Food and Agriculture

What It’s Like To Farm As A Cooperative

July 15, 2025 Growing for Market Magazine, Grassroots Economic Organizing. Create! Canada, Cooperatives, Farming, Food and Agriculture

“Oh, I remember when I was young and I wanted to start a farm co-op with my friends, too!” This was the common refrain my friends and I heard back in 2004 when we’d tell established farmers about the farm co-op we were starting. Our group met studying agriculture at McGill University’s MacDonald campus. We had gone our own ways for a few years to work on and manage other farms. Now, we were to run our own farm. We decided to do this together as a worker co-op. A lot of what we were talking about excited established farmers, but then they followed up with, “But then I started a real farm on my own.” No one directly told us not to start a co-op, but there didn’t seem to be a lot of faith that this was a real project.

Indian Farmers Reject Proposed Trade Deals With West

July 6, 2025 Abdul Rahman, People's Dispatch. Resist! Farmers, Food and Agriculture, Free Trade, India, National Strike, Strikes, Worker Rights and Jobs

Free trade agreements (FTAs) with countries in the West would harm India’s agriculture, its farmers, and small industries, claimed one of India’s largest farmer’s groups, All India Kisan Sabha (AIKS), in a press release on Tuesday, July 1. AIKS also extended its support for and announced participation in the upcoming national strike on July 9 against the policies of the ultra-right-wing government in the country. Over 150 million members, along with other constituents of the farmers’ coalition Samyukta Kisan Morcha (SKM), will participate in demonstrations in towns and villages across India on July 9, claimed AIKS in a press release on Tuesday, July 1.

Pressure Builds To Protect Manoomin (Wild Rice)

June 14, 2025 Wabigonikwe, Unicorn Riot. Resist! Food and Agriculture, Indigenous culture, Minnesota, Wild Rice

St. Paul, MN — With only 24 hours notice, advocates mostly associated with Rise and Repair Alliance packed the hearing room for the fourth time at the Minnesota Senate Building on May 1, 2025. Activists have been showing up to meetings since the start of the 2025 legislative session in an attempt to create legal protections for wild rice. Wild rice, often known by its Objiwe name, manoomin, has been a means of sustenance for Dakota/Lakota and Ojibwe peoples since time immemorial. It is the reason that Ojibwe people migrated to this region, “the land where food grows on water” – without it, people’s health and wellbeing would suffer from not being able to live their way of life and not getting essential nutrients from the rice.

Sharing Seeds In A World Of Proprietary Agriculture

June 1, 2025 David Bollier. Create! Food and Agriculture, Open Source, Seeds, The Commons

Seed sharing has been a venerable tradition since the dawn of agriculture. Sharing has been a way of honoring the renewal of life, developing new seedlines, and maintaining a farmer’s independence while helping other farmers. Modern capitalism, armed with new technologies and legal powers, has savaged this tradition of seed-sharing, with disastrous results. For the past several decades, large biotech corporations have aggressively engineered seeds and the design of seed markets to make them proprietary monopolies. This has had profound consequences for farmers and global agriculture: legal bans on seed-sharing, a loss of biodiversity, less innovation in seed breeding, and higher prices that threaten sustainable agriculture and the economic sovereignty of farm communities, especially in the Global South.

Israeli Settlers Escalate Violence, Forced Displacement Across West Bank

May 25, 2025 News Desk, The Cradle. Educate! Food and Agriculture, Gaza, Genocide, Israel, Israeli Settlers, Palestine, Settler Violence, West Bank

The last few days have witnessed a dangerous escalation of violence, theft, and vandalism against Palestinians by illegal Israeli settlers in the occupied West Bank. Settlers attacked Palestinians in the Al-Auja Waterfall area in Jericho on 25 May for the third time in one day, as part of ongoing efforts to displace families who have lived in the area for decades and establish a new illegal settlement outpost.This came a day after settlers, under the protection of the Israeli army, cut off the water supply to the area. In the Salim plain east of the occupied city of Nablus, settlers also continued to set fire to wheat fields on Sunday, coinciding with separate attacks on Palestinian livestock herders in the northern Jordan Valley area.

