Young Farmers Podcast

Ari de Leña is a farmer at Kamayan Farm is a vegetable, flower, medicinal herb, and education farm just east of Seattle on Snoqualmie People’s land. In this conversation we dive into what it looks like to deal with stress and anxiety while being ‘August tired’. Because Ari and Elizabeth really get into the heart of stress and anxiety we decided to split our conversation into two parts. In the first episode we focus on the ‘big picture’ and make connections between current conditions for farmers and how it affects our mental wellness. Please take care of yourself and your needs before you listen, as you listen and as you process this conversation.

Join the National Young Farmers Coalition today at youngfarmers.org/join and sign up for our advocacy network by texting FARMERS to 40649.

In Part 1 we mention:

The Body Keeps the Score: https://www.besselvanderkolk.com/resources/the-body-keeps-the-score Leah Penniman’s Farming While Black: https://www.soulfirefarm.org/media/farming-while-black/

Leah Penniman on How to Survive the End of the World Podcast: https://www.endoftheworldshow.org/blog/2020/5/6/apocalypse-survival-skill-4-braiding-seeds In Part

2 - Ari shares some real-life strategies on how to manage stress and anxiety. In this episode we discuss some embodied techniques that we both use on the farm.

In this episode we bring the work of:

Valerie Segrest: https://www.allmyrelationspodcast.com/podcast/episode/32c173eb/ep-2-food-sovereignty-a-growing-movem ent

Generative Somatics: https://generativesomatics.org/

Music credit to Made By Finja by Sascha Ende

Link: https://filmmusic.io/song/6171-made-by-finja //

License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Vero Vergara is a nonbinary, disabled, brown, queer farmer and food systems cultural worker based on Coast Salish territories. Vero is a founding worker-owner of Sweet Hollow Farm in Woodinville, WA. They work at the intersection of autonomous food systems building and liberatory community care. Learn more about Sweet Hollow Farm at their website: www.sweethollow.farm or their Instagram account: @sweethollowfarm.

Some folks that are mentioned in this podcast are: Karen Washington: https://www.riseandrootfarm.com/karen-washington Leah Penniman: https://www.soulfirefarm.org/meet-the-farmers/ Mai Nguyen: http://farmermai.com/farmer/ Rowan White: https://sierraseeds.org/rowens-story/ Ashante M Reese: https://ges.umbc.edu/ashante-m-reese/ Ricardo Salvador https://www.ucsusa.org/about/people/ricardo-salvador Robin Wall Kimmerer: https://www.esf.edu/faculty/kimmerer/ Winona la Duke: http://www.honorearth.org/speaking_engagements Chris Newman: https://www.sylvanaqua.com/ Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha: http://brownstargirl.org/ Ejeris Dixon: https://www.visionchangewin.com/meet-the-consultants/ejeris/ Music credit to Made By Finja by Sascha Ende Link: https://filmmusic.io/song/6171-made-by-finja License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Become a member of the National Young Farmers Coalition today at youngfarmers.org/join and join our advocacy network by texting FARMERS to 40649.

This episode was edited by Hannah Beal.

Jessica Manly talks with Equity and Organizational Change Director and Accountability Report author Michelle A. T. Hughes about what it means for the National Young Farmers Coalition to be accountable to its farmers, partners, and its racial equity commitments.

Read the report at www.youngfarmers.org/2020accountabilityreport and join us for our first accountability report webinar on Wednesday June 23, 2021 at 4pm by registering here.

Young Farmers Racial Equity Toolkit: https://www.youngfarmers.org/resource/racialequitytoolkit/.

Edited by Hannah Beal.

Michelle A. T. Hughes is a former large-scale hog farmer from New Haven, Connecticut with lived experience navigating systemic inequity and an educational background in food and agriculture policy reform. Prior to her graduate studies at New York University’s Department of Nutrition and Food Studies, Michelle worked in swine reproduction at the University of Pennsylvania, with both non-profit and food and agriculture start-ups in NYC and the Hudson Valley, and served on a program evaluation team for the NYC Mayor’s Office of Food Policy. At the Coalition, Michelle has worked on the equity and organizational change team since January 2020. Over the course of 2020, Michelle helped align our organization-wide efforts to institutionalize racial equity by implementing a strategy for organizational transformation. Michelle now works with executive leadership as Equity and Organizational Change Director to develop short- and long-term strategy to continue our anti-racist transformation, regularly evaluate and uphold accountability measures with staff, and develop practical tools and financial resources to support the organization’s racial equity goals.

