Radishes and rainbows: the LGBTQ growers reimagining the traditional family farm
At Ashokra farm in New Mexico, in the heart of Albuquerque’s fertile North Valley, lush fields of kabocha squash and heirloom corn grow alongside beds of tomatoes, onions and 13 varieties of okra. The team’s four farmers tend four fields spread across two and a half acres of leased plots on private residences and in a community garden, hauling their tools between each field in a mobile shed.
But the bountiful harvest is only one of Ashokra’s goals. As a queer-, trans- and people-of-color-owned vegetable farm, Ashokra is “trying to embody values and create a space that we haven’t seen on farms that we’ve worked at”, says farmer Anita Adalja. “A place where we have dignity, where we can feel safe, where we can feel like we can be our authentic selves”, protected from the threats of homophobia, transphobia, racism and sexism.
In their past work experiences, Adalja and their colleagues have each faced discrimination – either as queer farmers or people of color. Sometimes, that came in the form of being demeaned by owners who didn’t respect their skills or who took their photo for promotional purposes; other times it came in the shape of co-workers using racial slurs. At Ashokra, they’re trying to challenge the structures that permitted those abuses: by caring as deeply for the land as they do for one another, implementing a zero-tolerance policy for abusive language and adopting a nonhierarchical structure.
The farmers at Ashokra are not alone in that desire. Queer farmers across the country – and throughout history – have long tried to access land where they can live out their values. But that aim is often complicated by issues of safety and access to capital, which is why many queer farmers have come together to collaboratively challenge the structure of the traditional family farm.
In the 1960s and 70s, as the women’s liberation, gay rights and environmental movements took off across the US, thousands of women moved out on to the land to form more than 150 lesbian separatist communities. Sometimes called womyn’s land, lesbian land or landdyke settlements, many of these groups aimed to form communities away from men and the patriarchal and heteronormative structures that governed society. Although many of these spaces still exist today – like Huntington Open Women’s Land in Vermont, Outland in New Mexico, Alapine in Florida and the Oregon Women’s Land Trust just south of Portland – their history is not well known, even within the queer community.
These farmers were “really trying to live their values”, said Jaclyn “Jac” Wypler, a sociologist and farmer who wrote their dissertation on modern lesbian and queer farms in the midwest. Today, a new generation of queer farmers, like the team at Ashokra, are continuing to organize community farms around shared values, like a commitment to anti-capitalism, cooperative living and each other’s safety. But queer farmers can struggle to access land for a variety of reasons, including being estranged from their biological families and cut off from generational wealth or not being counted by government agricultural censuses.
While they were writing their dissertation, Wypler observed that some queer farmers had managed to acquire land through family or by buying property later in life. But many younger farmers “were renting land, were working on other people’s land and really struggling to secure land access”, in part because the wages paid to farmworkers are typically not enough to allow them to save up and buy their own land.
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Although the US Department of Agriculture offers grants and programs to members of certain communities that have been excluded from farming in the past, Wypler says the department “historically has been very verbal about saying queer farmers are not part of a special category” and collects no data on sexual orientation or gender identity. “When you’re not even measuring queer farmers, how could you ever recognize that they have struggles around not having access to land because they’ve been disowned by their families or the issues around where you can feel safe?”
Although there is no formal measure of the number of LGBTQ-owned and operated farms in the US, Wypler says there are some studies that have tried to approximate their prevalence. In its 2022 survey, the National Young Farmers Coalition found that “24.2% of young farmers identify as a sexuality other than heterosexual”, but only surveyed farmers under the age of 40. A separate 2019 study used data from the USDA census of agriculture to identify the number of farms owned by men married to men or women married to women, but the study’s authors emphasized that further refinement of the census is needed.
In the absence of government or institutional support, many queer farmers have devised alternative models for accessing land by working with one another.
In the 1990s, lesbian organizers came together to found Lesbian Natural Resources, a non-profit committed to helping lesbians obtain and maintain community land, at a time when lesbian couples had few legal rights. In the 2000s, farmers Nett Hart, Barbara Holmes, Terri Carver and Lisa Pierce co-authored the pamphlet On Our Own Terms, a guide to access, ownership, conservation and transfer of lesbian lands with chapters on ways to finance land, hold title to land and structure farm enterprises, among others.
At Humble Hands Harvest, a small organic farm near Decorah, Iowa, known for hosting the Queer Farmer Convergence, Hannah Breckbill and her colleagues – not all of whom are queer – are experimenting with a new system they call the Commons.
In 2014, Breckbill was farming on rented land in Decorah when a parcel of land came available. Worried that it might be bought up and turned into a hog confinement, Breckbill and her neighbors quickly organized to buy the land together. Breckbill started imagining what it would look like if she started a diversified vegetable farm on it. When she voiced an interest in buying the land back from the community for her own farm, a few of the shareholders gave their shares to her. Today, Breckbill calls that chunk of capital the Commons. “It belongs to the farm and the community, and what the farm is doing in the community,” she said.
Breckbill and her co-owner are working to transform Humble Hands Harvest into a worker-owned co-op, and are using the Commons to make buying into the co-op more affordable and sustainable. If either of them ever leave the farm, the money they’ve each invested will become a loan that the farm will need to pay back over time. But the capital that was given to them will stay with the farm, and its future owners. It’s an attempt, Breckbill says, to help them survive in a capitalist system while still challenging the idea of profiting from land ownership.
Meanwhile, Rock Steady farm, a queer-owned and operated cooperative vegetable farm in Millerton, New York, launched in 2015 with a rolling 10-year lease. Rock Steady was able to acquire that first lease, says Maggie Cheney, the farm’s general manager and owner, with a loan from Seed Commons, a non-extractive lending institution that funds cooperatives. Currently, Rock Steady is in the process of negotiating its next lease, which it hopes will be for an even longer term and eventually transition to a community land trust.
For “a lot of marginalized folks who don’t have access to capital, the thought of owning land is quite intimidating”, said Cheney. Farmland prices across the US vary but range anywhere from about $1,000 to $13,000 an acre. On top of that, production expenses – like the cost of labor, machinery, fuel, seeds and fertilizer – average about $182,000 a year per farm, according to the USDA. But at the same time, “there’s a real emotional draw to owning land, especially for Black and brown Indigenous people.” To that end, Cheney says, Rock Steady has learned how to operate as a cooperative “from other marginalized communities who have been facing similar issues,” like the Black sharecroppers who pooled their resources and pioneered the cooperative model with projects like Fannie Lou Hammer’s Freedom Farm Cooperative.
Alongside their work at Ashokra, Adalja is also the founder and program manager of Not Our Farm, an online storytelling project that they started in 2019 to “uplift and share stories of workers on farms not their own”.
“It’s not just about their joys, their triumphs, their harvest. What Not Our Farm has started to do is highlight abuses that happen on farms,” like inconsistent access to bathrooms, earnings far below the minimum wage and the discrimination that many queer, women and POC farmers face daily, said Adalja. “There’s so much of this country that is arable, beautiful farmland, but that’s not safe for us to even be there” as Bipoc queer and trans people. “Farming in collectives is not just about the ease of farming and sharing resources, it’s about safety too.”
Not Our Farm also gives space for farm workers to share the characteristics of their “dream farm”, or what could keep them farming even if they never own their own land.
In many ways, it’s an echo of the utopian goals of the womyn’s land movement.
From farms that place an emphasis on biodiversity to owners who provide health insurance and safe housing, Adalja says that “hearing what people share has been really, really beautiful”.
