The farm growing tomorrow’s farmers

MILLERTON —  Rock Steady Farm, a cooperative farm in Millerton, is exemplary within the agricultural landscape for many reasons, and its fundraising ability is one of them: In 2023, it raised $650,000, largely from grants.

The reason that it’s able to do this, said Maggie Cheney, Rock Steady farmer and co-founder, is that they approach farming not just as a business, but as an intersectional space — meaning that it tries to consider the full wide range of ways in which a farming business engages with the lives of local community members.

“We’re a nonprofit and a farm,” said Cheney. That means that “instead of just surviving, we’ve been able to shift to advocacy and systemic change,” which the cooperative accomplishes through educational and outreach programs.

When Cheney, D Rooney and Angela Defelice co-founded Rock Steady in December 2015, they adhered to a much more traditional model, Cheney said. “In the beginning years, we were really trying to kind of make it work,” they said. “We used to be basically 90% just farmers and producing food wholesale, going to markets, that kind of thing.”

But in the last four years, that has changed.

At Rock Steady, “community” extends beyond about locals and patrons: It’s also about the farmers.

Conducting surveys of Rock Steady alumni, said Cheney, “shifted us more in the direction of education work. Because we heard from our community that there is a gap” in the accessibility to learning how to farm.

It was a survey of the community of Rock Steady alumni, said Cheney, that shifted us more in the direction of education work. Because we heard from our community that there is a gap” in the accessibility to learning how to farm.

“For queer and trans farmers, and specifically queer and trans BIPOC farmers, there aren’t that many training programs on large-scale farms,” they said. “Rural spaces have not felt super welcoming” for those marginalized groups. “People have had abusive relationships with farm owners, myself included.”

At Rock Steady, would-be farmers who have been unwelcome or unsafe elsewhere can learn greenhouse skills, production skills — even basics like tractor driving — across a farming sectors.

Rock Steady’s emphasis on educational farming brought in 16 grants — not including outside of donors and family foundations — in 2023 alone. Its goal for 2024 is to match the $650,000 it was able to raise for the first time this year, a third again as much as it had raised in 2022.

Its most recent recognition was a $40,000 grant from Capital Impact Partners’ Co-op Innovation Awards. It will use the grant to further develop its Pollinate program, an immersive paid apprenticeship for queer, trans and farmers of color, which focuses on training new farmers in cooperative farming models.

It will also fund Rock Steady’s  alumni support program “HIVE” and the first year of an incubator program in partnership with Wildseed, also based in Millerton, just up the road from Rock Steady.

It has also received grants from the North Star Fund, a social justice fund, and $125,000 from The Fund for Frontline Power, which describes itself as a “100% grassroots-governed fund supporting grassroots-led climate solutions.” Grants from the Berkshire Taconic Community Foundation supports food access work in Ancramdale in partnership with Ancramdale Neighbors Helping Neighbors Association, and a set of documentary shorts that amplify the voices of queer, trans farmers.

Cheney said that things really changed for Rock Steady when it “came out” as a farm. “We were like, ‘Whoa,’” said Cheney, “‘why are all these farmers talking to us from across the country? Why are there, like, farmers from the Balkans, South Africa, Nigeria, India reaching out to us?’ Because there weren’t that many out farms.”

For its first round of public-facing training programs, Rock Steady received 350 applications for eight spots. “And then we were like, ‘How can we not do this?’” said Cheney.

“The current food system is not working,” they said, pointing to what happened at farms across the country duri

ing COVID-19, when whole fields of food were getting composted because of labor shortages and transportation breakdowns. “I think we need as many creative approaches to growing food as possible, especially given climate change.”

And for that, they said, “there’s something to be said about the LGBTQ community and people of color, there’s like a sense of reciprocity and collaboration and because we’re marginalized people. When you’re marginalized, you often have to have a lot more creative solutions to problems because you’re the one who’s usually experiencing the worst of it, if that makes sense.

“A lot of us at Rock Steady have faced, like, housing insecurity, have faced food insecurity. We know what it feels like to stand in line at a food bank,” they said. That makes the farm incredibly well-equipped to actually serve those food banks. “We want that experience to be dignified, to have the highest quality food possible and to build relationships with those who are in that community.

“Not everyone can get it

in the same way. And I think the more farmers that we have who are from marginalized backgrounds, the healthier and more grounded our food system will be.”

As Rock Steady Farm continues to grow, its focus remains on fostering understanding and creating bridges. Its success in securing varied and significant grants not only highlights the effectiveness of its work but also paves the way for a more inclusive and just approach to agriculture and community building.

Cheney commented: “Rock Steady wants to communicate beyond those of our own identity. It’s important to engage with a diverse audience. Some identity politics can be harmful, and we see the change that can happen in communities when you build bridges.”

“There’s a mainstream narrative that focuses on farming in a particular lens, for example, farming with restaurants and local scenes, or farming with food banks and pantries, and farming and climate,” Rock Steady Farm co-founder and farmer Maggie Cheney. “But it’s so much more than that—there are a million different lenses” through which one can understand the impact of a farm. Photo courtesy Rock Steady Farm