Across the board, queer farmers are not only challenging conventional farming and food production practices, but the image of farming itself
, but went to college in San Diego because, she figured, that’s what you did if you were gay. “I came out [in San Diego] and I really didn’t realize that there was necessarily a place for queer adults in agriculture,” she said. “It was just not something that I had seen. Most people that were queer that I knew moved to cities and I thought that that would be the path for me as well.”
But she missed her parents’ farm, so she moved back, which is where she met Hankins. Hankins studied agriculture in college and worked in food and agriculture activism networks, and she too did not see a future in city life. “I wanted to be somewhere rural and where I wanted to actually pursue growing for people and for the community,” she said.
Queerness helps define how many of these farmers approach farming and food work. Queerness is “how I relate to others and to the lands in a way that is actively challenging normalized relationships that have been imposed through colonization and capitalism,” says Ullauri. For Bouza, that work is also the work of history.
in Kansas. After making an effort to produce most of what they consumed, they realized “we grew and produced more that we could eat, and rather than waste the excess, it seemed important to share.” They produce all manner of meat, cheese, and produce, as well as soaps and lotions made from goat milk. And while Skeeba sees queerness as something that can create a shared experience within a heteronormative culture, it’s enough to just be queer and run the farm.
Still, queerness is an influence, even if the goal was not to create a Capital-Q queer farm. Hennessy recalls how, when he was learning to farm, all the land grant community classes were run by big agricultural corporations, selling a very specific, commercial way of producing meat and produce, which was never what he wanted to do. On, Hennessy outlines the “behavior-based animal management style” he developed, which eschews mechanized land management techniques.
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