In the future, I am going to do everything I can to bring my community together with locally grown organic food. I want to manage a community-operated farm using regenerative agriculture with sustainability in focus. I believe that bringing people closer to where our food comes from is a very important step toward creating a green future. Current agriculture systems are exploitative of natural resources. Topsoil for example suffers a loss of one percent every year and we have about 60 years of topsoil left. Regenerative agriculture builds topsoil at a fast pace and supports micro-organisms in the soil that are important for plant fertility, hence creating a much higher yield of healthier plants that have better resistance to pests and diseases. In turn, toxic pesticides and herbicides are not needed. To shift our perspective on agriculture, I want to bring attention to these issues and more. It is time to inspire people to be hopeful about our future. I’m going to dedicate myself to helping to bring the people together and bringing us all closer to our food through community-operated regenerative, organic, ethical agriculture.

When I was a child my grandpa would never pick his tomatoes before they were ripe unless my grandmother planned on making fried green tomatoes for lunch. He would always tell me about his days working on farms picking green tomatoes and throwing them in boxes to let them ripen off the plant and how the beautiful red tomatoes I saw in the grocery store were not real tomatoes. I never liked them. To this day, I can’t enjoy a tomato from the grocery store because they just don’t taste the same. Something my grandpa never told me about was the intensive approach to agriculture in our current system; spraying toxic herbicides on food and destroying the topsoil in the process. He also never told me about the whitewashing of American agriculture and how corporate agriculture destroys indigenous food ways, which has kept indigenous peoples from achieving food sovereignty. My grandpa didn’t have the means of accessing this information in his time, so he didn’t get to understand the dire importance of community driven agriculture, yet the things he taught me about gardening as a child led to my passion on this topic. He taught me so much about community driven agriculture without even realizing it. His beautiful, abundant garden helped feed all of our neighbors healthy fruits and vegetables for free. Everyone on Kling street benefitted from his labors and he was so proud of that. His lessons are the core of my social understanding and because of him, I know exactly what I am meant to do with my life. Grow free, healthy food for people! I am currently going to school, majoring in agroecology so I can learn how to grow food abundantly in a way that nourishes the Earth and our guts. I am especially interested in soil science and regeneration of topsoil through regenerative agriculture and holistic management of livestock. Proceeding college, I want to start a farm operation that helps to benefit marginalized communities with achieving food sovereignty. I believe that eventually, people will not have to rely on intensive, corporate agriculture to survive. This is an issue that is necessary for us to solve together and I want to be a beneficial part of solving it. Currently, I am operating a community garden that my neighbors all use for free. All they need to do is bring me seeds and I plant them, care for them, and teach their children how to care for them. I want to teach as many people as I can how to grow their own food. I want everyone to know that the production of food should involve and benefit every member of the community. I am sincerely grateful to my grandfather for implementing these principles into my life at an early age, and everyday I am more excited to share information and organic, healthy food with my neighbors, friends, and community.