Hannah Breckbill and Emily Fagan, Humble Hands Harvest. Credit: Cory Eull

Humble Hands Harvest is a worker-owned cooperative farm growing organic vegetables, organic grass-fed and finished lamb and pastured pork on 22 acres in northeast Iowa near Decorah. Hannah Breckbill is founder and co-owner of the farm with her second cousin Emily Fagan. Over the last decade, Hannah has worked to cultivate the resources, skills and experience needed to own and manage a successful farm business through participation in the Land Stewardship Project’s Farm Beginnings and Journeyperson programs and the Practical Farmers of Iowa’s Savings Incentives Program. Along the way, she innovated a new cooperative model of farm ownership that cultivates the resilience of community-based food and farming.

After graduating from college with a degree in mathematics, Hannah was drawn to farming because it offered an opportunity to combine her passion for social activism with her love of the land. After working for other vegetable farmers in her first three growing seasons, Hannah established Humble Hands Harvest in 2013 and continued to farm on leased land in several locations in the Driftless area of southwest Wisconsin and northeast Iowa. Hannah celebrates the experiences of each new season and location — both good and bad — as important steps towards her goal of establishing a permanent farming enterprise. “I’ve grown a lot through running my own farm business,” says Hannah, “but in order to really begin caring for the land, really investing in soil building and perennial crops, I needed a permanent place. The question was, how will I attain that?”

In 2014, Hannah participated in a cooperative purchase of a farm near Decorah that was initially motivated to protect the land from development. As a shareholder in the farm, Hannah successfully encouraged the owners to shift their goal from farmland protection to farmland access. In doing so, she found the answer to her question. Using her own savings, a family loan and matching funds earned through the LSP’s Journeyman’s Program, Hannah purchased eight acres of the farm in 2016. A year later, Emily joined Humble Hands Harvest as a co-owner. Since then, Hannah and Emily have worked together to raise the funds needed to develop vegetable and livestock operations on the farm through events like a farm-raising party and a Go Fund Me campaign.

Today, Hannah and Emily produce diversified vegetables, lamb and pork using mostly hand labor on about two acres of cultivated ground and 20 acres of pasture. Vegetable production infrastructure on the farm includes a well, a drip irrigation system, a deer fence, a moveable high tunnel, a greenhouse, a cooler and a pole building that includes a packhouse and storage. They own a small tractor they use to cultivate ground for cropping and to mow pastures and headlands, manage a small flock of sheep to produce grass-finished lamb and finish about ten feeder pigs each year on pasture. Hannah and Emily direct market their vegetables and meat cuts at twice-weekly farmers markets in Decorah and through on-farm sales of lamb and pork halves and wholes.

Want to read more? You can find the full version of this story in the Second Edition of Resilient Agriculture, available for purchase here.

Rebecca Graff and Tom Ruggieri, Fair Share Farm. Credit: Fair Share Farm

Rebecca Graff and Tom Ruggieri own and operate Fair Share Farm, a diversified vegetable farm located in rural Clay County, Missouri. Together they manage about ten acres of annual and perennial vegetables and fruits, culinary herbs and a large flock of laying hens to feed people in the Kansas City metro area. They market fresh vegetables, fruits and eggs from their farm through a CSA and produce vegetable ferments for direct wholesale and farmers market sales. They also coordinate with other producers in their area to offer meat, cheese and bread options to their CSA members. This farm-based food hub/food circle model allows them to provide a more diverse group of products to their CSA while also cultivating a diverse network of local food production capacity.

Rebecca and Tom met back in 2001, just a year after each had left unsatisfying jobs to look for a better way to support healthy community by working in sustainable agriculture. Their paths crossed at Peacework Farm, an organic vegetable farm in western New York where Rebecca was working as a first-year apprentice. “Tom came out to one of the first member workdays,” Rebecca recalls. “It was mid-May and I had been there just about a month. I admired his leek-trimming skills as we were preparing vegetables for market. We went on our first date a week later. We apprenticed together the following year and we’ve been farming together ever since.”

After another year working as apprentices at the Micheala Farm in southeast Indiana, Rebecca and Tom headed back to Missouri to begin farming on land that has been in Rebecca’s family for four generations. The Graff family farm, like most farms in the area, produced corn, soybeans and cattle using conventional commodity production practices. “I grew up on a farm,” says Rebecca, “but I did not learn how to grow crops of any kind, so it was all new to me when I started my first apprenticeship.” Using holistic farm planning and biological farming practices, Rebecca and Tom worked over the years to create a farm sustained by healthy soils and healthy community.

Want to read more? You can find the full version of this story in the Second Edition of Resilient Agriculture, available for purchase here.