of Malcom X with his quote “Land is the basis for all Freedom, justice and equality,” projected under the Lazarus Pavilion as Jalal and Mike discussed how land sovereignty and food access has played and continue to play an integral role in Black freedom movements across generations, from Tubman to incarcerated Black Panthers to Sweet Freedom Farm.

Sweet Freedom Farm is located in Germantown, NY. Germantown is located in the Hudson Valley, a majority-white and affluent area. Jalal and Mike emphasized how the Farm’s very existence is powerful, working to normalize the presence of Black farmers in the area.

As of 2022, one percent of farms are owned by Black farmers in the United States, but that was not always the case. Jalal and Mike shared historical legislation during the Nixon administration’s infamous War on Drugs that increased both industrial farming and the prison industrial systems: the number of small farms in these years went down, the number of Americans in prison skyrocketed. Mike also noted that as he was pursuing his Associate’s Degree through the Bard Prison Initiative, he learned just how much tax money goes to benefit the prison industrial complex, and began to understand how food and health care access is tied to incarceration rates in neighborhoods in New York.

The prison industrial complex affects both those inside and outside prisons; Sweet Freedom distributes fresh produce to the families of people who are incarcerated and engages impacted communities in education about abolition and land sovereignty, informing the next generation of farmers. Sweet Freedom used to supply produce packages to be brought inside prison facilities by family members. However, in 2022, New York banned bringing fresh produce inside, limiting parcels to vendors certified by the Department of Correction; huge price hikes on produce made those products largely inaccessible for families and inmates. For example, a mango that might cost $.99 in the grocery store is $4.50 through the prison vendor. After this policy change, Sweet Freedom pivoted to movement work, participating in advocacy to get the state to reverse the ban. Simultaneously, the group pivoted towards abolition education for affected communities and providing for families impacted by the prison system.

After the slide presentation, participants —which included undergraduates, New Haven and Connecticut community members, and program participants with Sweet Freedom— had the opportunity to talk about their personal understandings of abolition and connect about their work and ideas.

Much gratitude to Jalal and Mike, the YUPP coordinators, the YSFP coordinators, and everyone who came to the Old Acre on a chilly fall night.

Photos from the event by Kavya Jain ‘25 can be found here.

Alumni Interviews | Joshua Evans ’12

You might know that miso is tasty. But did you know that it can contain never-before-seen forms of life? In the latest installment of our alumni interview series, Joshua Evans ’12 shares these and other findings from a decade in food research. A former Events and Farm Manager at the YSFP, Evans journeyed from New Haven to Copenhagen to explore fermentation and entomophagy at the Nordic Food Lab. Now, as director of the Sustainable Food Innovation Group at the Danish Technical University's Center for Biosustainability, he combines culinary research and development, natural sciences, environmental humanities, and more to explore how we might create a more sustainable and delicious food system. 

This conversation is part of a Voices series about the exciting work YSFP alumni are doing in the world of food and agriculture. The transcript has been edited lightly for length and clarity.

Let’s start at the beginning: where does your interest in food and food research come from?

It goes back to a lot of experiences in my childhood. I grew up in Canada, on Vancouver Island. My dad grew up in Northern Ontario, where there's not a lot of people. Instead, there's a lot of lakes and a lot of space. He grew up fishing and hunting for ducks. Through him, I remember having some profound early experiences, like catching my first rainbow trout. It was just me and him, in a canoe on a lake, early in the morning, and the sky was the same color as the skin of the rainbow trout. I remember him showing me how to hit the trout on the head the right way to kill it well. It was an encounter with the immediacy of taking life, and that being necessary for our own life. The question, at least for me, was less about whether to take life or not — because to persist we must — and more about how to do it well: a question of quality. There were other experiences that I had, fishing with him or picking wild blackberries or hanging around the garden growing up. I always had this sense of glimpsing something that was deeply meaningful. I didn't really understand why, but I felt it.

That explicit understanding only came later, in my teenage years, when I started reading books on food and agriculture by Michael Pollan and others. Suddenly I gained a language for making sense of those profound encounters with these larger webs of life, and how eating necessarily tied me to those. That was one of the reasons why I wanted to go to and ultimately chose Yale, because in the late 2000s, there weren't so many universities that had on-campus farms, and even fewer that had programming around them. The YSFP was the place where I felt like it was possible to explore all the different connections that food had to all these different disciplines in a way that felt really valuable and rare. 

After graduating, I moved to Copenhagen to do culinary research and development with the restaurant Noma through their Nordic Food Lab. It was a place that was deliberately set up to be between the academic world and the restaurant industry, to bring together people from these different worlds to explore the flavors and edible biodiversity of the Nordic region. There, especially through a big research project on insect gastronomy around the world, I became really interested in how different knowledge systems interact or fail to. So much of what we were doing — with the insects, with wild plants, with adapting traditional fermentations — inevitably came back to the synergies and the tensions between scientific knowledge and more traditional knowledge systems. That's what led me to study history & philosophy of science and science & technology studies in grad school. And that's what brought me to where I am now, where I have this research group in Copenhagen. We're using transdisciplinary culinary research and development to not just make new products, but to envision more diverse, sustainable ways of eating. We’re trying to use food innovation as a way to connect to and strengthen traditions rather than make them obsolete or somehow be in conflict with them.

Your online description of the Sustainable Food Innovation Group mentions all these interconnected food systems challenges — diversity, knowledge privatization, nutrition — and at the end of that list, you include blandness. How do taste and blandness fit into the bigger picture of these food systems challenges that you're trying to address?

I very deliberately put blandness alongside these other grand challenges as something that demands, I think, equal attention and urgency. I am of course not the first to call attention to this — Slow Food for example has been doing so for decades now — but in many circles, it's still really radical to propose that lack of flavor is correlated with lack of diversity, or that monoculture flavor is necessarily related to the monoculture that we see in agroecology and in our diets. Particularly at Nordic Food Lab, after visiting farmers and fermenters and food producers around the world, I started to notice certain patterns. Even though they can be in wildly different places and use wildly different methods, I've noticed — again, not as the first by any means, but another voice adding to the choir — that the most arresting, complex flavors often arise in contexts that are more diverse. They are structured by a certain orientation to the world. It's not about control. It's also not about being totally hands off. It's something in between. It's something more like tinkering: being involved, pretending neither to be masterful nor absolved. So following that kind of flavor will often lead us to cultivate those kinds of relationships with other species and those kinds of systems of farming or food production. 

This ‘in-between’ way of relating to other forms of life is something I've noticed with a lot of fermenters in particular. Maybe it’s something about our relationship with microbes — how tractable, how close to hand, but also how indirect those relationships are. Many microbes are not immediately visible, but they're sensible through their effects. Of course, there are many different ways of approaching fermentation. A more industrial way is predicated on as much control as possible. You can also be too hands off. If you're too hands off, then it just becomes rot.

I have a number of friends brewing kombucha under their bed who I think are maybe a little too close to that end of the spectrum.

And that’s cool! I’m all for experimenting, and far from it for me to tell anyone how they ‘should’ ferment or not — that’s definitely not what I’m talking about. But I think we've all tasted kombucha which is basically just vinegar, and it's not the most pleasant experience. I also don't think it's the most nuanced or rarefied or beautiful expression of what kombucha can be, because if you go too far in that direction, all kombucha just becomes acetic acid. That’s a good example of where there is a correlation between this in-between sweet spot of flavor and a kind of in-between ethics and politics of agency. I think there's a more general lesson in there about how to interact with other species. 

What you're saying about tinkering and exploring the limits of human control makes a lot of sense as someone coming from a researcher's perspective. What is the role of research in shaping a more sustainable and equitable and delicious food system? 

I think research can be a really powerful tool for supporting the kinds of transitions we want to see in food and agriculture. But of course, it doesn't necessarily do that. Most research in food is based in or adjacent to industry. That’s not to vilify industry entirely, because industry can also be variegated; but only to say that research is not necessarily transformative. However, I think we can be deliberate and try to design our research in a way that is as supportive of transformation as possible. For example, much of our work with fermentation involves DNA sequencing and metabolomics: high-tech stuff that can give us valuable knowledge, but that can also cost a lot of money. It's the sort of analysis that most traditional or DIY food producers don't have access to. I'm really interested in what happens if we give those tools to fermenters and food producers and say, ‘What would you like to know about the microbes that you work with? How can we design experiments together that can create knowledge that can actually feed back into your craft-based process? Can we use some of this high-tech science and interdisciplinary research not to help industry earn more profit, but to help other kinds of producers continue and deepen their practice that is more oriented towards diversity?’ For me, that’s one kind of research — inclusive, participatory, open-ended — that can help shape a more sustainable, equitable, and delicious food system.

I saw the paper that came out last month from the Sustainable Food Innovation Group about microbes and novel misos. Was that approach at play in the design of the study?

