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Reclaiming Our Common Home
The path to an ecological civilization is paved by reclaiming the commons—our common home, the Earth, and the commons of the Earth family, of which we are a part. Through reclaiming the commons, we can imagine possibility for our common future, and we can sow the seeds of abundance through “commoning.”
In the commons, we care and share—for the Earth and each other. We are conscious of nature’s ecological limits, which ensure her share of the gifts she creates goes back to her to sustain biodiversity and ecosystems. We are aware that all humans have a right to air, water, and food, and we feel responsible for the rights of future generations.
Enclosures of the commons, in contrast, are the root cause of the ecological crisis and the crises of poverty and hunger, dispossession and displacement. Extractivism commodifies for profit what is held in common for the sustenance of all life.
The Commons, Defined
Air is a commons.
We share the air we breathe with all species, including plants and trees. Through photosynthesis, plants convert the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and give us oxygen. “I can’t breathe” is the cry of the enclosure of the commons of air through the mining and burning of 600 million years’ worth of fossilized carbon.
Water is a commons.
The planet is 70% water. Our bodies are 70% water. Water is the ecological basis of all life, and in the commons, conservation creates abundance. The plastic water bottle is a symbol of the enclosures of the commons—first by privatizing water for extractivism, and then by destroying the land and oceans through the resulting plastic pollution.
Food is a commons.
Food is the currency of life, from the soil food web, to the biodiversity of plants and animals, insects and microbes, to the trillions of organisms in our gut microbiomes. Hunger is a result of the enclosure of the food commons through fossil fuel-based, chemically intensive industrial agriculture.
A History of Enclosure
The enclosure transformation began in earnest in the 16th century. The rich and powerful privateer-landlords, supported by industrialists, merchants, and bankers, had a limitless hunger for profits. Their hunger fueled industrialism as a process of extraction of value from the land and peasants.
Colonialism was the enclosure of the commons on a global scale.
When the British East India Company began its de facto rule of India in the mid-1700s, it enclosed our land and forests, our food and water, even our salt from the sea. Over the course of 200 years, the British extracted an estimated $45 trillion from India through the colonial enclosures of our agrarian economies, pushing tens of millions of peasants into famine and starvation.
Our freedom movement, from the mid-1800s to the mid-1900s, was in fact a movement for reclaiming the commons. When the British established a salt monopoly through the salt laws in 1930, making it illegal for Indians to make salt, Gandhi started the Salt Satyagraha—the civil disobedience movement against the salt laws. He walked to the sea with thousands of people and harvested the salt from the sea, saying: Nature gives it for free; we need it for our survival; we will continue to make salt; we will not obey your laws.
Expanding Enclosures
While the enclosures began with the land, in our times, enclosures have expanded to cover lifeforms and biodiversity, our shared knowledge, and even relationships. The commons that are being enclosed today are our seeds and biodiversity, our information, our health and education, our energy, society and community, and the Earth herself.
The chemical industry is enclosing the commons of our seeds and biodiversity through “intellectual property rights.” Led by Monsanto (now Bayer) in the 1980s, our biodiversity was declared “raw material” for the biotechnology industry to create “intellectual property”—to own our seeds through patents, and to collect rents and royalties from the peasants who maintained the seed commons.
Reclaiming the commons of our seeds has been my life’s work since 1987. Inspired by Gandhi, we started the Navdanya movement with a Seed Satyagraha. We declared, “Our seeds, our biodiversity, our indigenous knowledge is our common heritage. We receive our seeds from nature and our ancestors. We have a duty to save and share them, and hand them over to future generations in their richness, integrity, and diversity. Therefore we have a duty to disobey any law that makes it illegal for us to save and share our seeds.”
I worked with our parliament to introduce Article 3(j) into India’s Patent Law in 2005, which recognizes that plants, animals, and seeds are not human inventions, and therefore cannot be patented. Navdanya has since created 150 community seed banks in our movement to reclaim the commons of seed. And our legal challenges to the biopiracy of neem, wheat, and basmati have been important contributions to reclaiming the commons of biodiversity and indigenous knowledge.