Investing In Farmers Transitioning To Organic, Regenerative Agriculture

May 17, 2025 Cristen Hemingway-Jaynes, EcoWatch. Create! climate crisis, Farmers, Food and Agriculture, Organic Farming, Regenerative Farming

As more people are starting to realize — and as Indigenous Peoples have understood for millennia — how we treat the land affects everything from food and water security to carbon sequestration and climate change. Many farms in the United States are multigenerational family operations, and, as they are passed down, some members of the next generation are exploring the transition to agricultural practices that are better for the planet and healthier for our food system. Iroquois Valley Farmland REIT is an investment company that focuses on helping farmers transition to organic, regenerative agriculture.

In Lagos, Nigeria, A Farmers’ Market That Sells All Week

May 7, 2025 Osioke Itseuwa, Platform Cooperativism Consortium. Create! Farmers, Farmers Markets, Food and Agriculture, Local Economy, Nigeria

Every Saturday in Ikoyi, Lagos (Nigeria), a small but steady ritual unfolds behind Nakenoh’s Boulevard mall. TKD Farms Farmers’ Market, founded in 2017, brings together a rotating group of vendors—15 to 20 each week, out of a larger pool of 185. What happens here is more than retail. It’s a working model of what a community-centered economy can look like. This isn’t a typical market. Vendors don’t just show up, set up, and sell. They interact, adapt, and build relationships that carry beyond the day’s sales. The layout changes weekly—no vendor has a fixed spot. This prevents any one business from monopolizing customer flow and encourages everyone to connect with different neighbors each time.

How Farmers Responded When Trump Administration Stopped Paying Them

May 6, 2025 George B. Sánchez-Tello, Capital and Main. Organize! California, Food and Agriculture, Food Insecurity, Trump Administration, USDA

Every year brings its own unique challenges for California farmers: water shortages, fires, finding laborers to do the work, bureaucrats in Sacramento adding new requirements and fees, and more. But the second term of President Donald Trump has made this year very different. As part of deep cuts across much of the government, the administration of President Donald Trump chopped $1 billion from the U.S. Department of Agriculture almost without warning. This led to widespread financial pain that affected already struggling farmers and left hungry patrons of food banks in many parts of the country desperate for other sources of healthy food. On Feb. 28, California officials warned farmers who had grown food for schools and food banks that there was funding only for work done up to Jan. 19, despite the fact that farmers had submitted invoices for work and harvests past that date.

The Homeless Garden Project: Opening Doors To The Unhoused

April 20, 2025 Damon Orion, Counter Punch. Create! Community, Food and Agriculture, Gardens, Homelessness

An analysis of data from 2017 and 2022 by the Pew Charitable Trusts points to a direct connection between high housing costs and homelessness rates in the United States. Unsurprisingly, a Santa Cruz County Civil Grand Jury 2024 report stated that the city, which the National Low Income Housing Coalition ranked as America’s most expensive rental market in 2023 and 2024, has the most people experiencing homelessness in California per capita. A University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC), research project called No Place Like Home labeled Santa Cruz as “the least-affordable small city in the U.S.”

The New Mexico Mom Growing Political Power From A Community Garden

March 11, 2025 Gwen Frisbie-Fulton, Resilience. Organize! Community Garden, Food and Agriculture, Food desert, New Mexico

Alamogordo is a working-class town. Because of its proximity to three military bases, lots of veterans live here. Like many places in New Mexico, housing costs have skyrocketed and rent is taking up a bigger portion of locals’ paychecks, making family’s food purchases—and particularly the quality of food—dwindle. As a result, 16.5% of Otero County’s population is food insecure, higher than both the state and national averages. In the county, 19% of residents live below the poverty line, including 28% of those under age 18 and 13% of those 65 or older. Food is often the first thing a family skimps on when facing tough budgets; you can’t pay half the light bill, but you can cut back on groceries.