Yes! That paper comes out of my PhD, the seed of which comes from the work we were doing at Nordic Food Lab. At that time we were starting to develop what we might call ‘translated’ fermentations: combining techniques from different parts of the world with local ingredients, in the same way we might translate a book from one language into another, to make something that is old and new at the same time. One of the first fermentations we developed at Nordic Food Lab — shoutout to my old colleague Lars Williams who made it — was a miso using pearl barley kōji and yellow peas, whereas traditionally in Japan it would be based on soybeans and rice. So it's definitely a miso, but it had this very un-Japanese, very Nordic taste because of the peas — something that, if you’re a Dane, your grandmother might have served you cooked into a stew. As I learned more about the microbiology behind what we were doing, and how quickly microbes can adapt to new environments, it appeared likely to me that the chefs I was working with weren't just creating new flavors, which was their goal, but that they might also be bringing new forms of life into the world without even realizing it or trying to. We didn’t quite have the capacity at Nordic Food Lab to answer that kind of question ourselves, so in my PhD, I wanted to bring the scientific resources I had access to back to my culinary colleagues to study these novel, ‘translated’ fermentations together. We decided to use DNA sequencing to see, if we vary the substrates using the same recipe, does that lead to different microbial ecologies, maybe even new evolutionary lineages, new species or subspecies or strains, niches for new biodiversity? The short answer is yes — but of course, there's more complexity to it. For anyone who's interested, I can recommend reading the paper, and we have more papers coming out soon going deeper into this topic.

You’ve mentioned how your time at the YSFP shaped your future trajectory. How did the YSFP change the way you think about food? Were there moments on the Farm that felt like important transitions for you? 

There were so many moments of learning in and around the Farm for me. It’s hard to point to any single one; I think it was more about the process or the rhythm. I joined the YSFP as an events intern at the start of my sophomore year, continuing for the rest of my time at Yale, and I was also a farm manager in my senior year. Friday afternoons became this ritual special time at the end of the week. I would notice how the same dough recipe would change as the season got cooler and then warmed up again in the spring. I would notice all the interlocking seasons for the different crops as they would appear and then bloom and fade from the pizzas. Somehow the pizzas became this prism — one could see the distillation of the land around us in this little circumference of dough. If there’s one thing I think of with my time at the YSFP, I think of this feeling of process and overlapping rhythms that extend in time, all of those movements and changes in the land over multiple years, and noticing how our tastes and practices of care shaped and were in turn shaped by that land. That reciprocity has shaped how I approach cooking, how I approach research, and why I’ve gone on to do what I have.

Animacy, Agency, and Agroforestry | knead 2 know ft. Rebecca Salazar '26

Although the morning was gray and overcast, blue skies emerged from behind the clouds for our final workday of the semester. Students, too, departed from dorm rooms and libraries to gather on the Farm one last time before winter arrives. Half the group took shovels to aging Halloween pumpkins, slicing and dicing the gourds into rich material for our compost pile. Other students spent a meditative hour breaking up garlic heads and sowing the cloves, laying the groundwork for next year's pizza toppings. Many breaks were taken to enjoy carrots fresh from the field, their sweetness amplified by the first frost of the season.

Students then climbed up the hill for a slightly heartier snack, as the pizza team served up pies topped with peppers, squash, and all sorts of delicious vegetables. While they ate, they listened to a fascinating knead 2 know by Lazarus Summer Intern and Native American Cultural Center and YSFP Seedkeeper and Programs Liaison Rebecca Salazar '26. Salazar's talk, delivered in partnership with the NACC’s Henry Roe Cloud Conference, focused on the relationship between Indigenous peoples and plant spirits as shown through the Three Sisters of squash, beans, and corn. 

Salazar explained that Eurocentric academic language not only obscures the purpose of practices like shifting cultivation but also misses the spiritual significance of Indigenous knowledge and foodways. She added that using terms like “Abya Yala,” which in the Kuna language means “land in its full maturity” or “land of vital blood,” “presents an ideological resistance to nationalist terms like ‘America’ and reaffirms the view of a unified continent which has its own life and spirit.” 

Salazar then articulated how "animacy, agency, and agroforestry" are intertwined through the cultivation of the Three Sisters and the milpa crop-growing system. She described the co-evolution between plants and people as “symbiosis,” not “domestication.” She detailed the history of this co-evolution, its role in Indigenous cosmology, and the medicinal, nutritional, ecological, and political benefits of milpa agriculture. For example, intercropping reduces erosion, while polycultures tend to produce more energy and thus greater food security. Milpa also offers a space for Indigenous resistance to colonization, as well as respect and acceptance for women who face discrimination in neoliberal markets. For more information on Salazar’s research, listen to her podcast reflecting on her summer as a Lazarus Summer Intern. 
After the knead 2 know, attendees warmed their hands around the fire pit, enjoyed hot apple cider and cake in celebration of the NACC's tenth anniversary, and watched a beautiful sunset while listening to School of Music professor Ian MacMillen and his band, Scrimshaw Foes. We thank Salazar for leading such an insightful talk and all the attendees who gathered with us for one last workday. Photos from the event by Reese Neal ’25 are available here.

Farmworkers' Rights, Marimbas, and Dancing in the Moonlight | knead 2 know ft. Bea Portela '24

There was a fantastic turnout at the Friday workday and all the tasks were completed in record time. Not only did students tidy up multiple different tunnels around the Farm, they also raked fallen leaves, removed hops vines, and turned the compost. All in all, it was a highly productive session and we are super grateful for the wonderful sense of community throughout the day. 

It was then time for Global Food Fellow Bea Portela '24 to present her knead 2 know. Through her summer internship at Southern Migrant Legal Services, Portela immersed herself in the advocating process via direct outreach to farmworkers. “They don’t really know about our services,” says Portela, “so it’s up to us to reach out to them and tell them that we exist.” As part of her outreach, Portela got the opportunity to travel to a lot of beautiful places in the south. However, with various ‘private property’ and ‘no trespassing’ signs around the farms, work was both beautiful and challenging. Portela shared with us that working and living conditions of farmworkers were not ideal. Many homes were left unfinished. Some farmworkers lived in makeshift barracks and cramped conditions. Portela believed that it was important for people to understand the conditions that farmworkers were living with, in order to emphasize the importance of giving farmworkers the support they need and reaching out to them. 

The farmworkers she talked to were not always receptive due to understandable reasons like fear of retaliation and potential for job blacklisting. If a farmer is not efficient in their work, Portela noted, word can get around the recruiters who have contacts with each other, effectively preventing the farmworker from getting hired anywhere in the United States. Portela with the outreach team ultimately tried a new outreach strategy towards the end of her internship that she calls “the tentacle approach”, which essentially meant that the legal aids were  talking not only to farm workers but also people in the community connected with them including family and friends, former employees, community leaders, local immigration advocates, and more. This, while Portela experienced only once, already proved to be very successful and a more effective way to do outreach.

Afterward, the Yale Marimband performed for the first time on the Yale Farm. There was nothing quite like it: attendees got up and danced as fun rhythms rang through the air. Cheers and laughter ended the day on a high note, marking the performance a resounding hit. Intercultural Moonlight Stories the same night was also a success. With s’mores, hot chocolate, tea, and a campfire warming everyone up in the chilly night, we witnessed so much talent from singing to poetry reading to kazoos to group performances and more under the moonlight. The group cheered each other on in a supportive, intimate atmosphere. 

In accordance with daylight savings ending, the next (and last!) knead 2 know of the semester on Friday, November 10th will start at 3:30 PM EST. Lazarus Summer Intern Rebecca Salazar will be talking about her podcast episode titled “The Three Sisters of Abya Yala: Mesoamerican Histories of Agroforestry, Animacy, and Agency”. The event will be in collaboration with the Henry Roe Cloud Conference timed with the 10th year celebration of the Yale Native American Cultural Center. 

Photos by Reese Neal '25 from this past week’s knead 2 know can be found here.

Fall Feast

What a day October 27 was on the farm! Our annual Indigenous Fall Feast could not have been met with better weather. The meal — three sisters succotash, wild rice salad, beet poke, sunflower chia pudding, white cap cornbread, oh my — was sourced from the Old Acre, local vendors, and Indigenous producers in Hawaii and Turtle Island. Producers included Massaro Community Farm, Mexican Amaranth, Noh Foods of Hawai’i, Romona’s American Indian Foods, Red Lake Nation Foods, Schoolyard Sugarbush, Séka Hills, and Sweetgrass Trading Co.

The event honored the Three Sisters, corn, beans, and squash, grown on the Farm and gifted by Abenaki Seedkeeper Liz Charlebois, and served as a celebration of Indigenous foodways.

It was such a joy to see the community come together and to watch conversations over beautiful food, warmed by the setting sun on a picnic blanket, last into the evening. Our Native American Cultural Center Seedkeepers and Programs Liasons Emerson Harris '26 and Rebecca Salazar '26 welcomed us to the feast, explaining the significance of the three sisters as a means of resisting American settler colonialism. Salazar and Harris offered a poignant critique of Yale’s land acknowledgment and spoke of indigenous resistance to dispossession. To learn more about the history, meaning, and utility of the Three Sisters, listen to Salazar’s podcast, “The Three Sisters of Abya Yala: Mesoamerican Histories of Agroforestry, Animacy, and Agency,” produced this summer as part of the Lazarus Summer Internship The podcast can be found here. Salazar will also be presenting her summer research at our last knead 2 know of the semester, on November 10th.