Partnership, Not Property
So, too, with water. When French water and waste management company Suez tried to privatize the Ganga River in 2002, we built a water democracy movement to reclaim the Ganga as our commons. Through a Satyagraha against Coca- Cola in 2001, my sisters in Plachimada, Kerala, shut down the Coca-Cola plant and reclaimed water as a commons.
Ecological civilization is based on the consciousness that we are part of the Earth, not her masters, conquerors, or owners. That we are connected to all life, and that our life is dependent on others—from the air we breathe to the water we drink and the food we eat.
All beings have a right to live; that is why I have participated in preparing the draft “Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth.” The right to life of all beings is based on interconnectedness. The interconnectedness of life and the rights of Mother Earth, of all beings, including all human beings, is the ecological basis of the commons, and economies based on caring and sharing.
Reclaiming the commons and creating an ecological civilization go hand in hand.
This article originally appeared in Yes! Magazine at https://www.yesmagazine.org/issue/ecological-civilization/2021/02/16/vandana-shiva-reclaiming-commons.
Yes! Magazine is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of … . Learn more at Yes! Magazine
What’s growing on the farm this spring?
The North Amherst Community Farm is coming back to life. Following 17 years of organic farming and a short interval of inactivity, the board of directors is working to revive farming activity in North Amherst with an emphasis on the “community” aspects of the North Amherst Community Farm. Toward this end, we engaged the young, creative and passionate minds of UMass students through the Stockbridge School of Agriculture Permaculture Design and Practice class this past spring. They presented the result of their work to community members on May 7, 2026 at the North Amherst Public Library.
The NACF board of trustees will be reviewing the suggestions of the students and community members over the next few months.
Friends of the farm continue to clean up the vegetation and debris while also working to stabilize the financial status of the farm and move toward full ownership of the infrastructure (buildings, equipment, etc.) that is currently owned by Simple Gifts.
In the meantime, we have rented most of the farmland in order to pay taxes and insurance, which allows the public continued access to the property. We’re delighted to have responsible tenant farmers using and maintaining the land.
If you walk the farm this spring, you will see:
Kitchen Garden Farm from Sunderland occupying the large greenhouses. Greenhouses 1, 2, and 3 on the west end (North Pleasant St.) have been the home to leafy green vegetables over the winter and are now being transitioned into peppers and tomatoes.
Kitchen Garden is also farming about 4 acres of tomatoes and peppers with drip irrigation and plastic mulch, on the fields just north of the large greenhouses.
Em Thomas from Little Bend Flower Farm in Sunderland is preparing to grow flowers on about 1/2 acre, just north of the large greenhouse on the west end of the farm.
And Plainville Farm from Hadley, will be growing squash on the fields at the east end of the farm, along Pine St.
Planting of the organic squash along Pine Street has begun!
You are invited to a public meeting!
Following a public meeting at the North Amherst Library last fall, the North Amherst Community Farm Board continued to be in conversation with potential future farming operations and have had discussions about possible projects that would serve the North Amherst community. Among the most exciting projects are a community garden, a public orchard or food forest, and start-up (incubator) farming enterprises.
Before making decisions on any of these possibilities however, we have engaged the UMass Permaculture Design and Practice class from the Stockbridge School of Agriculture to help us think creatively about the future. NACF Board members have met with the students several times both in class and on the farm to discuss possibilities.
The UMass Permaculture Design Class will present the results of their analysis and proposed design for the farm to the NACF Board at a public event in May and you are invited!
Please join us for:
According to UMass faculty member, Lisa Depiano, “It is very meaningful for students to get a chance to work directly with their own clients on a real-life project alongside their peers. Our past clients have also found it helpful to have a focused time with students to help them think through their site goals, conduct a site analysis, and help them develop a master plan and other resources for their farm.”
We are as excited to hear their thinking as we are to hear your reaction to their presentation. This project continues to be a community effort, and as members of our local community, we still need your good ideas and suggestions. We hope you will join us for their final presentation on May 7.
