Farm Organizations

Farm Organizations

Community Alliance with Family Farmers (CAFF) builds sustainable food and farming systems through policy advocacy and on-the-ground programs designed to cultivate more resilient family farms, communities and ecosystems. CAFF works with family-scale farmers to generate change and build better food and farming systems. CAFF helps farmers by creating and changing state and national legislation, and working directly with growers and buyers to help them access markets and improve their growing practices. This brings healthier food into more schools, hospitals and farmers markets so that community members have greater awareness of and access to healthy, local food.

Ceres Community Project encourages young people to grow food and prepare organic meals that are delivered for free to low income families struggling with a serious health challenges. With four program sites in Northern California and a dozen communities nationally replicating its model, Ceres is re-imagining the meal delivery program as a strategy for improving health, reducing social isolation, and strengthening local food systems.

California FarmLink is statewide program of economic development. Their Farm Opportunities Loan Program provides flexibly structured financing to under served, low-income, immigrant, and beginning farmers across the state for operating, equipment, and infrastructure loans.

Navdanya is an Indian-based non-governmental organization which promotes biodiversity conservation, biodiversity, organic farming, the rights of farmers, and the process of seed saving. One of Navdanya’s founders is the brilliant Vandana Shiva, an environmental activist, physicist, and author. Navdanya is a network of seed keepers and organic producers spread across 18 states in India. Over the past two decades it has helped set up 122 community seed banks across the country, trained over 500,000 farmers in seed sovereignty, food sovereignty and sustainable agriculture, and helped setup the largest direct marketing, fair trade organic network in India. Navdanya is also actively involved in the rejuvenation of indigenous knowledge and culture. It has created awareness on the hazards of genetic engineering, defended people’s knowledge from biopiracy and food rights in the face of globalization and climate change.

EcoFarm has helped to cultivate the movement towards a more ecologically sustainable and just food and farming system. For over three decades EcoFarm’s mission has been to nurture safe, healthy, just, and ecologically sustainable farms, food systems, and communities by bringing people together for education, alliance building, advocacy, and celebration.

Rooted in the early experiences and sensibilities of its founders—Frances “Frankie” Moore Lappé and Joseph Collins—Food First has been working to end the injustices that cause hunger since 1975. Since its first book, Food First: Beyond the Myth of Scarcity, Food First has gone on to publish over 60 books and hundreds of articles and research reports exposing the root causes of hunger and amplifying the voices of the communities and movements advancing real solutions. Over the years Food First staffers, fellows and interns have gone on to form new organizations including Pesticide Action Network, Neighbor to Neighbor, Global Exchange, Center for Living Democracy, Focus on the Global South, Korea Policy Institute, Land Research Action Network, Oakland Institute and the Oakland Food Policy Council. In 2010, Food First launched its Food Sovereignty Tours program to bring scholars, activists and farmers to the front lines of the global food movement

AmpleHarvest.org is a nationwide non-profit, which has been fighting hunger and food waste since 2009 by enabling millions of gardeners and growers to donate their excess garden produce to a food pantry.