The line for the feast commenced after the land acknowledgment and gratitude to the organizers was shared. Soon, groups spread across the hill, sitting on picnic blankets while student performers Pilar Bylinsky '25 and Ryan Bibb '25 sounds spread throughout the Old Acre.

After all the cornbread was consumed, the evening concluded with Semilla Collective's Jarocho performance group Son Chaneques Rebeldes.

Conversation, in the Lazarus Pavillion and on picnic blankets spread on the hill, lasted late into the evening, augmented by the beautiful setting fall sun. Students were able to take a piece of Fall Feast home in ʻōlena-dyed cotton gift satchels, which contained rattlesnake beans, white cap corn, buffalo creek squash, hawaiian pink salt, and dried ʻōlena.

Many thanks to the Native American Cultural Center, the Native and Indigenous Students Association at Yale, and the Ethnicity, Race, and Migration Department for co-sponsoring this event. Photos from the event by Reese Neal '25 can be accessed here.

Oysters and Sunshine | knead 2 know ft. Elizabeth Chivers '26

Friday, October 13th saw a bright sunny sky, which supercharged a very productive workday at the Yale Farm. Among merry chatter people uncovered sweet potatoes, strung red pepper ristras, and harvested basil in large buckets. In the midst of mid autumn stress, workday participants also dyed strips of fabric into a dye bath of turmeric powder and ʻŌlena. Soon the fabric will be knitted together and strung up into a garland to adorn the Lazarus Pavilion during the Indigenous Fall Feast later this month. After a full fall workday, everyone made their way to the pavilion afterwards to listen to the Friday talk by Yale sophomore Elizabeth Chivers ’26. 

Chivers was a Lazarus Summer Intern this summer who undertook independent research over the summer about the dynamics of change, relationships, and industry in the Point Judith Pond Oyster Farms with the goal of answering one question: “What are the defining practices and economics of Southern Rhode Island’s oyster aquaculture?” She conversed with three local farmers on-the-ground to hear their experiences on practices, as well as how the practices have changed in response to global warming over the years. 

Among the interviewees was Harvey Cataldo, founder and owner of Bluff Hill Cove Oyster Company. The primary method used by their farm is the floating bag system, where the mechanisms are spread out horizontally over the ocean’s surface. Chivers also added discussion about how climate change has impacted the industry from the point of view of people constantly engaged in it, highlighting to the audience how global warming results in higher water temperatures, which in turn leads to higher bacteria growth in the sea. This results in a higher likelihood of people getting sick from seafood, a challenge that those in the oyster industry have had to face more and more urgently in recent years. Another interviewee was Chris Morris, a fisherman and a lifelong resident of Rhode Island, who discussed his first-hand observations of oyster farming throughout his many years as an active member. His individual perspective provided a complementary contrast to Cataldo’s larger-scale one. The third interviewee was Mick Chivers, a college student receiving mentorship from Cataldo and Morris as someone new to the industry. The intensive interview-based project drew observations in three primary realms, namely the changes oyster farms have noted from warming sea waters, the relationships between people in the industry, and how technology and policy have shaped the industry as we know it today. 

Chivers’ personal connection to her research project led to a high-impact presentation, which was then followed by inspiring and thoughtful conversation as The New Blue a cappella group performed. Read her Voices post recapping more of her project here. Pizza and concord grapes made their way through the crowd as the sun began to set. 

Photos from the event by Elio Wentzel ’26 and Arrow Zhang ’26 can be found here. 

Poetry, Food, and Archives | knead 2 know feat. Kavya Jain '25

“Peanut Butter” by Eileen Myles

Kavya Jain '25 presenting her knead 2 know

Song Writing Collective Member singing

Barley and Yale Hops brew heating up

Song Writing Collective Member singing

Here at the Yale Sustainable Food Program, we like to think we go against the grain — but sometimes, that means working with the grain. On Friday, October 6, students started on a batch of Yale Ale using malted barley and hops from the Old Acre. If all goes according to plan, the mixture will ferment into a delicious brew over the next few weeks (by the time you’re reading this, spoiler alert: it did). While some students stirred the pot inside the propagation house, others sowed heirloom wheat and rye seeds in the fields. The rye will be harvested next July as part of the Yale Summer Session course “Rye: Cultural History and Embodied Practice” (co-taught by farm manager Jeremy Oldfield and Maria Trumpler).

Students then washed their hands and turned their attention to a different carbohydrate: pizza. While they enjoyed the delicious pies topped with apples, eggplant, and everything in between, they listened to a fascinating presentation by Global Food Fellow Kavya Jain '25.

Jain’s fellowship was inspired by a project for the class “Poets and their Papers.” While exploring the archives of poet Mei-mei Berssenbrugge in the Beinecke Library, Jain found an exhibition guide from the painter Georgia O’Keeffe. Jain learned that Berssenbrugge was a friend of O’Keeffe’s and regularly shared meals with her. She set out to explore how meals function as a site of poetic imagination, traveling to rural New Mexico to interview Berssenbrugge directly.

The initial conversation with Berssenbrugge was disappointing for Jain. The poet expressed hostility toward Jain’s project, failing to see the connection between food and art. In many of her papers, too, Berssenbrugge implies that the two are in conflict, expressing anxiety over her body and suggesting that devoting effort to food takes energy away from writing. 

Although Jain found the interview difficult, her further work helped her make sense of the conversation. After reading the book Women, The New York School, and Other True Abstractions and talking with New Mexican poet and farmer Mallika Singh, Jain saw how gender and generation might have shaped her and Berssenbrugge’s relationship with food in different ways. 

As the summer progressed, Jain also started to reframe her research question. She held a Zoom call with a member of the Red Flower Collective, an art and research collective that explores queer and diasporic identities through home cooking. The conversation led her to ask not only how food exists in poetry archives, but also how poetics might serve to archive food practices. Upon returning to New Haven, she hosted her own archive-making meal, asking friends to respond to the poem “Peanut Butter” by Eileen Myles and to reinterpret the evening’s menu in a way that aspired to abstraction, not perfection. 

Jain ended the presentation with an exhortation to “eat, read poems, and keep your papers” — useful reminders for us all. Fittingly, we had the Yale Song Writing Collective have their members perform original songs while we continued to think about poetry and eat pizza. We thank Jain for her insightful presentation and everyone who gathered on the Farm to hear it. Photos of the workday and knead 2 know by Reese Neal '25 are available here. 

Fair Trade Debunked | LSI '23

This post is part of Jasmine Jones’ 2023 Lazarus Summer Internship.

From the beginning, I knew that I would use this summer as an opportunity to delve into my longstanding interest in the Fair Trade movement as a gateway to ethical business. However, little did I know that I would end up “debunking” the Fair Trade model. My guiding question throughout my research was “In a global trade system faced with inhumane labor exploitation and environmental destruction, what have been the main approaches to conducting ethical business?” My perception and understanding of the word Fair Trade have transformed these past few months and pushed me to question what I value in an ethical business. 

At the start of this project, I simply wanted to focus on consumer education and spreading the word about Fair Trade labels and the impactful work they are doing for laborers and the environment. However, somewhere along the line, I discovered criticisms of Fair Trade and how this was leading to emerging counter initiatives. I eventually found it more fitting to take apart the word “Fair Trade” and discuss what these labels mean, their origins, importance, effectiveness, criticisms, and the overall global response. There is a lot to tackle with 400 plus Fair Trade labels. Therefore, I found it most effective to structure my project as first, a general introduction to what Fair Trade is and its history that concerns discussions of colonialism, industrialization, and consumer consciousness. I followed with a discussion of why Fair Trade is important through an analysis of 6 key standards of the certification (Price Floor, Premium, Stability & Credit, Working Conditions, Institutional Structure, and Environmental Protection). Then, I discussed the economics of Fair Trade and Development Economics as a reminder that Fair Trade and its partners all abide by the realities of global trade. Following this I looked into 5 key areas of criticism for Fair Trade including Inefficient Positive Economic Impact, Market Inequalities, Certification Exclusion, Label Fatigue, and Greenwashing. Furthermore, I pursued case studies in the organization Fairtrade International and the company McDonald’s as a comparative analysis of a third-party verifying organization versus an independent company with self-certification standards. In the end, instead of reaching a definitive conclusion on the Fair Trade model, I developed visions for the future to expand the Fair Trade movement. By addressing wants, incentives, and accountability for both Fair Trade and independent company Green Standards, there will be progress toward addressing the flaws in the global exchange of goods.