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Sowing seeds of support: Grow Food Northampton meets $1M goal to help local farms, fight hunger
| Original Post – Daily Hampshire Gazette | Published: 08-05-2025 3:41 PM Modified: 08-05-2025 5:41 PM |
By GRACE CHAI
NORTHAMPTON — Leaning out of the window of his blue truck on a hot summer day last week, Courtney Whitely of Ras Farm recounted his journey to farming.
The Jamaica native had been a farmer for a long time working for other farms in the area before he obtained land to grow his own produce from Grow Food Northampton. To him, growing food requires a connection to the land, and understanding how to grow food that nourishes the body is important.
“You have to be one with the land,” Whitely said.
He learns a lot from the land, including when growing certain food doesn’t work out one season. Last year, he tried to plant kallaloo, a leafy green used in many Jamaican dishes, using plastic materials to support its growth, but it didn’t grow well. After planting it again differently this year, it thrived.
Now Whitely grows butternut squash, jalapenos and other vegetables to sell at Grow Food’s Tuesday Farmers Market. He found out about the Northampton nonprofit while browsing a website called New England Farmland Finder, where he discovered that the organization leases land to small farms.
Whitely is one of 10 farmers who have been able to lease land at affordable prices from Grow Food, the largest community farm in Massachusetts whose mission is to support local farms, provide land- and food-based education for children and adults, advocate for food security and practice sustainability.
The nonprofit’s role in the community began in 2010, when founders Lilly Lombard and Adele Franks — with the support of over 800 petition signatures from locals — lobbied for 121 acres in Florence to be preserved as farmland.
In the 15 years since its founding, Grow Food has established a community farm where it leases land to small farms, oversees a 320-plot community garden where people can grow their own food for an annual fee of $40 (or pay on a sliding scale), and operates a Giving Garden that grows thousands of pounds of food annually for donation to local food pantries and community meal sites. Grow Food also promotes education on local food and farming, runs a Tuesday Farmers Market and delivers free food to nine low-income housing sites each week.
This work has been bolstered along the way by a combination of funding sources, including the Northampton community and federal and state grants.
But as federal grants began to get wiped out under the Trump administration, Grow Food’s leaders saw the “writing on the wall,” as co-Executive Director Alisa Klein puts it, and last fall launched a campaign to raise more than $1 million for its Community Roots Fund. The campaign collected some $900,000 in private donations over the course of several months before opening to the public in June. Within six weeks, the organization raised the remaining $100,000.
Klein said that community members contributed with “remarkable generosity,” crediting the huge community response to people recognizing the role that Grow Food plays in feeding people in the city.
Klein says that while the organization had an “infusion of funds” for capital projects, its $1 million campaign is critical operational funding that will allow it to continue their programs and initiatives. The money will be used to support local farms and gardeners in the Community Garden and to implement climate resilience measures.
Some of these programs support its mission of education, as the organization has established a close relationship with Northampton Public Schools where students come to the community garden on an annual field trip.
“If we can engage kids in the local food system at a young age, if we can impart to them a sense of agency that they can create a healthy, vibrant, resilient local food system … they will go on to be kind of citizen activists to create that healthy local food system,” said Klein. “We feel like it’s really important to give them the tools to learn how to grow food, to have a relationship with the land.”
Grow Food also has classes on the community farm for adults to learn about farming and gardening. Klein says that the organization hones in on the cultural origins of different kinds of food and they talk about the history of the land.
Some of these programs will take place in a new pole barn, funded by a federal grant from U.S. Rep. Jim McGovern and a city grant from the Community Preservation Act, that Grow Food will use to host events, educational classes and more.
Recently, Grow Food held an event at its Living History garden, where food from different cultures grows alongside each other. Walking through the Living History garden feels like flipping through a richly diverse family album: covered in green leaves on a trellis are bumpy green bitter gourds; illuminated in bright sunlight are red okra, flax and molokhia, a leafy green used in many traditional Middle Eastern dishes. The garden represents the larger story of people hailing from all over the world who came to Northampton.
