WHO WE ARE

OUR MISSION

Not Our Farm (NOF) is a non-profit farmworker storytelling project that strives to celebrate and share the stories of non-owning workers on farms. We aim to increase visibility around the challenges and abuses that happen on farms, regardless of the size, location, or reputation. NOF is building power among farmworkers by cultivating a virtual place of community in which farmworkers share their stories and skills, create resources, and form relationships with each other. 

CORE VALUES

Not Our Farm's core values have been directly shaped by recurring themes brought up in farmworker storytelling. We strive to embody these values in our work and believe our farms and food system should as well.

  • Community care – Active care towards, with, and from our communities is opposed to the individualism and transaction within capitalist exchange. It is rooted in mutual respect and reciprocity. Community is built on relationships and requires conversation, care, labor and conflict resolution.

  • Cooperation – We all contain a diversity of skills, lived experiences and curiosities that, when uplifted and celebrated, can only strengthen our work.

  • Rest – We decenter productivity as the core aspect or measure of success in farming. We strive to embody nature’s ebbs and flows and recognize the wisdom of the earth and the plants we grow.

  • god is Change* – Our journeys take many paths, and this is reflected through our skills and interests. All experiences are needed to shape our work. We must allow ourselves to follow the stream where it takes us, and what we focus on as an organization may change or shift over time. For our work to be truly sustainable, we must be able to hold these complexities.

  • Embrace of all – Not only is there room for all of us, it will take all of us. We value authenticity and hold space for everyone to show up to this work unapologetically as their full selves in their full power.

  • Commitment to education + learning – We actively work to dismantle oppressive structures that reinforce knowledge hoarding on farms. We are inspired by and uplift anarchist freeschool and skillshare models. We honor the fundamental right to knowledge and acknowledge the deep wisdom we individually and collectively bring.

  • Right relationship with the land – We are part of a community who respect one another and the land we are on. We make an effort to learn about and from the land we are on, the ancestral peoples of the land we are on, and historical + present struggles for liberation. We believe farms are political microcosms and places for us to practice the future. We farm as a way to counter the systems that we are living under.

    *quoted from Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower: All that you touch. You Change. All that you Change Changes you. The only lasting truth is Change. God is Change.

NOF ECOSYSTEM

This graph displays who we center in our work and who we are accountable to. We prioritize working with past and current farmworkers and organizations / groups / collectives who are farmworker-run or work explicitly with farmworkers. 

MEET THE TEAM

THE CORE TEAM

ANITA ADALJA • FOUNDER / PROGRAM MANAGER
anita@notourfarm.org

Anita identifies as a nomad and reject Indian. She has spent nearly 15 years working on farms including non-profit, for-profit, urban and rural farms in New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia, California, Washington, D.C., and New Mexico. Anita also trained and worked as a social worker in New York City. Her heart is focused on safety, dignity and financial security for farmworkers. She founded Not Our Farm in 2019 and dedicates this project to all of the crew members she has farmed alongside.

MALLIKA SINGH • ORGANIZER
mallika@notourfarm.org

Mallika is a poet, farmer, and cook who makes work about ecosystems and intimacies. Mallika facilitates a study and writing group called Rivering Towards: Desert-Water Poetics & Politics. their debut chapbook, Retrieval, was published in 2020 from Wendy’s Subway.Born in Delhi, India and raised in the Bay Area, CA and Santa Fe, NM; mallika finds their homes in Sikh Punjabi diaspora and under the open skies of New Mexico. they are currently based in Albuquerque, NM and is growing vegetables, herbs, and flowers with their coworkers at Ashokra Farm.

ADVISORY BOARD

GABY PEREYRA
Gaby Pereyra is a Venezuelan/Uruguayan transplant to NY. Her immense love for plant ancestors started at an early age, when she began to learn anything and everything about them, especially their relationship to people in agro-ecosystems. Gaby's current responsibility as Land Network Weaver is to seed and strengthen relationships, networks, collaborations, and knowledge exchange among Black, Indigenous, and other land stewards of color. Over the past 15 years, Gaby has worked alongside farmers and land stewards from the Americas, Africa, and Europe, learning about the magical trade-off of carbon, nitrogen, and water between the soil, plants, and the sky. As a descendent of immigrant and refugee ancestors and as an immigrant herself, her commitment is to the re-connection of communities and land, under land tenure models that support human beings and non-humans beings, to create more equitable possibilities for our future ancestors.

BO DENNIS
Bo Dennis is a trans farmer based at Dandy Ram Farm in Monroe, ME/ Penobscot Territory. In addition to growing flower in queer community he works supporting beginning farmers through his work at the Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association.