Overall, with this “debunk” I exposed new approaches to look at Fair Trade and areas for improvement. However, I still plan to support Fair Trade as it is the most reputable on a large scale. I am excited to see how this movement evolves in the future and to reach the ultimate goal of welfare and transparency in ethical business. 

You can view my slides here!

The Effects of the Old Acre’s Hill on Its Soil | LSI '23

This post is part of Pete Muhitch’s 2023 O’Donohue Summer Fellowship.

The Yale Farm’s slope uniquely impacts both its above-ground management and the structure and properties of the soil that lies beneath. Along the farm’s hill, are a series of berms running north to south. The berms, consisting of a wonderful variety of perennial herbs and flowers, are in place to mitigate runoff, erosion, and leaching, and carve out a flatter surface for crop production. Pictured below is a map and picture of the farm from the perspective of the path between beds 2U and MAPLE. The yellow lines highlight the elevation change of the land, while the blue lines highlight the berms. 

On its own small scale, the Old Acre slope and its terraces tie the Yale Farm into a global history of farming on hillsides. Indeed numerous societies across the world have employed terracing techniques to transform thin-soiled slopes into soils viable for agriculture. A cursory wikipedia search offers rice farming in mountainous areas of Vietnam as one prime example. 

Topography is a major factor of a given soil’s development. As biological, chemical, and physical processes weather a parent rock (in the case of the Yale Farm, a reddish sandstone called New Haven Arkose) into soil, gravity can transport soil particles depending on an area's topography. Pictured below is a slide adapted from a presentation from Scott Fendorf PhD, a Stanford University soil scientist. This topography principle suggests that soils at the base of a slope tend to be deeper and wetter, as a result of the leaching and accumulation of fine-particle clays from the upper parts of the slopes. Soils on a slope, therefore, will be shallower and more rich in heavier sand particles, and resultantly are well drained. 

With a historic and scientific backdrop of hillside farming, this project aims to study what effects, if any, the slope has yield on the farm’s soil in varying locations. Acknowledging my own lack of expertise in soil science, to the best of my abilities, the goals of this project were to (1) determine the chemical and physical properties of the Yale Farm soil, (2) determine any variance in soil properties versus soil position on the slope, and (3) determine any variance between cultivated and uncultivated soils. In pursuit of accomplishing these goals, I was able to practice soil field analysis techniques, offer scientific suggestions for patterns in the soils, and further inform one thread of the farm’s narrative (its hill!) with data collected. 

A series of four holes were dug to study these thoughts. Though more holes would increase the accuracy of the project, at a certain point too many holes would be beyond the scope of the project (digging is laborious and impractical for the farm). The location of each hole is denoted with an ‘X’ in the map above. Each site was selected to form a line down the hillside, in order to compare the soil at various points along the slope. A hole was additionally dug in field 2M to discover the effects twenty years of agriculture has had on the soil there, compared to the rest of the hill around it. At each site, the soil’s horizons, depth, texture, aggregation, relative wetness, color, and nutrient content was assessed. Texture was determined using the wire method; the Munsell soil color guidebook was used to determine color and aggregation; samples of the near-surface soil of each site were collected and sent to the University of Connecticut soil nutrient laboratory for analysis. Below are the physical results of the project. 

Hill, 41.32041 N, 72.92198 W:

The soil at the hill site consisted of a sandy, well drained, reddish soil (increasing numbers before YR in the color column denotes a change in hue from red to yellow, i.e lower numbers before YR mean a redder hue). After around 26 inches of digging, I reached what I refer to (throughout this project) as the soil’s BC horizon. Though not quite a C horizon of unconsolidated rock, the BC horizon still largely contains soil particles, but is significantly rockier (and more annoying to dig) than the B horizon that lies above. At the risk of oversimplification, I will describe basic soil horizons: an O horizon consists of organic matter and detritus at the surface of the ground; an A horizon is the uppermost soil level, typically high in organic matter and home to plant roots; the B horizon is found below the A, and is lower in organic matter but higher in rock derived nutrients, which are weathered from the C horizon; the C horizon is unconsolidated rock material, just starting to be weathered in soil. Beneath the C horizon is rock. Texture and color changes commonly denote a change in horizon. 

Upper farm, 41.32036 N, 72.92130 W:

The upper farm hole was the most difficult and confusing hole of the project. The soil there is very compacted, sandy (to the point I could not form a ball for the texture test), and shallow. After 28 inches of hard digging, I reached what I believed to be a C layer of solid, impenetrable red rock. This soil presented the same red hue as the hill site.

Field 2M, 41.32036 N, 72.92132 W:

Field 2M yielded a greater clay content than the two higher dig locations. This included a Bt horizon, referring to a translocation, or leaching, of clay to the B horizon of more than 20% increase from the upper horizon. 2M is also deeper (requiring 33 inches of digging before the BC layer was reached) and of a more yellow hue than the upper locations. The relative moisture of this site is altered by the field’s irrigation, resulting in a very dry surface soil, but wetter in the more clay-rich deeper regions. 

Lower farm, 41.32036 N, 72.92133 W:

The most clay rich soil was found at the lowest dig site, which aligns with the topography principle of soil formation. This hole had the same yellow-ish hue of 2M, but required more than 43 inches of digging before any semblance of a BC horizon was reached. As a result of its clay content, it was the moistest soil of the project as well. 

Overall physical results: 

**relative wetness affected by irrigation schedules 

The principle of topography and resulting soil properties largely hold true on the old acre. Lower dig sites tended to yield wetter, deeper, more clay rich soils, while the upper two sites were sandier, shallower, and drier. The upper farm site does preclude the farm from perfectly following the topography principle, with abnormally shallow and coarse for its slope position. This could be due to leaching from the slope it is on, but also could be a result of other factors, such as the berm lying above it trapping erosion from the upper slope, or the many tree roots that surround it. Another perennial possibility is that the land was altered by unbeknownst human activity. Upper soils also tended to be redder. I offer the following explanation: soil color is largely determined by the predominant oxidation state of the soil’s iron. Given the difference in moisture and other physical properties of the upper and lower dig sites, the iron oxidation could be likewise different, explaining the color difference. 

The topography principle also has implications for a soil’s nutrient content. Nutrient leaching will often occur on slopes as a result of runoff, causing nutrients to settle at the bottom of a hill. Moreover, clays and organic matter, also more abundant at a hill’s base, generally have a greater capacity to hold nutrients due to greater particle surface area.

Hill: 

Upper Farm:

2M:

Lower Farm:

Overall there does appear to be a greater concentration of nutrients, and a higher pH, at the base of the hill on the farm. While it is possible that this is due in part to topography and the accumulation of clay there, it is likely because the soils of the farm have been affected by 20 years of fertilization and lime application. It is therefore clear that years of farming has drastically increased the soil’s fertility and improved its pH. These improvements appear to not be limited to the field 2M, the only site currently being cultivated, but extend to the other on-farm sites (upper and lower farm holes). This could be a result of leaching of fertilizer, or due to an accumulation of nutrients at the base of the steeped part of the hill. Regardless, the data shows a greater nutrient content, pH, cation exchange capacity, and base saturation in the three on-farm soils tested in contrast to the hill site. 

Revisiting the goals of the project, the four holes dug largely appear to uphold the topography principle of soil formation, as the project does show a trend of deeper, more clay rich and fertile soils at the base of the hill. Cultivated soils also tend to be more fertile and higher in pH, but this does not appear to be localized to beds that are currently being cultivated. Personally, it was great fun to get dirty, dig some holes, and practice some soil science techniques while investigating this unique characteristic of the Yale farm. 

Dynamics of Change, Relationships, and Industry; Point Judith Pond Oyster Farmers’ Reflections | LSI '23

This post is part of Elizabeth Chiver’s 2023 Lazarus Summer Internship.

I grew up with four brothers in Rhode Island, where we were raised by two distinctively wise parents who loved teaching us. One central part of this education-rich upbringing was the way we explored and strengthened the capacity to sustain ourselves and others using the land and sea surrounding our home. We dug, weeded, raked, fed, harvested, and caught in the blooming backyard, shallow salt ponds, messy coops, and open ocean that I call home. It was a vein of my life that so wholly centered a meaningful ethos and community. Ths vein is even more present in the experiences of my father and many of his friends, who engage with these practices on an industry level. The understandings and ways of learning cultivated by growing up in this context have been deeply defining to my personhood and perspective. When I was offered the opportunity to delve into a food-related topic for my independent project, I knew I wanted to return to my home state and communities, centering the breadth of experience, knowledge, and sovereignty that food producers in the area possess. One industry that particularly interested me was the oyster aquaculture industry, which is blossoming, sustainable, and local in ways inherent to its product and contexts. I decided to conduct interviews with oyster farmers who work in the Point Judith Salt Pond and ended up centering three–Chris Morris, Harvey Cataldo, and Mick Chivers–who all share common connections. I wanted this to be guided by their voices and reflections, rather than preconceived vision, so my research question was loose, asking “what are the defining practices and economics of Southern Rhode Island’s oyster aquaculture?” 