Indigenous Food Reciprocity As A Model For Mutual Aid

March 10, 2025 Kate Nelson, Civil Eats. Create! Food and Agriculture, Indigenous foods, Indigenous Peoples, Mutual Aid

In the Arctic and Far North, where a successful hunt can mean the difference between feeding the village or scrounging to make ends meet, one might assume a scarcity mindset would take hold. Instead, reciprocity prevails. Examples of this sharing-focused approach abound. A recent documentary, One With the Whale, follows the hunting practices of an island community in the Bering Sea. In one scene, after a long period without finding game, a hunting crew harpoons a seal, which will allow them to feed some of the community. “It’s always a blessing to receive any animal that you catch,” Siberian Yupik hunter Daniel Apassingok tells the filmmakers. “As small as the game is, the game is dispersed with four or five other boats."

Reviving Native Food Sovereignty

March 1, 2025 Dahr Jamail, Resilience. Create! Alaska, Food and Agriculture, Food Sovereignty, Indigenous foods

The Tongass is one of the most ecologically important places on Earth, and plays a critical role in the climate crisis by sequestering one billion tons of carbon dioxide equivalent. The towering old growth forests of the Tongass store the carbon equivalent of six million cars a year, while producing a quarter of all the salmon in the Pacific Northwest. This intact and abundant rainforest are the homelands of the Tlingit, Haida, and Tsimshian Peoples, who care for, steward, and honor the lands and waters that sustain all Southeast Alaskans. Communities in this region practice a way-of-life that is rapidly disappearing across the globe.

Trump Provides An Opportunity To Change The Way We Look At Food

February 23, 2025 Lois Ross, Rabble. Create! Canada, Donald Trump, Finance and the Economy, Food and Agriculture, Tariffs, Trade War

As the political and economic instability created by the goings-on south of the border continue, it is time for all of us to recall how we arrived at this juncture. It is also time to acknowledge that, despite common belief, there has never really been “free” trade with the United States, but rather only a series of measures that have encouraged the unhealthy integration of the Canadian economy into that of our southern neighbours and the ensuing enrichment and concentration of wealth in the hands of transnational corporate giants. Throughout these so-called free trade agreements (FTA, FTAA, NAFTA, CUSMA) the US has often filed unfair trade practice complaints that have led to international trade dispute panels.

Should Cities Open Their Own Grocery Stores?

January 12, 2025 Jule Pattison-Gordon, Governing. Create! Food and Agriculture, Food Deserts, Human Rights, Public ownership

By now, most people are familiar with the concept of food deserts — areas where residents lack ready access to fresh foods. Should local governments step in to operate grocery stores in neighborhoods that don’t have them? Aside from ideological questions over whether governments should get involved with operating retail establishments, there are a number of practical hurdles that are difficult to overcome. Zohran Mamdani, a member of the state Assembly who is running for mayor of New York, calls for a network of city-owned grocery stores.

Small Farming, Urbanisation And Climate Migration

December 2, 2024 Jake Smaje, Resilience.org. Educate! Bangladesh, climate crisis, Food and Agriculture, Migration, Small Farmers

Bangladesh is a small country that sits within the Northeast of South Asia with India wrapped around it, and Myanmar to the South. Despite its small size and relatively recent independence, Bangladesh plays an oversized role in the way poverty, development, climate change and urbanisation are imagined globally. Often in discussions of climate change the conversation turns to Bangladesh as a country imagined to be sinking, throwing out waves of climate migrants across the world. For many reasons this vision is wrong. I don’t have space to go into this in depth here (see further references below). Instead, I want to tell a different but connected story about Bangladesh, urbanisation and the environment.

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