Approaching the new year and what’s ahead

As we enter a new year here at Common Roots Farm, we are devoting time for reflection, planning, and preparation for the coming season. Every winter our team rigorously reviews our operations to improve what we do. Our eye is always on people with intellectual/developmental disabilities and their experiences here on the farm. As our winter cover crops slowly grow, protecting and feeding our soil, and the rains come, we are tucked inside with our computers and our coffee, asking ourselves how we can better include people with disabilities? How can we best provide a place where everyone feels a part of something bigger? How is our farm an asset to the wider Santa Cruz community?

Peter & Pan wish you a Happy New Year!

During 2024, we want to share more about regenerative farming and why we are focused on this path for our land’s future. Similarly, we will be asking for your ideas, to add to ours, to help shape our future.

Our Board came together in 2023 with a facilitator to begin work on a three-year plan. A new year always offer us new beginnings. As Common Roots Farm enters our seventh production season, we hope you share our enthusiasm for the model we are actively creating — one where people with and without disabilities collaborate to grow food and flowers in a healthy, regenerative manner that positively impacts our farmers, those who support them, our ecology, and our climate.

For all who’ve generously donated to us, we thank you so very much. It’s a big challenge to operate any non-profit organization and we are truly grateful for each and every donation. Your support has a very direct impact on adults living with I/DD and we invite you to please come see us in action during our farming season.

We will keep you posted here as we plan our 2024 events and volunteer opportunities and roll out a new online calendar to keep you apprised of all that’s happening at Common Roots. Thank you for joining us!

Tool grant from Intuitive Surgical

Never doubt the value of networking! Thanks to our board member, Igor Smelyanksy, Common Roots Farm has benefited tremendously from our relationship with his employer, Intuitive Surgical. Igor introduced his colleagues to the farm and local employees have been convening regular work days here ever since, helping throughout the season with many different farm tasks.

Igor on the farm.	Intuitive Surgical employees help out in Spring 2023.

Sowing seeds with Intuitive Surgical employees.

The good news hasn’t stopped there! Common Roots was also awarded a grant from the Intuitive Surgical Foundation to purchase new tools and farm equipment. “This grant is a game changer,” says Farm Manager, Nina. “We will start the season with new hula hoes, rakes, row cover and more!” We have also purchased adapted tools so that our farmers with the most significant physical disabilities can more fully participate during our growing season. This grant will help outfit our greenhouse with new commercial tables designed for optimal seed starting, watering and plant growth. By placing them at varying heights, they will also be wheelchair accessible.

Can you sense our excitement?! Our new moveable high tunnel will allow us to maintain our strict crop rotation plan, optimizing soil and crop health, while giving farmers with disabilities the chance to work during our season “edges” — early spring and late fall. Extending our season in this way means more farming opportunities and more crops for sale to our community as we work toward ever greater self-sufficiency here on the farm.

Common Roots sends a very special thank you to Igor, Intuitive Surgical Foundation, and everyone from the company who has participated in some way in supporting Common Roots Farm. These kinds of partnerships are so beneficial to our farmers with disabilities and certainly help our bottom line. Thank you all!

Common Roots is a Whole Cities Foundation community partner

When Chelsea Nienow from Whole Foods recommended Common Roots for a Whole Cities grant, we were delighted and intrigued. Whole Cities Foundation works to expand access to fresh, healthy food and nutrition education through community-led processes. Well, we’re so excited to announce Common Roots Farm is now a Community First Grant partner in supporting long-term food access solutions in our community!

Whole Cities Foundation applies Whole Foods Market’s Community First Principles to build partnerships with locally-led organizations to help create thriving local food systems and grow community health. We love how Whole Cities Foundation understands that grassroots solutions are often the strongest. Our farm’s work to include adults with disabilities in market farming caught the Foundation’s attention, along with our commitment to ecological practices.

WIth this grant, Common Roots will bring in a registered dietician nutritionist to teach classes in food preparation and nutrition to adults with disabilities and their chosen support person. We’ve learned that in our fast-paced lives, sometimes preparing fresh foods can feel like a burden. Here, participants will have the opportunity to go into the farm and harvest fresh produce themselves, learn how to prepare it, and then sit down together to eat and enjoy it.

As part of our six-week course, participants can take home fresh produce and practice the recipes learned each week. Making fresh fruits and vegetables more accessible to our community is one of our goals.

Common Roots is very excited to bring this opportunity for skill-building, socialization, and healthy eating to our farm this coming season. Click here to learn more about our partnership with the Whole Cities Foundation, and watch our website and social media for information on class sign-ups this spring.

Thank you, Chelsea, and Whole Cities Foundation for this marvelous opportunity to use our new outdoor kitchen and bring food preparation to our farm in 2024! We can't wait!