I headed to the salt pond a few times, each day with a list of questions and an open mind. Standing on the docks, we looked over the gear and bags as each of the interviewees reflected broadly on their skills, contexts, and work. The focus shifted; as I conducted my interviews with these farmers, I noticed the topics that kept cropping up and the threads that connected them to one another. I was left with hours of recorded interviews rich with parallels and intersections going far deeper and beyond just “defining practices and economics.” Those were certainly central aspects of the conversation, but I noticed that the reflections and memories shared in the interviews were defined by three core dynamics – change, relationships, and industry. Further, one relationship in particular stuck out as a root for each person’s connection to the work – that with brother, fisherman, mentor, and lifelong Rhode Islander Tom Hoxsie, who passed away in 2021. With this in mind, I opted to write an account of what was pertinent and omnipresent throughout these interviews, with the aim of highlighting the knowledge and recollections of these three different individuals, with their varied positionalities and perspectives.

My final project takes the form of a written piece. On an academic level, it provided me an opportunity to attempt new ways of learning and sharing information in a way that was true to the interviewees that first held and shared it. The project involved learning to utilize new technology, conducting dynamic interviews, responding to a depth of information, and synthesizing different but overlapping voices into an informative, truthful piece. The material and experience garnered throughout this project is thanks to the farmers who shared their labor and minds with me and my Sony recorder. The gift of their rich voices enables so much further thought on what the food and fishing industry looks like, particularly at this personal scale. It is clear that relationships to land and sustenance (of self, of community, of climate) are vital ones, as seen in their experiences, in my childhood, and wherever people grow and eat. 

This writing is linked here (in progress). It centers the knowledge and memory expressed by these farmers, with the aim of accurately recording these practitioners' reflections on their defining practices and experiences of the industry, one which lends itself well to sustainability, growth, and small-scale ownership.

Additionally, the slides I used for my presentation are linked here.

The Three Sisters of Abya Yala: Mesoamerican Histories of Agroforestry, Animacy, and Agency | LSI '23

This post is part of Rebecca Salazar’s 2023 Lazarus Summer Internship.

A bit on creating a podcast episode for my independent project: I chose to record a short pilot episode for my project because I wanted to move away from the traditional written academic work and think about how sound and movement, all those things that contribute to the animacy of life, cannot be flattened down into the written word. In the podcast I reflect on my positionality as a reconnecting native who was raised mestize but prefers to take on the placeholder of xicanx identity. My experience in dissecting why the Three Sisters is a site of resistance and rematriation has been the basis of my understanding of the role of seedkeeper as somebody who maintains the sanctity of plant-human relationships and can place them in terms of the community-identity that characterizes diverse indigenous communities. The cross-time and cross-generation relationship or kinship building that maintains life and culture today has given me hope for our relationship to the earth and the role of indigenous activists, farmers, scholars, and people to lead the way in restoring human-non-human relationships during the growth of climate change as a symptom of neocolonialism. 

Listen to the podcast episode The Three Sisters of Abya Yala: Mesoamerican Histories of Agroforestry, Animacy, and Agency below:

Making a Yale Farm Olla: An Exploration of Soil Composition and Traditional Irrigation Practices | LSI '23

This post is part of Calista Washburn’s 2023 Lazarus Summer Internship.

For several months this summer, sections of the grassy and peaceful Yale Farm became a muddy and noisy construction zone. As work crews brought in backhoes and dug trenches across the Farm, installing some critical tech infrastructure for the University, the summer farm team grew accustomed to large piles of soil and yellow work machines dotting the landscape. For me, what began as an annoyance became an exciting opportunity to explore the Farm’s soil.

Piles of soil on the southeast side of the Farm, dug up by construction crews in June and July 2023

While all aspects of soil are important to farmers, it is the organic elements—compost and decayed matter, soil carbon and nitrogen—that seem to get center stage time and time again. As the construction crew dug up more and more of this beautiful red, organic-matter-poor soil, I became increasingly curious about those inorganic components we spend less time thinking about.

I’ve loved ceramics and pottery since middle school, and I have spent hours in the Murray Pottery studio coiling sculptures and throwing wobbly saucers on the wheel. I had heard about the process of harvesting wild clay—clay found in the soil all around us—and was eager to try my hand at it. The piles of topsoil lying around the farm presented the perfect opportunity.

Over the course of the summer, I developed a “wet process” method for harvesting usable clay from the mixture of gravel, sand, silt, clay, and organic matter that comprises the Farm’s soil. Iterated steps of adding water, mixing, letting particles settle, and pouring off the still-suspended smaller particles gave me an experiential understanding of the Farm’s soil makeup.

A bin of Yale Farm clay drying in the sun

My firsthand exploration of clay harvesting at the Farm prompted me to learn more about the relationship between ceramics and agriculture, particularly a ceramic-based irrigation method called “pitcher” or “olla” irrigation. The term “olla” can be used to refer to a wide bodied, narrow-necked earthenware pot that is buried and filled with water in order to irrigate the surrounding soil.

Olla irrigation relies on the porosity of low-fired clay to deliver a steady supply of water right to the roots of crops. Instead of water dripping out at a constant rate, as in drip irrigation, water in a buried olla will seep out as a result of negative pressure created by the dryness of the surrounding soil and water tension. Ollas will irrigate soil when it is dry and there is negative pressure, but cease to irrigate when the soil is wet and the pressure gradient evens out. The combination of this intermittent irrigation and the fact that ollas deliver water right to the root zone with little evaporation makes olla irrigation incredibly efficient.

Source: https://www.permaculturenews.org/2022/11/29/irrigation-with-ollas/

Diagram of a buried olla, with a zone of water seepage

Though it can be used in almost all climates, pitcher irrigation has been prevalent in arid and desert agricultural settings for thousands of years. Farmers have used olla irrigation in China, India, Sri Lanka, the Middle East, the southwest United states and Northern Mexico, and large swathes of Africa. In these places, the water savings of pitcher irrigation have made it possible to grow water-intensive crops—even melons—in the most adverse conditions.

Though it is not a recent development, olla irrigation has become a trendy topic in gardening blogs and other small-scale agricultural resources in the past 10 years, and particularly since 2020. Though the scientific community as a whole has given far less attention to pitcher irrigation, the past decade has seen an increase in interest in pitcher irrigation as a remarkably efficient water-saving technology. More and more studies seek to include pitcher irrigation methods and to quantify and optimize their water savings in different agricultural settings. As droughts plague many parts of the U.S. and the world, and as we are increasingly forced to confront the flaws with modern agricultural technology, olla irrigation is hailed as a tried-and-true method with better results than some—if not all—modern technologies.

The trendiness of ollas among gardening blogs, while it remains relatively obscure within mainstream farming wisdom, has helped me reflect on the ways in which traditional knowledge retains legitimacy in modern agricultural spaces. While small-scale farmers and gardeners tend to value tried-and-true, inherited practices, conventional large-scale agriculture focuses much more on cutting-edge technologies and scientifically-proven numerical optimizations.

In my summer of clay exploration at the Yale Farm, I was able to acquaint myself with clay and pottery in a myriad of its forms, from its origins mixed in the soil to an ultimate fate as a vessel centered in cultural, functional, and historical contexts. I am deeply grateful for the Yale Sustainable Food Program and Lazarus Summer Internship team for their enthusiasm about my experimentation.

Fine Dining and Sustainability in Japan | knead 2 know feat. Mao Shiotsu '24e

Last Friday brought 3.8 inches of rain to the Old Acre, but the rain and wind couldn't keep YSFP-ers away from last week's indoor knead2know. Dozens of students braved the blustery weather to attend the Friday talk by Global Food Fellow Mao Shiotsu '24, who spent the summer in Japan exploring the country's fine dining. 

Previously, Shiotsu took a gap year to study pastry and cuisine in France. After three months of culinary school, she worked in the fine dining restaurant Georges Blanc. “I started thinking a lot about restaurant culture, how dishes are made,” Shiotsu recounted. Contrasting her time in France with her upbringing in Japan, she said, “I started thinking about the differences between the priorities in the dish.” 

Over the course of the summer, Shiotsu spoke to chefs and farmers in many different regions and styles of Japanese cuisine, from the Michelin-starred Muromachi Wakuden in Kyoto to family farms in the countryside of Nara. Everywhere she visited, she was struck by the emphasis on simplicity and local ingredients. In Japan, “a dish with one ingredient can be fine dining” — a sentiment that Shiotsu’s Italian and French colleagues didn’t share. Although those European countries prize their local produce, they place more of an emphasis on the individual chef’s artistry, creativity, and storytelling, Shiotsu said. This is evident in everything from the level of decoration on the plate to the way restaurants are named: in Japan, it’s very uncommon to name a restaurant after the head chef. By comparison, Shiotsu observed that Japanese chefs see themselves as elevating nature, presenting ingredients in the way that best draws out their inherent beauty. As one Japanese chef told her, “Japanese cuisine is not an art, because in art, the artist is the main character.” 