Become a member of the National Young Farmers Coalition today at youngfarmers.org/join.

Today we're coming to you with a special episode from our Hoosier Young Farmers Chapter. The Hoosier chapter just released their own podcast series which shares the voices of farmers from across the state, farmers you might not think of when you picture the farmers of Indiana. This episode features stories about the challenge of acquiring affordable, quality land for farming, and some of the creative ways these farmers have managed to get on the land. You can listen to the rest of the Hoosier Young Farmer Podcast at hoosieryfc.org/stories.

Land access is the number 1 challenge young farmers across the country report in growing food for their communities and starting farm businesses. To address this barrier, Young Farmers just launched the One Million Acres for the Future Campaign. We are calling on Congress to invest $2.5 billion in the 2023 Farm Bill to facilitate equitable access to one million acres of land for the next generation of farmers. As part of the campaign, we created the Land Advocacy Fellowship, a two-year, paid advocacy and leadership fellowship that will resource 100 young farmers, growers, and land stewards to advocate for equitable land policy. Applications are open now through January 15th. To learn more about the campaign and to apply for our Land Advocacy Fellowship, visit youngfarmers.org/onemillionacres. And to join the National Young Farmers Coalition, visit youngfarmers.org/join.

*Brief correction to the land transition statistic Liz states in the introduction. She meant to cite this Civil Eats article which claims, "In the next decade, 400 million acres of U.S. farmland will change hands," instead of "400,000 acres." According to American Farmland Trust, “371 million acres of farmland will change hands over the next 20 years."

The Washington Young Farmers Coalition (WAYFC) takes over the Young Farmers Podcast to talk about resilience and community building in the time of COVID-19. Become a member of the National Young Farmers Coalition at younfarmers.org/join and sign up for our advocacy network by texting FARMERS to 40649.

Tracy L. Stewart is a mindfulness based mental health therapist at the Nile’s Edge wellness collective and activist in Seattle, WA. She currently serves on the board of SURGE, a BIPOC centered reproductive justice organization, Buddhist Peace Fellowship (BPF) – Seattle, and has served on three Social Justice Fund (SJF) giving projects. Elizabeth was able to get Tracy on the phone to help connect the dots between food-growing, uprisings for racial justice, and our mental health. Our conversation sprawls between rage and love, trauma and healing and does include explicit references to police brutality, internalized oppression, and other forms of harm. We acknowledge that some of this conversation could be triggering, and we encourage all our listeners to please take care of your needs. Tracy sees her role in community as working to create supportive, safe space for BIPOC folx in discovering their gifts through mindfulness practice and social justice awareness. Her cup is filled by the outside places, silly friends with microphones, passion for life, and folx sharing their good medicine with each other. “My focus is learning to be a good elder in order to support those out in the community fighting for all us to BE. In my work, I see a lot of suffering of black and brown folx who are warn from fighting to be their full selves. With Gathering Roots, the intention is creating a place where that burden can be released, people can fill their cups with joyful learning and the beauty of the Earth, witnessed and empowered to be all that they are.”

You can learn more about Gathering Roots at their website: https://gatheringroots.org/

Throughout the episode we make reference to the work of:

Reverend Angel Kyodo Williams : https://angelkyodowilliams.com/

Michelle Lee, Author of Working the Roots : https://kpfa.org/episode/the-herbal-highway-may-9-2019/ Llama Rod Owens: https://www.lamarod.com/

Leah Penniman: https://www.endoftheworldshow.org/blog/2020/5/6/apocalypse-survival-skill-4-braiding-seeds

My Grandmother's Hands: https://www.resmaa.com/books

Music credit to Made By Finja by Sascha Ende Link: https://filmmusic.io/song/6171-made-by-finja