Emory Inspired: Love is Love Cooperative Farm grows local, sustainable food for campus

“Gardening and farming are very different. This isn’t a hobby; it’s a job,” says Russell Hondred, one of five partners in the Love Is Love Cooperative Farm.

Insects. Bad weather. Hungry animals. Spoilage. Disease. The tractor won’t start. Staying on top of those elements and more is the demanding job to which Hondred refers.

But don’t ever bet against farmers, especially this quintet.

Years of planning coalesced recently in a moment of joy: After the partners acquired land in Mansfield, Georgia, through the Working Farms Fund of The Conservation Fund, in late November they delivered part of their first year’s yield to Emory through a food purchase agreement (FPA).

First conceived by Ciannat Howett, associate vice president of sustainability, resilience and economic inclusion at Emory, the FPA is a crucial aspect of providing farmers the markets they need to be viable and gain access to financing based on crop sales.

Notes partner Monica Ponce, “Love Is Love farm has been around for more than 13 years at a couple of sites. We hope this is the last move to land that we will own and be able to farm indefinitely.”

A 2019 partnership between Emory and The Conservation Fund means that the Working Farms Fund is purchasing farmland within a 100-mile radius of metro Atlanta, placing conservation easements on it to permanently protect it from development and harmful environmental practices, and leasing the land to farmers with a 10-year path to ownership, selling it to them at the end of their lease.

In turn, Emory will buy their sustainably raised crops and livestock in advance, which allows the university to have a reliable source of local food — something that is more important than ever, given that the pandemic has highlighted the vulnerability of the world’s supply chains.

In May 2021, the United States Department of Agriculture awarded $4.8 million to the Working Farms Fund to create a more resilient food system across metro Atlanta, with U.S. House Agriculture Chair David Scott (D-Ga.) praising the efforts of Emory and The Conservation Fund.

Increasingly, the state’s farmers will be more diverse as the Emory–Conservation Fund partnership helps ensure that historically discriminated against groups — Native Americans, women and African Americans — have access to financial capital. With the average farmer being 60 years old, there is also the hope of enticing younger farmers such as Ponce and Hondred.

Beyond creating more opportunities for who farms, it is also about how they farm. For the Love Is Love partners, the emphasis is on putting more carbon back into the soil than they release. Their new property hadn’t been sprayed, just mowed, so their hope is to achieve organic certification by January 2022. “We hope,” says Ponce, “that people feel better knowing who is growing their food, that we are local and using best practices and fair labor standards.”

Even better, no fence keeps this good idea from spilling beyond Georgia. Notes Howett, “Many other higher education institutions and municipalities say they want to replicate the Working Farms Fund model that Emory created in Georgia.”

With the harvesting of the partners’ first crop of sweet potatoes, sunchokes, eggplant and basil — an undeniably satisfying moment for being the first harvest on new land — the food headed to Emory dining halls, among other outlets.

Eventually the farms will allow Emory faculty and students to study the level of greenhouse gas emissions that characterize different agricultural practices. According to Howett, “We need more scientific research to show what are the best practices to ensure that greenhouse gases are sequestered in the soil permanently.”

Reducing the distance from farm to table, boosting the state’s economy, growing diversity in the ranks of farmers, reducing the carbon footprint and getting good food in the bargain: Everything about the partnership underlines Emory’s values. 

“By ensuring that we have more sustainable, local food for our patients, students, staff and faculty, we are making a statement about the kind of world we want to see,” notes Howett.

In the past six months, the Love Is Love partners dug a well, built a greenhouse, bought a tractor, planted and harvested their first crops and then went right back to their extensive to-do list.

“In our business, you wear all the hats — weed puller, barn builder, tractor driver, HR adviser, business manager,” says Ponce. “You could say I like a good challenge.”