Shiotsu also noticed differences between the two country’s approaches to food waste. In the Japanese restaurants Shiotsu visited, nothing was wasted. Food was sourced from the restaurant’s own gardens or from neighbor’s farms, and anything that wasn’t served to guests would be eaten by staff. At French restaurants, Shiotsu recalled, the chefs often made more meals than they needed and discarded them at the end of the night. 

The discussion gave students plenty to chew on both literally and figuratively, as they enjoyed moon cakes and babka and sipped tea made with the Farm's nettles, ginger, and mint. And there will be much more to ruminate on next week as our knead 2 knows continue with a presentation by Global Food Fellow Kavya Jain ’25. 

Photos from the event by Reese Neal ’25 can be found here.

Cooling the Tropics | Workday and Book Launch feat. Professor Hi'ilei Hobart

Friday, September 22nd was a special day on the farm. Just a quick glance at the Old Acre revealed that something was different: the Farm was decked out in marigold streamers, Farm flower bouquets, and white tablecloths for the book launch of Cooling the Tropics: Ice, Indigeneity, and Hawaiian Refreshment by Profesor Hi'ilei Hobart.

The workday was the most routine part of the afternoon, yet spectacular. The week's drizzle halted for students to harvest a bounty of sweet potatoes and do a thorough weeding job around the beds and chicken coop. Students also de-installed infrastructure such as posts and tarps in several beds to transition for the coming season. 

After an afternoon of work, students, professors, and community members alike gathered around the Lazarus Pavilion for a panel honoring Profesor Hobart's latest book.

Professors Ned Blackhawk (Yale University), Jodi Byrd (Cornell University), Jean O'Brien (University of Minnesota), and Noenoe Silva (University of Hawaii Mānoa) gave their reflections on Professor Hobart's book, noting its unique analysis of how culture, infrastructure, and colonialism on the islands relate to the popularity of frozen treats, from ice cream to shave ice. Hobart’s opening remarks focused on the unidentified girl that marks her book’s cover. Analyzing the representation of Hawaiian people in frozen treat marketing campaigns serve as an entry point into the book’s themes—the impact of constructions of whiteness, Indigenous identities and food systems, supply chain networks, the tourism economy, and more. 

After the panel, Joshua Ching '26, Helen Shanefield '26, and Jairus Rhoades '26 performed a moving hula to close out the program. The celebrations did not stop there. Soon after, attendees were treated to a bounty of fresh pizza, cold drinks, and, of course, some Farm-made shave ice in delicious flavor iterations of hibiscus, passionfruit, and ginger. While centered around cool treats, the Farm exuded an extra poignant sense of warmth.

Much gratitude goes out to Professor Hobart for sharing her scholarship with us, the Yale Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration for collaborating with YSFP on this event, as well as all who made the trip to New Haven to be there to learn and celebrate. 

To many more beautiful afternoons like this one together. 

Photos from the event by Grace Cajski ‘24 can be viewed here. 

Update [October 9, 2023]: a more extensive article on the book launch and Prof. Hobart’s journey was published by the Yale Herald and written by Joshua Ching ‘26.

The Intersection of Ceramics and Agriculture | Workday and knead 2 know feat. Calista Washburn '24

On Friday, September 16th, a gorgeous and cool sun shone upon the Old Acre as students rounded out the first full week of classes of the semester with a workday and knead 2 know, programs run by YSFP up until mid-November.

This week, students harvested buckets of pinto beans, hops to make Yale Ale, crispy red apples soon-to-be pressed, and gigantic zucchini—some which were so large the women’s rugby team used them to conduct a few passing drills, before returning the veggies to their rightful spot in the cooler. A great turnout made the harvesting an incredible group effort.

The Old Acre is getting lots of love as students work to transition the beds for the changing season. In addition to the harvest haul, students composted material, scuffled and weeded several plots, and removed fences, hoops, and fabric to make way for the planting of new crops. Students also picked marigold flowers to be strung as garlands to decorate the Lazarus Pavilion.

After the workday, students headed to the Lazarus Pavilion for pizza with delicious end-of-summer toppings such as corn, fresh tomatoes, and zucchini jam (sensing a theme?). Students were treated to a fascinating presentation by Lazarus Summer Intern Calista Washburn '24, who explored the relationship between agriculture and ceramics by detailing her summer project harvesting clay from Old Acre soil. Washburn detailed the difference between sand, silt, and clay, and her evaporation process which allowed her to excavate clay from the soil on the Farm. Washburn spoke of the use of ollas, clay pots whose name originates from Spanish and Spanish-colonized areas, however has been a traditional irrigation practice across Indigenous communities across the world. Ollas, full of water, are buried in agricultural terrain, and osmosis through the clay creates a steady source of irrigation. Washburn intends to construct an olla with some of the clay she excavated this summer. She also brought clay and ceramic samples for students to engage with.

If you missed this Friday, don’t worry; the stellar Knead 2 Know lineup continues. This Friday, the Farm is partnering with the Program in Ethnicity, Race, and Migration to host a book launch for Yale Professor Hi'ilei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopulani Hobart’s Cooling the Tropics: Ice, Indigeneity, and Hawaiian Refreshment (2022). The reading and panel with Jodi Byrd, (Cornell University), Ned Blackhawk (Yale University), Jean O'Brien (University of Minnesota), and Noenoe Silva (University of Hawaii Mana) will begin at 4:30 PM with pizza and refreshments at 5:30 PM. Rumor has it that shave ice is involved...

Photos from Friday by Reese Neal '25 and Grace Cajski '24 are available here, and photos from Sunday by Arrow Zhang '26 are available here.

Food and Faith at Zumwalt Acres | Workday and knead 2 know feat. Miriam Levine '25

Despite a few encouraging signs of early autumn weather, the past week has been remarkably hot and humid. Still and all, dozens of students braved the sweltering weather to come to the first workday of the semester, where they helped manage the profusion of late summer produce. We weeded the carrot field, scuffled the arugula beds, and harvested hops for our forthcoming batch of "Yale Ale," with plenty of breaks for cold water straight from the pump. 

Students then gathered under the Lazarus Pavilion for an engaging presentation by Food and Faith Fellow Miriam Levine '25, who spent her summer at Zumwalt Acres, a regenerative agriculture community in Sheldon, Illinois. Levine said her dream in life is to start a commune for pregnant people and new parents, so she was “really excited about learning how to build intentional community, especially with an emphasis on land stewardship.” 

After generations of being farmed with standard industrial practices, Zumwalt now strives to model what organic regenerative agriculture can look like in the heart of soy and corn country. The farm practices crop rotation, composting, minimal and no-till agriculture, and mulching. They also employ agroforestry strategies, relying on a “shelter belt” of fruit and nut trees to not only produce food but also protect the crops from pesticide from neighboring farms. 

They attempt to share this approach with the surrounding community through a variety of partnerships and special events. This summer, Zumwalt hosted a Perennial Soil Health event, which drew 50 farmers from the surrounding area to learn about regenerative practices. Levine acknowledged that she had “a lot of preconceived notions” about a region known for its industrial agriculture, but “being able to talk with these farmers, and hear how they’re noticing how their plants and their soil and the ecology have changed over time, and their fear about climate change and how dedicated they are to working on this topic, was incredibly meaningful.” 

Zumwalt is both a farm and a research and learning center. Levine specialized in mushroom cultivation, researching the power of fungi to decompose plastic, build homes on a substrate of human waste, and break down radioactive waste and petroleum. In partnership with the Planavsky Lab over in Yale’s Department of Earth & Planetary Sciences, Zumwalt Acres is also researching basalt, a volcanic rock that can sequester carbon and release nutrients into the soil when used as a natural fertilizer. 

The community is led by Jewish values. In addition to weekly Shabbat dinners and regular Jewish learning, the farm observes traditions like shmita, treating every seventh year as a year of rest for the soil and a time to give back to the surrounding community. They also follow pe’ah, the obligation to leave the corners of each field for those who cannot grow their own food — or, in Zumwalt’s case, donating that produce to a local food pantry. 

We thank Levine for her insightful talk, and we thank everyone who attended the knead2know and volunteered at our workday. This Friday, our knead2know will be led by Calista Washburn ’24, a Lazarus Summer Intern who spent the summer on the Old Acre learning about soil and clay harvests and its relationship historically to irrigation practices. 

Miriam was the recipient of the Food & Faith Fellowship Award, sponsored by the Joseph Slifka Center for Jewish Life at Yale with support from the Yale Sustainable Food Program. Learn more by searching “Zumwalt” in the Student Grants Database.

Photos from the workday by Reese Neal ’25 are available here. 

The Farm as Classroom

The Yale Sustainable Food Program prides itself on growing food-literate leaders “on the farm, in the classroom, and around the world.” But what happens when farm and classroom are combined? Over the last year, many Yale professors have brought their classes to the Yale Farm, whether for a moment of personal reflection, a discussion of land politics, or an exploration of botanical science. While students finalized their decisions about what classes to take this semester, YSFP Communications Manager Sadie Bograd ‘25 spoke with a range of instructors about the ways in which the Farm can be fertile ground for learning. 

