By Amalia Gabriel Colón-Nava
As the sun sets over the Schuylkill River, dusk sets in over our ¼ acre farm located at the top of a tall hill – this is my favorite time of day. Looking out towards the river, the forested area lines the bottom of the hill, which makes me feel closer to the sun. Dirtbaby Farm is a worker-owned cooperative farm based in Philadelphia, PA. Our ¼ acre is made up of 30 community garden plots that are rented from the Schuylkill Center for Environmental Education. They are separated into five sections, each lined with an 8-foot-tall deer fence.
This season, May 2023-November 2023, will have marked our third growing season as a cooperative. Evelyn Langley and I, Amalia Colón-Nava, maintain the farmland and most of the on-the-ground programming while Arielle Colella manages finances, customer communications, and operational administration.
Since 2019, when Evelyn founded Dirtbaby Farm, the CSA program has grown from feeding ten households to over 50 households each season. We have grown the CSA program slowly over time. Most recently, this was split up into three different CSA options for our customers – half shares, full shares, and herb shares. We accept SNAP (the Federal government’s Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) payments for our shares, increasing the accessibility of our produce to low-income people.
As someone who grew up with a lot of fresh produce grown in our nearby community garden plot, I have been accustomed to eating healthy whole foods for a long time. However, that is not the case for many of my peers. In fact, just because I grew up with local agriculture being a strong value in my household, many of the foods I now grow and love are different from foods I was accustomed to eating regularly before I started farming four years ago. This is a huge issue. Local agriculture and foraged foods are not accessible to low-income inner-city families because we are removed from nature and native plants, because we don’t have time to process and harvest these foods, and because our local stores don’t stock them and there aren’t enough small, community-based farms to harvest them.
Familiarizing oneself with how to cook the foods that grow around us is liberating and revolutionary. Being in control of how to nourish and care for your body on a very basic level is an essential survival skill. Our dollars are also our most powerful weapon. When we invest in far-away foods, we also invest in fossil fuels and industrialized agriculture, perpetuating hierarchical systems that create labor exploitation. Investing in local agriculture increases our bioadaptability by consuming nutrients that are literally from our own ecosystem. We create less waste. We encourage agriculture that is based on the economic growth of local businesses and community organizations.
However, huge structural changes would need to occur for this to be sustainable and accessible to everyone, not just those with spare time and money. We should make it our work to investigate these systematic problems further and regularly discuss solutions.
For Dirtbaby Farm, our CSA and growth as a business have been especially slow because we have operated without taking on any debt. We also changed many of our offerings over the last four years based on our customer base (including adapting during the COVID-19 pandemic). This meant that we donated many hours of labor to the business, which has ultimately strained many aspects of our lives. We are looking to solve this problem by fundraising more for our programs before the start of the season and incorporating an ethical apprenticeship program in 2024 that is mutually beneficial to the farm and apprentices and honors the apprentices’ labor and ideas.
Some lessons learned from running a CSA program in Philadelphia:
Recipes and newsletters improve accessibility and relationships that our customers have with local foods
Half shares sell faster than full shares and full shares are often split between two households
People are excited to use SNAP dollars on locally-grown food
Groundhogs are the worst
Mugwort is everywhere
There is a lot of local fruit that can be foraged
Having a diverse range of crops is difficult but worth it because it helps maximize our growing space
Growing culturally significant crops and/or small amounts of plants that are important is meaningful to growers like me and keeps me going when the gettin’ gets hard
In addition to our regular CSA program, four of our full shares are paid for through donations to be gifted to a chef and doula who create and deliver free postpartum meals for new parents. We call this the Giftbaby program. This idea came about by discussing the need for fresh and nutrient-dense foods for new mothers and having relationships with local doulas looking to offer this service to their clients. This year, we created a streamlined ordering system through our website and “sold out” the meals within an hour of being listed on the site, demonstrating that we are fulfilling a clear need and that there is a demand for more of this service.
To recap, this year's CSA program consisted of eight full shares, eight herb shares, 15 half shares, and four full shares donated as bulk produce for meals. Although this was tricky to coordinate and keep track of, it allows us to distribute almost 100% of the food we grow. If a crop produces less than we expected or produces inconsistently shaped fruit, we can give it to the Giftbaby chefs since they are expert cooks and the distribution is going directly to meal prep. We include crops in the half and full shares when crops are more productive. We grow and distribute herbs because they provide different and essential vitamins and nutrients than vegetables. Plus, herbs and flowers deter pests and encourage pollinators on our small farm, making herbs a fun, beautiful, essential aspect of our micro-climate.
We still need to figure out how to fund the cost of labor, grow vegetables on a small scale, and secure land the business members could own. We have a lot to learn, but we feel powerful in creating a farm business that responds to the needs of our community and teaches us so much about our home along the way.
Amalia Colón-Nava, she/they, worker-owner of Dirtbaby Farm in northwest Philadelphia, PA and can be reached at dirtbabyfarm@gmail.com. Visit dirtbabyfarm.com for more information.
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