The Collaborative Farming Podcast

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 Ian McSweeney & Kristina Villa, co-directors of The Farmers Land Trust, are responsible for creating and supporting farmland commons, a vehicle for preserving farmland and ensuring its dedication to regenerative agriculture in perpetuity while respecting both the farmers and the communities they feed. I mean, what's better than that? If you like what you hear, are a farmer or a landholder, and wa...

Hey folks, it's Jackson and today I've got a bonus episode of Collab Farm with Mike & Armonda of Rose Hill Farm Stop in Bloomington, Indiana. I attended a session with them at the Organic Association of Kentucky conference '23 and was really impressed. You'll see why in a minute... Now, you may have heard the last episode of The No-Till Market Garden Podcast with the great Alex Ball speaking with...

Tianna Kennedy is a founding member and 1/3 owner of Star Route Farm in New York and owner/coordinator of the 607 CSA . She talks about how Star Route Farm began as a partnership, how/why they incorporated a third owner and how it's multiform CSA component split off to form a whole other organization which she now coordinates. Now, the 607 CSA includes dozens of producers, hundreds of members, and...

The Full Plate Farm Collective began in Ithaca NY nearly 20 years ago when Chaw Chang & Lucy Garrison-Clauson' of Stick & Stone Farm and Nathaniel and Emily Thompson of Remembrance Farm came together to offer a joint veg CSA. Since, it has grown to about 700 members and is now a substantial part of their farm revenue, enough to have a full time coordinator (ie. Molly Flerlage), and brings in produ...

Author, academic, and podcaster David Bollier! David works with the Schumacher Center for a New Economics and has studied and written extensively on commoning for the last two decades.   For those who aren't familiar with that word, commoning is simply the act of managing shared resources like land or information. We talk about how he came to study the commons as an alternative for change after be...

What does it look like to give Burmese and Bhutanese elders and families, and by extension immigrant and refugee peoples, meaningful growing opportunities? Today, I chat with Tallahassee May , the farm director of Growing Together Nashville . First, let's just agree that Tallahassee May is one of the best names we've ever heard. Second, Growing Together Nashville is a part of the Nashville Food Pr...

"Liberation Farms is food justice in action. It is a demonstration of the success that is possible when marginalized communities have the opportunity to organize and lead themselves." Today, we hear from Lana and Muhidin, the farm manager and executive director respectively, of Liberation Farms in Lewiston, Maine. Liberation farms is a 200+ acre farm in the Little Jubba Agrarian Commons . Sound fa...

A conversation I envisioned since the beginning of this podcast, I talk with Brent Lackey of the Kentucky Center for Agriculture and Rural Development about cooperative development, step by step . Mentioned in the show... Understanding the Capper Volstead Act KRS 272 on Cooperatives Cooperation Works! Development Network Thank y'all so much for listening. This podcast is brought to you by Certifie...

As a follow up to last week's Aliments Farmhouse Food conversation , Hannah and Natalie from  Ferme Agricola share a bit about what it's like being a member of a producers cooperative from the perspective of the farmers. Thank y'all so much for listening. This podcast is brought to you by Certified Naturally Grown  &  Growing for Market Magazine . It's also brought to you by growers like you. If y...

Aliments Farmhouse Food is a multifarm cooperative of seven farm members co-markting their produce, meat, dairy, and more through a home delivery CSA to some three to four hundred members throughout Ottawa, Canada. I talk to farmer member and general manager Leela Ramachandran about how it all began and has grown over the last few years, leveraging the low overhead of direct to consumer delivery t...

Do you grow enough diversity for a full-diet CSA? Or just stick to what you grow well? These are two extremes of the spectrum, but...  what if you could do both? Mikey and Erin of Boxcar Acres provide a multi-farm, full-diet, full-choice CSA in Henry County, KY. They aggregate and distribute veg from their own farm and several others, along with protein, dairy, honey, and value-added goods, all fu...

Talking cooperative compost company with Nathan and Michael from Tilth Soil , folks.  Tilth Soil and Rust Belt Riders have been collecting and diverting food waste from landfills and, as a result, have been making some of the most amazing composts and soils around. When I heard they had officially organized as a worker cooperative, I had to get them on the line to learn more. Not only am I excited...

And we're BACK with the next and perinneal season of The Collaborative Farming Podcast. In this episode, Cody & Mel of Speedwell Farm & Gardens and Helen of Farmette Flowers , making up two thirds of The Treehouse Farm Collective , talk about their shotgun wedding farming collectively for land access and their model that respects both their pre-existing individual farm business autonomy while reap...

BONUS EPISODE of The Collaborative Farming Podcast, a quick conversation with Col Gordon of Inchindown Farm and Farmerama's LANDED podcast series which explores the colonial roots of the small family farm and how understanding the past can change our farming future. It's some of the best three hours of farm podcasting out there and you can listen to it here . Cannot. Recommend. It enough. Also men...

Today, we revisit Eric & Jill of Green Things Farm Collective in Ann Arbor, Michigan. I couldn't think of a better way to end it than with one of the first farm collectives we spoke with last year… If you remember, I talked with Jill, Hannah, & Michelle of Mega Beauty Farm —there's and inside joke there you're only going to get by going back and listening to that one… also check out Eric & Nate on...

We've heard about land trusts, conservation easements, maybe community trusts before, but what if there was one modeled with the farm and the farmer in mind? The mission of Agrarian Land Trust is to build local agrarian commons to hold farmland to ensure its sustainable and productive stewardship for generations to come. Director Ian McSweeney is going to tell us how agrarian commons work, why the...

Rob Smith is the director of Viva Farms in Burlington, Washington. Viva farms is an incubator farm and offers not just access to land and infrastructure that beginning farmers may struggle with, giving them time to build their market before investing in those decisions, but also opportunities for a real on-farm education and on-site aggregation/distribution. If you're interested in incubator farms...