Hi’ilei Hobart, Indigenous Food Sovereignty (ER&M 316)

For students in ER&M 316, the class visit to the Farm was both instructive and restorative. 

“So much of the story about Indigenous food comes out of these really difficult and challenging histories of settler colonial dispossession and erasure,” Professor Hobart said. “The Farm… gave students a lot of breathing space to build community with each other, to exhale just a little bit.”

“Teaching about the food system in a thoughtful way can feel a lot like doom and gloom,” she added. “So taking moments of actual joy becomes really important.”

The visits were also a form of “embodied practice” that helped students think about growing practices and labor in new ways. The class strung marigolds, tasted ciders, harvested crops, and assisted with Fall Feast, the annual celebration co-sponsored by the YSFP and the Native American Cultural Center. 

Dr. Hobart spoke to the limitations on the Farm’s ability to promote Indigenous food sovereignty, given its small size, non-Indigenous leadership, and position within the institution of Yale. Still, she noted that practices like sourcing seeds from Indigenous seedkeepers, planting a Three Sisters garden, and growing plants in ways that honor their heritage can “really make a difference.” 

More broadly, the Farm “gives space to allow people to come together thoughtfully [and] meaningfully,” she said. “Breaking bread together is not an uncomplicated process, but it so often does a lot to remind us that we are in community, even though that community can sometimes feel incohesive.” 

Rachel Kauder Nalebuff, Reading and Writing the Modern Essay (ENGL 120) 

As part of a unit on writing about place, Nalebuff takes each of her ENGL 120 sections to a distinctive spot on campus, like the YUAG or the Beinecke. Last fall, her students ventured farther north to the Old Acre for an exercise in “noticing what you notice.” They spent forty-five minutes sitting or wandering the Farm in silence, writing down whatever they observed.

“I really want to encourage my students to think about what it is that they can say about a place that no one else could say,” Nalebuff said. “Eventually you start to see things in new ways if you just spend enough time in a place.” 

Nalebuff noted that the Yale Farm is a uniquely potent site for observation. “Being in any place, but maybe nature especially, often brings up personal memories,” she said. “A smell, or a certain kind of wind.” For students, the session on the Farm also formed an enjoyable experience that diverged from the pace of the indoor classroom. As she observed her students’ observations, Nalebuff felt that the class entered a “peaceful state” instead of having to “push through boredom.”

“It was such a spirited class, and everyone was grateful to be there and was so present,” she said. “It was one of those moments where the lessons of writing and of leading an engaged life felt so intertwined.” 

Linda Puth, Plants and People (E&EB 145) and The Ecology of Food (E&EB 035)

Dr. Puth specializes in interdisciplinary science classes that are accessible without prerequisites. Her courses “highlight some of the strengths of the Yale campus that a lot of students never know are there until their senior year” — a list on which the Yale Farm is at the top. 

Visits to the Farm bring Puth’s lectures to life. For example, the Farm’s wheat field showcases how plants evolve with domestication. Wild wheat has a center stalk that breaks apart when the grains are mature, dispersing the seeds widely so they don’t compete with the parent plant. But agricultural varieties evolved so that the stalk wouldn’t shatter, making them easier to harvest. 

The class visits also explore nutrient cycling, pest control, and different systems of agriculture.

Puth is currently on leave to lecture at Yale-NUS College. Although the classes she teaches there are similar in theme, she has adapted the content to Singapore’s tropical location. 

“Some of the students here have never been outside of the tropics and so they are used to constant day length — in Singapore, the day length changes by about 10 minutes per day over the entire year,” Puth said. “There’s never a freezing time. The seasonality is mainly just rainfall. So it's a very different system here and being able to talk about seasonal agriculture is a wonderful contrast.” 

Puth’s class has explored these contrasts through guest discussions with Farm Manager Jeremy Oldfield, as well as through site visits to in-ground, rooftop, and vertical farms in the area. 

Sophy Naess, Painting Time (ART 332) 

In a class about representing time in painting, there’s no better place to go than the Farm. ART 332 students make multiple trips to the Farm over the course of the semester, witnessing the Old Acre’s evolution over both a four-hour class and an entire season. The visits thus allow students to explore the passage of time on the small scale (like the changing light between late afternoon and early evening) and the large (like the growing and ripening of a field). 

The class trips generate conversations about themes of pastoralism and labor, Naess said. 

The Farm enables “thinking about the idea of nature as some kind of force to behold, as a romantic idea, versus thinking about the way that the space has to be constructed and cultivated,” she elaborated. “Conversations about that come up when talking about composition, framing. Are you representing the labor that happens here through looking at the wheelbarrow, or the shipping container that holds the tools?” 

There are also countless opportunities to develop technical skills: working with figure and background, movement and abstraction, and above all, color.

The Farm is “so resplendent with color,” Naess said. “We really get into the myopic examination of the incredible range of color that exists within a small area of a garden.” 

Max Chaoulideer, The Politics of Food (ENGL 114)

Chaoulideer’s writing seminar focused on many contentious topics in our contemporary food systems: urban agriculture, conscientious consumerism, the romanticization of agrarian life, contests over land usage and ownership. The class visit to the Yale Farm was a way to explore all of that. 

According to Chaoulideer, Oldfield explained how the Old Acre is an “educational farm” more than an “agricultural” one. With its limited footprint, the Yale Farm will never produce enough to feed all of Yale’s campus. Instead, it serves as a space to “question or disrupt the status quo” through the crops it grows, the practices it employs, and the space it creates.

“A common throughline in the class was how to think about food both as a very concrete, practical, nutritional substance [and] as a kind of political tool,” Chaoulideer said. “For a lot of students, it was a new concept that… the place and process of growing could raise critical questions.” 

The Farm became a reference for that kind of critical agriculture, Chaoulideer said. The YSFP is constantly exploring how it relates to Yale Dining, to the university as a whole, and to different parts of the New Haven community — “raising questions about what the Farm should be or could be.”  

Many thanks to all these instructors for their time and generosity. This semester, new classrooms are coming to the Old Acre, including students from ENGL 114: Matters of Color / Color Matters, ARCH 1021: Architectural Design 3, ENG 114: What We Eat, and HSAR 553: Embodied Artisanal Knowledge. 

All Pib Slow Play | GFF '22

The pib's cooking process relies on hot stones, fired in the pit, to hold and release heat.

All Pib Slow Play: A Sedimentation of History and Sound (APSP) is a hybrid decelerationist music and food programming project. It sets cumbia rebajada (slowed cumbia) and ambient sounds to the cooking of tamales using an underground pit-roasting method: the Pib. All Pib Slow Play was conceptualized and designed by Miguel Gaydosh beginning in 2021. This is an ongoing project and research will continue to be gathered on the Arena channel Suena la Cumbia, with occasional updates made to the website.

 Listen to a mix here

The project is named after a record by DJ Screw and a letter to Elysia Crampton. APSP is a means to research, practice, and evolve traditions that generations of Indigenous families have kept alive across the Americas, while sharing the fruits of this process and celebrating the soil.

Chef Sandra Trigeuros and family preparing and cooking the primary dishes throughout the evening.

APSP synthesized after learning about Rosalia Chay Chuc’s traditional cooking methods in the Yucatán, which sparked memories of my family's tamales and pib cooking in Southwestern Guatemala. These inspired me to revisit cumbia rebajada videos found online, and realize the potential of combining the pib’s ancient slow cooking techniques with slowed cumbia’s intoxicating rhythms.

As a performance, APSP centers slowness as a vehicle, and Kency Cornejo and Diana Taylor’s ideas of embodied acts “as an essential mode of cultural, spiritual and social representation and transmission of knowledge," to awaken a resistance to Yomaira Figueroa's concept of destierro (uprooting) through memories of home/lands and land practices.

 "They used to have very detailed history books. But when the Spaniards came, they burned thousands of them. So they had to pass all the information by mouth."
Ricardo Muñoz
Chef's Table: BBQ Season 1, Episode 4: “Rosalia Chay Chuc”
2020

While the first iteration of APSP was about sharing food on a farm and broadcasting on Local Radio, the next version will focus on the idea of a social sculpture in an urban pocket forest—at Cactus Store NY's garden this Summer—as a space for people to gather and learn through programming surrounding the idea of deceleration.

Guests and students learned hands-on through food preparation.

APSP is an investigation of the potential for socio-ecological interfaces—bringing ‘nature’ and ‘culture,’ the ancient and contemporary, together through living forms—from the ground beneath our feet to sounds reverberating down city blocks.

 “Not an earthquake but an accretion, a sedimentation of history and sound [...] I don’t think I’ve ever listened to anything so geologic. A certain chemical trace inheres, like the smell of rock after rain, recording or suggesting things now invisible but not gone.”
Jeffery J. Cohen
"A Letter from Jeffrey J. Cohen to Elysia Crampton,” DIS Magazine
2015

APSP is a chance to move slower with and closer to the earth through a mixing of sounds, flavors, and links lost and found. Digging beneath the surface of our daily accelerationist culture, pib and rebajada methods come together to manipulate space and time, unearthing impossible moments in cavities of potential.