ELI TIZCAREÑO
eli tizcareño has been on the Not Our Farm advisory board since 2023. They are the Training and Education Director at the US Federation of Worker Cooperatives which supports co-ops and democratic workplaces through consulting, training, and technical assistance. On their free time, they enjoy time with loved ones and cats, drinking coffee, music and garden time.

SARAH SOHN (SHE/HER)
Sarah Sohn is Co-Director of the Braiding Seeds Fellowship. Sarah has worked on small vegetable farms on and off since she was a teenager and has had the joy of working with hundreds of brilliant beginning farmers since 2015. She is deeply honored to be working with the Braiding Seeds Fellowship. Sarah is Korean American and grew up in Michigan, which is where she worked on her first farm and learned to grow garlic, the vegetable she remains most identified with to this day: sometimes pliant, sometimes a little rigid in the stalk, sometimes curly, always stinky.

SHANI MINK
Shani Mink is a seasoned farmer, experiential Jewish educator and the executive director of the Jewish Farmer Network. Over the last 12 years she has worked on farms as a field hand, educator, manager and consultant. Shani’s work with the land deepens her spiritual path, and the wisdom of the Jewish tradition lends endless meaning and intention to her work as a farmer.

CRIS IZAGUIRRE
Cris Izaguirre is a farmer, educator and cultural worker. The former Farm Manager at KCC Urban Farm, in Brooklyn, New York an alum of the Center for Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems at UC Santa Cruz. He is the co-founder of Interlocking Roots, a QTBIPOC farmer collective. Currently he is the Propagation Instructor at Farm School NYC and is a 2023-2024 Castanea Fellow. Cris’ work centers food and racial justice with a focus on the leadership, lineage and stories of Black, Indigenous and People of Color.

TOLU IGUN (SHE/THEY)
Tolu Igun (she/they) is a wild child at heart from Detroit. Introduced to the urban agriculture movement in 2013, they finally took the leap of faith to become a farmer in 2020.

Tolu currently operates OlaLekan (oh-lah-lay-khan) Farm, a Black owned diversified vegetable and education farm in Upper Marlboro, MD focused on resolving food apartheid and supporting the next generation of farmers and land stewards.

OlaLekan Farm is named in honor of Tolu’s maternal grandparents: Lalekan and Olabisi. The Yoruba names together affirm the addition of honor, joy and wealth will occur for all who are a part of this community and serve as a reminder to stay hopeful for what’s to come.

MEY DOLCE-BUN
Mey Dolce-Bun is a queer Cambodian American flower farmer from Brooklyn, New York. She has been farming for 12 years, growing vegetables, livestock, and now flowers. She lives in Columbus Ohio with her wife and two young children.

V QUEVEDO
v is a nonbinary queer precious and unpopular agitator with experience organizing in community against gentrification, environmental racism, and the occupations of Palestine. v has worked on a community farm, as a ditch rider, and staffed the kitchen at a farmworker center. v advocates and disrupts for anti-racist food policies that center living wages and safe workplaces for all food and farm workers and repair for historic and ongoing racism, land theft, and extraction. v loves animals, dirt, weeds, and silly putty.

BOARD OF DIRECTORS

JULIETA SAUCEDO • PRESIDENT
Julieta Saucedo has been a grower for over five years and has been involved in conservation and community projects for over a decade. Currently works at a non-profit where oversees farm educational opportunities and coordinates training programs for beginning farmers and youth. She also actively seeks educational/training opportunities for beginning farmers and experienced farmers. Here she has also been a food safety technical assistant and trainer.

BENJAMIN BARTLEY • TREASURER
Benjamin works on the sustainability team of a natural foods distributor. He supports the company's commitment to reduce its supply chain emissions. Benjamin has worked in values-based food systems in numerous capacities since 2011, including value chain specialist at a cooperative food hub and grocery chain, farm food safety auditor, technical assistance provider to farmers and food businesses, and food access director at a sustainable agriculture non-profit.

ALEXIA KULWIEC, J.D. - SECRETARY
Alexia teaches Labor Law at the University of Wisconsin Law School, School for Workers. She is involved in analyzing and contributing to national labor policy through her publications and amicus curiae brief writing before the National Labor Relations Board, and in submitted federal rulemaking comments. She also currently studies labor standards in U.S. agriculture and the food system and has engaged in applied research involving agricultural workers and other essential workers. While always willing to customize courses for local unions or other advocacy groups, Alexia currently offers programs in labor and employment law, wage and hour claims, union organizing campaigns, contract negotiations and interpretation, grievance arbitration, hearings before the NLRB, internal union governance, women’s leadership, employment discrimination, workers’ compensation and workplace related immigration issues.