FEB 19, 2025
We are 1 month into the second Trump administration. We are 1 week away from launching our CSA (Asian Vegetable Club). We are 1 month away from the start of our growing season in New York. Our community is hurting, enraged, exhausted. Like many, we are riding the relentless cycles of information and processing all that has fallen around us with as much grounded clarity that we can muster. Farmers are living in fear of deportation and the impoverished are further neglected. Access to gender affirming care and the safety of transgender and queer people continue to live under threat. Funding has been revoked from food access programs, regional farm and food system infrastructure, and projects to restore soil and ecosystems. The survival of farms at every scale is further threatened. What will happen when you starve the people who feed you?
This reality is not new. The people who labor to feed the many have been devalued and exploited since the onset of imperialism, capitalism, and conquest. This country built its wealth by committing genocide, stealing land, enslaving stolen people; all mechanisms to violently uphold a system that prioritizes capital and property above humanity. This cult of violence continues to feed itself through exploited labor with no end in sight.
Generation after generation has struggled and fought for self determination and collective liberation in a system that wants them dead. They understood the importance of community ownership of the means and distribution of production through communal land management, equitable distribution of resources, and building interdependence that honors every individual.
It feels like we are closer and farther from this vision as we have ever been. To farm is to tie your fate to the realities of the land and to learn to tolerate the life and loss that surrounds us all the time. Despite the collapse and despair around us, we persist and continue to build with hope and belief in the power of people. We have known the importance of building community-owned food systems and the depth of this importance reveals itself with each passing season.
We are a cooperative of three farm businesses with ambition to include more. Our work is to prioritize growing food for people in need while sustainably investing in the growth of our production and cooperative distribution systems, to pursue economic viability through diverse sales channels while applying for grants and fundraising, to develop our individual businesses while collaborating to pursue larger opportunities together.
We are proud to have realized $209k of total sales revenue on 13 acres in production over the last two seasons. In 2024, 89% of our revenue was from food access partners who distributed the food at no cost to recipients, many who were funded by the New York Food for New York Families program (NYFNYF). The NYS Department of Ag and Markets launched the NYFNYF program with the goal of boosting traditionally disadvantaged farmers and increasing access of underserved communities to local food. As a result of federal targeting of programs supporting DEI initiatives, our food access funding is being called into question. The recent actions of the state have affirmed our need to sell directly to consumers (thus, Asian Vegetable Club), and continue building interdependent community resilience.
The challenge of building a community-owned food system for marginalized people is simultaneously co-creating many interdependent pieces that require time, relationships, and trust. Many have tried and failed. Not only must we relearn (remember) to grow our ancestral foods and adapt them to a new and changing climate, regenerate depleted soil, train ourselves in non-exploitative business practices and solidarity economics to pull “profit” from razor thin margins, educate the public about economic justice and accessible pricing systems, orchestrate our own logistics and distribution systems, and most pressingly – we must develop our own markets to reach our communities.
The question and risk we face is whether consumers will rise to the occasion, tolerate the discomfort of change, develop community-owned markets with us, and believe in the value of regional resilience. Rising production costs and the loss of migrant labor will shrink the price gap between local-sustainably and industrially farmed food. The conditions and landscape of consumer choice is changing. Buying from farms you have relationships with will bring transparency and immediacy. Buying from farms who work collectively to own the means of production means direct communication about pricing and growing practices, even while public health institutions are no longer funded to provide that information. Community ownership, in the darkest of circumstances, means resilience in our care for each other amid the inevitabilities of change.
This work may span a lifetime, and many more. We are building upon generations of struggle for collective liberation and adapting their wisdom to the present. We call on all of you to claim a role in the co-creation of the world that you want, with us. Worlds that survive are built on reciprocity, and the people who belong to each other give as much as they take. Passive spectators take.
Many Asian Americans are continually learning to see the material and human cost of assimilation. We have been moved by stories from so many of you. We see your labor of unlearning. We understand the pain of swallowing exclusion in exchange for the illusion of protection, the pressure to perform to only learn that excellence would not save you, the daunting awareness that there are yet so many languages to learn. We see your need for community to hold and be held by, sharing the struggle to be brave enough to accept yourself as you are. To try to unlearn a lifetime of conditioning, proffered and reified by white supremacy and colonialism, that taught you no one would.
We recognize the will to survive in our parents and ancestors in its many expressions, the care and concern and helplessness and fear to protect those they love, even when the delivery is painful and not in the form we need. We see those of you who feel it is too painful to see yourself fully, and know that healing is ongoing. Boba politics will only pacify your rage for so long.
To live in Asian diaspora is to constantly transmute our perception of self from other, invisible, into I. To find safety in descendants of other Asian people who tried to colonize your Asian people, because many do not care to discern between your faces. To transform the pain of belonging nowhere into recognition that we belong to each other, and learning that in claiming others we claim ourselves.
The land shows us the truth in fractals; what is true of atoms is true of the cosmos. What heals the soil harmonizes with the needs of the soul. We descend from builders, healers, inventors of agrarian technologies, architects of cosmologies, people who saw medicine in music and plants and the pursuit of balance in all measures, who attuned to the rhythms of 24 seasonal points in a solar year, who spoke in poems and harmonic scale, who obscured truth in metaphor to preserve mystery and free will.
We bring others with us. We are co-envisioning and co-creating the future of Chinatown and the plurality of Asian America in New York. We are building in coalition with Black, Latine, and white farmers to sustain our communities. We are imperfect people building imperfect systems, sharing the honest work of serving our people, softening our hearts to feel it all, and preserving all that is good to carry forth.
We leave you with words from Sommer Sibily-Brown:
there is a rush to fix all that is falling apart
are we integrating into a burning house?
they can sit in the mess they made
they only have the power we give them
not every fight is ours
we have new worlds to build
systems change doesn’t happen in comfort
we are the only ones that got us
our liberation is tied to each other
Sign-ups for our CSA open this week. We will be doing many commercial actions to sell our food, but it was important to us to remind all of you (and ourselves) of our political dreams with our work.
In hope, grief, rage, and tenderness, we continue.