Laser-etched banana leaves served as as informal placemats.

Thank you to Sandra Trigueros and her family, Geovanni Barrios, Jacqueline Munno, Isabel Rooper, Pancho Blood, Jeemin Shim, and Kyle Richardson. The first volume of All Pib Slow Play was supported by the Yale Sustainable Food Program, and Yale School of Art's inaugural student-curated exhibition, No White Walls.

You can find more information on allpibslowplay.org and Miguel will be sharing updates on Instagram in the coming months.

A crowd of students and guests gathered under the Pavilion to eat, drink, and learn.

Alumni Interviews | Kate Anstreicher '18

A successful crop needs support in order to thrive: insects to pollinate it, people to weed it, sunshine and water to help it grow. Farms, too, cannot thrive in isolation. That’s where the Glynwood Center for Regional Food and Farming comes in. Founded in 1997, Glynwood is an agricultural nonprofit which builds connections between and provides resources to food systems actors in the Hudson Valley. As Glynwood’s Program Manager, YSFP alumna Kate Anstreicher ’18 helps manage the Hudson Valley CSA Coalition, the Food Sovereignty Fund, and other initiatives. In this interview with YSFP communications manager Sadie Bograd ’25, Anstreicher explains the crucial role that stakeholder-driven partnerships play in sustaining a thriving agricultural community. 

This conversation is part of a Voices series about the exciting work YSFP alumni are doing in the world of food and agriculture. The transcript has been edited lightly for length and clarity.

What is the Glynwood Center for Food and Farming? What do you do as program manager?

Glynwood’s mission is to ensure that the Hudson Valley remains a region defined by food and farming where farmers can thrive. One main part of Glynwood’s work is our regional food programs, where we help build producer coalitions in the Hudson Valley to assist with things like collective marketing and skill sharing. I manage the Hudson Valley CSA [community supported agriculture] coalition and help with communications, website development, and other parts of various projects. 

Since land is so fragmented in this region, a lot of farms are small-scale, diversified vegetable operations, for which CSA is a good model. In 2016, we founded the CSA coalition and received grant funding to build a central website with a directory where consumers can search for farms near them using their zip code, what sort of things they want in a CSA share, and how they want to pay for it. That's been an important, centralized way for CSA farms to promote their offerings. We also organize an annual winter summit where we promote peer learning. 

One of our earliest regional food programs was working with cider makers and apple growers. The alcoholic cider industry has grown a lot in the United States in the past 10 or 15 years, and New York is no exception. Glynwood saw an opportunity to help large-scale apple producers create a value-added product in the early 2000s. We got funding to send cider makers, apple growers, and other restaurateurs and spirits experts on several international trips to see other regions in which cider is a proud and long-standing industry. Those international exchanges helped grow the industry and provide technical assistance. We're still doing a lot of cider work, but our work also resulted in the founding of a separate organization, the New York Cider Association, which does advocacy to make sure that New York’s laws are supportive of cider makers. Lately, they’ve been working on doorstep delivery and shipping. Right now, there's this weird bottleneck: New York cider producers can ship their product to consumers in other states, but I could not order a bottle of cider from a New York producer to have it arrive at my door.

Those sound like valuable partnerships. What else does Glynwood do? 

Our food access work has expanded since the pandemic. We founded our Food Sovereignty Fund in the spring of 2020 with an advisory council of farmers, food pantry representatives, and other folks across the region who were concerned about the increase in food insecurity at the onset of the pandemic. The Food Sovereignty Fund aims to channel more fresh produce and meat and dairy products into the emergency food system—although what we call an “emergency” is really a chronic issue in our country. We build contracts and pay farms in advance to grow food for food access partners and their communities, whether that is a food pantry run out of a church or a larger organization that also makes hot meals. We prioritize building relationships with farms that are run by historically marginalized farmers, including BIPOC, queer, and female farmers. This year, we contracted about $300,000 to 22 different farms who distributed food to 20 different food access partners.

We have a farm on site that's over 230 acres. In 2007, we started our farmer training programming, in which apprentices learn sustainable vegetable and livestock farming practices. We also help organize apprenticeships at other farms. A lot of farms want to help train the next generation of farmers, but they don't necessarily have the time or the resources to provide educational opportunities to their employees. We're able to pay those farmers for a four-hour workshop, for example, so they still get their hourly wage but can come to Glynwood. 

We build additional revenue for our mission-related work through site rental. We're really close to the city, so people want to get married in the Hudson Valley. Model Hailey Bieber and her husband, Justin Bieber, came for a photo shoot once because Hailey was modeling for Vogue. They ended up using one of our goats. 

I’ve seen some recent reporting that land prices have become a big issue for farmers in the region. Could you elaborate on these and other challenges that farmers face in the Hudson Valley? 

There is a competing interest in the beauty of the landscape. Particularly during the pandemic, a lot of New Yorkers found it scary to live in the city, and the Hudson Valley became a very popular destination for people to settle down, to buy land, to have a family. I really don't blame them, but that has put a lot of pressure on the land market, and land values are astronomically high. Land access is a huge issue here for farmers who want to start a farm from scratch, especially first-generation farmers who don't have that much collateral and aren't inheriting land. Luckily, there are a lot of organizations in place that can help acquire land and found these incubator parcels. 

Land access includes housing. The market here is honestly terrifying. I'm a salaried employee at a relatively well-resourced nonprofit, but the Beacon housing prices are a stretch for me. For people in a farm crew making $16 an hour, I can't even imagine how hard it is. I've heard stories from farmers who've said that they have tried to hire someone, and then that person can't find housing, so they can't take the job.

Something else that has shifted in the past five years alone is the climate crisis and the severity of the climate disasters that are occurring on an annual basis, even in our region. It’s the whole gambit: both too little water and too much water and crazy wind storms and hail storms in the middle of the summer and tropical storms. 

You said that your mission is to maintain the Hudson Valley as a region defined by farming. What does the agricultural landscape look like? 

This has been a bustling region for thousands of years. The Hudson River has always been a river of commerce and was stewarded by Indigenous populations for generations. At the beginning of colonialism, the Hudson Valley became a region that freighted food to New York City. 

There are a lot of vegetable farms and orchards. You need to drive further north or west to get to crops like corn and soy. The land is too valuable here for that commercial scale. We also have some awesome raw milk dairies in the region, including sheep and goat dairies. It's harder to find big enough parcels of land for large-scale livestock production, especially for cattle. But I know of a lot of people who are raising broilers and laying hens.

It's amazing how robust the farming community is here. There are some multi-generational farms around, but the Hudson Valley is also a bastion for young farmers, first-generation farmers. We have an incredibly robust queer farming community and increasingly BIPOC farming community, in large part thanks to farms that are very intentionally building that community, like Soul Fire Farm, Rock Steady Farm, Sweet Freedom Farm. They're all advocating for food justice and for the training of BIPOC farmers and queer farmers, and they’re building a safe space for those farmers. Chaseholm Farm is a queer-owned, third-generation, grass-fed dairy, and they have a dairy drag show every June that's popular among farmers. 

How does Glynwood fit into that community? How do you figure out the specific challenges that you can help address?

We're still learning. We are a well-resourced, majority white organization, so especially when it comes to things like food justice and social justice, we're not the experts. For example, with the Food Sovereignty Fund, the accountability council is really our guiding force. We have the time and the resources to facilitate the project, but we need input from folks who are on the ground distributing food and representing communities elsewhere in the Hudson Valley. 

We're trying to get more into language justice and offering more of our services in Spanish in particular, because there are tons of farm workers here whose first language is not English. Quite a few farmers are using the H-2A program to employ farm workers from Guatemala and Mexico. We try to have several bilingual events a year and are trying to translate as many written resources as we can. We also bought equipment for bilingual events that we are willing to rent out to other entities for free, because we think that language justice should be more widespread. That was in large part inspired by the Hudson Valley Farm Hub who already had that model in place.

One thing that we have to remind ourselves of is that efficient work is not always the best work. You want to see change really fast, but it's slow, intentional work in which you involve stakeholders that can help you better achieve your goals in the long run. 

Slow, intentional work—that reminds me of the Yale Farm! Could you tell me about your time there? 

The Yale Sustainable Food Program was a wonderful and influential part of my college experience. I started volunteering at the Farm my first-year fall and was working as a culinary events manager by the following spring semester. I loved being able to be outside every Friday, rain or shine, and to learn some awesome culinary skills from Jacquie. The Chewing the Fat speaker series was also amazing. That was the first time that I heard Leah Penniman [of Soul Fire Farm], Michael Twitty [author of The Cooking Gene]. The lineup was just incredible, and it opened up a new dimension of food and agriculture and environmentalism to me.