Impact of federal cuts
The organization relies on local generosity and private funding more than before to support these kinds of programs. According to Klein, Grow Food lost nearly one third of its budget due to federal funding cuts for grants such as the Local Food Purchase Assistance Cooperative Agreement Program (LFPA), which provided funding for groups like GFN that buy food from socially disadvantaged farmers and producers to provide to underserved communities.
Previously, the LFPA grant it received provided $400,000 over the course of three years. The nonprofit expected to renew the U.S. Department of Agriculture grant for another three years, but it was terminated in March.
Grow Food has also lost funding from a Farm to School grant that would have provided $50,000 for GFN’s education programs.
“We saw the writing on the wall, that we knew that hunger and food insecurity [were] rising in this valley,” said Klein. “And so we knew that we were at a moment where we had to figure out how to strengthen the organization’s ability to continue our work and to continue to feed people in the community.”
According to the Greater Boston Food Bank’s fifth statewide Food Access Report, food insecurity among Massachusetts households has increased to 37% in 2024 based on survey data. In the same report, Hampshire and Franklin counties were shown to be 50% food insecure and Hampden County as 54% food insecure, with food insecurity defined as “the experience of being unable to afford enough food to eat or worrying about where one’s next meal will come from.”
Role of farmers market
One way Grow Food combats food insecurity is through its Tuesday Farmers Market, which takes place behind Thornes Marketplace from April until November.
A popular community fixture, the market bustles with activity on a typical afternoon, with about 30 vendors selling produce and other goods to customers. Grow Food does Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) matching at the market, doubling up to $10 of customers’ SNAP money. For every $10 spent in SNAP, for example, GFN gives someone $20 in tokens to buy anything SNAP eligible, like meat, cheese, fruits and vegetables. Massachusetts’ Healthy Incentives Program (HIP) is another program that helps SNAP recipients access free, local produce up to $40 per month and is also available at the farmers market.
Farmers market Manager Helen Kahn organizes the music, vendors and SNAP transactions. Standing under a tent that provided some respite from the blazing heat last week, Kahn helped marketgoers at the Grow Food table to the sound of a fan whirring.
“I think people don’t really realize how many food insecure families and individuals there are in this region,” said Kahn, who says that in the last four years, 30% of all purchases made at the market were made with SNAP. “I think [people] think Northampton and … erudite, privileged, wealthy. It’s not necessarily the case. It’s very important not only to have people able to use their SNAP and their healthy incentives program to buy fresh fruits and vegetables, but in addition to that, the SNAP match that we’re providing is helping people purchase even more.”
According to Kahn, the organization processes 120 to 160 transactions at its table every market. Between the farmers markets in the summer and the winter, Grow Food gives out $55,000 each year to food-insecure households. Kahn says that the program benefits both SNAP recipients and farmers.
Additionally, Grow Food takes the market on the road every week to reach more people through its mobile farmers market. Two teams of volunteers, each led by a food access assistant, split up to deliver free food like tomatoes, eggplants and greens from local farms to nine low-income housing sites. The market serves about 250 households each week, with people picking up food for their families, according to Erin Ferrentino, food access manager.
Several residents, including Robin Hicks, 63, visit the mobile market every week. Hicks, who lives at Cahill Apartments, is eight years sober from alcohol and heroin and now lives with her 10-year-old cat. The mobile market is part of her Thursday morning routine.
A few feet away from the table of produce, she pressed play on her phone, the tune of a song she calls “One Day at a Time” drifting into the air. She danced a little, humming the lyrics with a smile on her face. One day at a time — or ODAAT — is her motto.
“I love these people,” she said, looking toward the table of volunteers. “I am so very grateful to [Grow Food Northampton] for coming every week.”
Wally Czajkowski (at left) with Dave Tepfer on the farm as Dave and he review the terms of the sub-lease. Off from Wally’s shoulder (in the distance) you can see some of the composted goat manure that he will be spreading to accelerate the growth of his squash crop.Wally’s presence means that there will be productive activity on the land. That will be good for our morale, and it will also prevent the maturing and seeding of weed plants that would otherwise thrive in the fields. Wally has agreed to plant a winter cover crop before he leaves.
northamherstcommunityfarm.com 