Support Milkweed Farm's Land Transition!

To our community, friends, and family far and wide,

 

We are so pleased to announce that after many long years of searching and a year-long transfer process, we bought a farm! For us, this is more than a decade long dream come true and we are asking our community far and wide to support us in our land transition! We are now the proud stewards of a 10-acre parcel in Westminster, Vermont owned by the Earth Bridge Community Land Trust, where we have secured a lifetime lease and purchased the previous owner's house and farm infrastructure. We look forward to producing organic no-till vegetables and flowers for our local community for a long, long time. We are a queer and trans owned farm and will be proud to be able to use our new land as a safe and welcoming gathering space for our community and look forward to employing and training the next generation of young queer aspiring vegetable farmers. We are forever grateful to the Earth Bridge Community Land Trust for helping us to access this property, to the Akaogi/Smith family who stewarded the land for the past 30 years and built the farm from the ground up, and of course to the Abenaki, the original indigenous stewards of this beautiful piece of earth.

 

We humbly recognize our extreme privilege in being able to access this land at all and we are fortunate to be able to have secured financing for a portion of our project and to have savings to put towards it as well. We publicly acknowledge that asking for money for our farm and family in this manner is complicated! In an effort to stand in solidarity with communities historically and currently most impacted by the lack of access to land, we will be donating 10% of any funds we raise to the amazing work of the BIPOC led SUSU commUNITY Farm , who are also in the process of making their own land transition!

 

As we look toward our new farm, the reality is that we are facing some very expensive projects that need to happen so that we can physically move onto the land. At the top of the list is a whole house renovation needed to make the current farmhouse safe and liveable for our family. It currently is a very rustic largely uninsulated shell that needs a complete upgrade from top to bottom, and upwards of $200,000 worth of materials and labor to transform it into a liveable home. Construction materials are so expensive right now; we’ll be doing some of the work ourselves and using reclaimed materials when possible! Part of the project that will be especially expensive is power. There is currently no substantial electric service to the property, as the previous owners made due with a very minimal solar system (just enough to power a small well pump). After months of research and back and forth with the power company, excavators, solar designers and electricians, we recently learned that the total cost to bring power service to our new home and farm structures will be around $40,000, far greater than we ever anticipated. The high costs of wire and conduit coupled with the very long distance of the house and farm to the nearest pole are driving this hefty cost. We plan to add a grid-tied solar system in the future. In addition to the massive work that the house needs, much of the farm infrastructure is also badly in need of fixing.

 

The land itself is gorgeous and well-suited to our needs - we have inherited fertile ground, many perennials, and a lush ½ acre asian pear orchard, and yet, the many important systems and structures key to the operation of our farm and family that are either absent or in disrepair, such that we are not able to fully operate our farm business or physically live on the land this season. Normally this time of year, we would be filling greenhouses with seeds and seedlings, but due to the lack of proper on site infrastructure and because we need to move and rebuild our own greenhouses as well as physically move our equipment, tools, supplies from our previous farm location to our new farm (no small feat!) we just didn’t feel we would be able to grow successfully for our CSA and wholesale customers this spring. This disruption in our farm business is incredibly distressing to us, emotionally and financially, but we know we must focus on completing construction of our new home and other large infrastructure projects before we can farm on the land successfully.

 

Additionally, we are welcoming a new baby into our family in early April - another big transition we will be holding amidst all of the others!

 

We are fully committed to growing good food for our community on this land long into the future, and are asking for our community to support us in a successful transition onto our new farm and into our new home so we can get to the important work of feeding you all! We hope to raise $10,000 or more, which we can immediately put towards building our new home and farm. Please share widely!

 

With love and appreciation from our family to yours,

Jonah, Emily, and Simon