Finca Seremos is a new food justice project in the Hudson Valley founded by longtime uptown organizers Brenda and Chris. Come grow with us!

Finca Seremos will grow nutrient-dense, organic vegetables, fruit, and poultry products in Beacon, NY primarily for farm share (CSA) subscribers in Northern Manhattan and the Bronx with a wide range of household incomes—including Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) recipients—who value fresh, local, and culturally-appropriate food.

The name Finca Seremos means “We-will-be Farms” in Spanish. It comes from the closing line of “Love Sonnet LXIX” by Pablo Neruda, a nod to the love Brenda and Chris have for each other and their family, for stewarding the land, and for their communities in Inwood, Washington Heights, and the Bronx. The poem’s final line—“And through love I will be, you will be, we will be”—also frames the deep understanding of interdependency and mutual aid at the heart of Finca Seremos’ approach to farming. We seek to bend our arc toward justice in three key components of our farm operation: ecological stewardship, building community, and cooperative labor.

Ecological stewardship prioritizes the health of our ecosystem above annual yields—over time, a balanced ecosystem will be more productive for us humans and our non-human kin. Stewardship starts with listening to the land through putting a small portion into diversified vegetable production while cover cropping much of the remainder to see what works best. It also involves baseline ecological observations to have a framework for evaluating our impact. As production expands, we’ll scale up a low- to no-tillage, lightly mechanized, diversified vegetable and perennial cultivation on 4+ acres using a rotational system tailored to the land whose principles are laid out in the land-use plan below, along with a pastured poultry operation on ~1.5 acres focused on laying hens and meat birds. By going beyond requirements for organic certification under the National Organic Program, Finca Seremos aims to boost the strength and resilience of the ecosystem by increasing soil health and diversity of species at all trophic levels while providing food for our communities.

Building community, upstate and uptown, is the second priority in the vision of Finca Seremos. We aim to organize through food. Complementing the many organizing models that respond to emergency and crisis, our work will slowly build the kinds of deep relationships that only food can cultivate. This work will begin over conversations at CSA pickups, building relationships with our customers, trading recipes and resources for housing, education, healthcare, and labor concerns. We’ve cultivated broad networks of support and social services across all these areas through our previous work in government and education that we can leverage to help our community solve everyday problems starting at CSA pickup.

We are also creating a non-profit arm with a focus on education, taking inspiration from practical, justice-oriented training programs like Farm School NYC and Soul Fire Farms. Finca Seremos will partner with local high schools where we have strong relationships to offer internships for our majority Black and Brown neighborhood youth to experience farming outside the stigmas that agricultural work carries for many of their families. In this way, we’ll provide a chance for students with farming in their family’s past to reconnect with ancestral knowledge, creating a much-needed pipeline for farmers of color to skill up, get on land, and feed our people.

Cooperative labor is the final piece of Finca Seremos’ vision, implemented by creating a worker-owned cooperative. As long-term residents of a low- and middle-income housing coop, customers of several commercial coops, and people from cultures of cooperation and mutual aid in Appalachia, Puerto Rico, and Cuba, we understand how cooperative principles form a solid bedrock for ethical, sustainable decision-making in workplaces. Inspired by Soul Fire and Rock Steady Farms, our coop will delegate power and responsibilities to different levels of the governance structure so that we can maximize worker dignity and input, as well as financial stability. This cooperative structure is essential to the vision for Finca Seremos because it bakes sustainability into the organization at the outset by ensuring interdependence of cooperators so that no one person becomes irreplaceable when knowledge and responsibilities are shared.