We are fundraising with the goal of raising $20,000 in donated vegetables to distribute throughout the 2024 season.

Please donate to our Gofundme!

With your love, financial support, presence on the farm, and interest in our work, we have made huge strides in working toward our commitment to food justice. We still exists and surviving another growing season that like quite a feat in itself. We grew, sold, and donated 23,000# of our produce this year!  Since 2020, we have donated 57,000# of our vegetables!!

Some farm highlights include:

• Participation in young farmer training through the Anne Saxelby Foundation, and farming alongside returning crew members Bliss Battle and Mirrored Fatality! 

• Distributing our food through Choy Commons Wholesale, selling our vegetables with two other Asian American farms, Gentle Time, and Choy Division to mutual-aid initiatives and restaurants in NYC. Through our work together we started organizing and sending food to new partners including: Red Canary Song, ALMS, Send Chinatown Love, while continuing to work with Heart of Dinner.  

• Infrastructure development at our forever-farm! Built two new NRCS-granted greenhouses and are currently renovating our dilapidated dairy barn.

• Our first year operating as Catskills Agrarian Alliance.

• Grant Support to feed the people through Glynwood’s Food Sovereignty Fund, Otsego Community Foundation, National Young Farmers, Watershed Agriculture Development Board.

• Supporting  grassroots mutual aid groups throughout New York. We have been able to send 100-1000# of food weekly to Bushwick Ayuda Mutua, Market in the Heights, Red Canary Song, La Morada, Heart of Dinner, Wat Buddha Thai Thavorn Vanaram.

We work to question the entire global food system and the premise on which it is based: pollution by agricultural chemicals, the decline of rural livelihoods, and food, people, and land as commodities to be exploited. We exist in an economic system where profit for corporate agribusiness has created a damaged earth, and commodity prices are set below the cost of production, which means small-scale growers are the ones remediating the soil while struggling to survive. This is a very narrow and limited way of organizing life and deciding who is important and who is not important.

We do not want to modify this system of production but to get out of it altogether! We work towards a complete transformation of the food system.

We are fundraising for a complete food system transformation that (1) prioritizes living wages, healthcare, and secure housing for all food system workers (2) centers and creates conditions for BIPOC agrarianism to actually flourish (3) replaces extraction with mutual-aid and the communal sharing of resources (4) grows food naturally and takes care of the soil (5) is led by the working class and serves all people with nutrient-dense, ecologically grown food.

But this is what we are up against: 

Cheap food comes at a high price. Farmer plight is kept hidden from public attention. It is culturally expected for farmers to work over 40hrs per week/7 days a week for less than minimum wage. We try to pay ourselves $300/week to help us pay our employees $15/hr. There is a tremendous amount of sacrifice and unpaid, skilled labor from the people who do this work with us, which is an exploitative and unsustainable way to feed people.

Grant culture is inaccessible. We don’t have the capital to outsource our fundraising and grant applications. It's hard to farm and figure out the money to keep the things alive and write lengthy time-intensive grants at the same time.

Market economics are false. Conventional industrial-sized farms subsidize the low costs of food with the help of the government. Small farms who focus on growing food ecologically (versus using chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and GMO seeds) cannot compete with this pricing and are never paid the value of their work. 

Farming is expensive. It's hard to make a dollar from a $2.50 bunch of kale. It takes three people hand planting, hand weeding, and fertilizing that plant for 4 months to grow that kale! Seed supply costs have  gone up 30% due to supply chain shortages. As gentrification accelerates, land becomes increasingly inaccessible to farmers who only earn $10-$20/hour. 

Mutual Aid work is volunteer-run.  But we believe it is really important to financially support mutual-aid organizations and their efforts to take care of their neighbors, feed hundreds of people, and fight gentrification.

Food should not go to the highest bidder. Your continued support of the farm will  help us farm against this reality. 
Your donation:

• Gets our produce to free-food distributions throughout New York State and lets us continue to feed our neighbors. 

• Feeds hundreds of families relying on free-food distributions.

• Allows the groups we work with to keep doing their important work .

• Supports the regional food movement and small scale farmers. Fresh food = higher nutrient value, the reduction of the  carbon  footprint of food, and support of our local economy.  But farmers are perpetually poor because the prices that farmers get compensated  for their labor are low, way below the cost of production. We exist in survival mode and its exhausting. Your donation helps us keep going!

• Sustains regenerative agriculture that builds healthy soil, plants, and biodiversity. This will be really important to undoing the damages done by extractive agric

• Is participation in what Bill McKibben describes as a deep economy, which "cares less about quantity than about quality; that takes as its goal the production of human satisfaction as much as surplus material; that is focused on the idea that it might endure and considers durability at least as important as increases in size.”

  
  Your donation allows us to do our work. It centers the needs of the farmers, distributors, and consumers in the food system by eliminating our participation in the problematic Government-subsidized (poisonous) big AG economy in which market prices will never cover the costs of our production. Your donation supports organizations in need of healthy organic produce to distribute and feed the people!

Click here: Gofundme