In RECOMMONING, we are searching out a more open, collectively held world where, once again, land is held in common. A collaborative series with Dark Properties.
Back in 2018, I left a cushy tech job to move to the woods. When people asked why I was leaving, I told them I was going upstate to start an artist residency. While true, this didn’t tell the full story. What I should have said was, “My nervous system isn’t compatible with the city-busy, workaholic lifestyle that prioritizes capitalism-driven ROI over human and more-than-human thriving.” I wanted to find another way of living and being that didn’t make me feel bad; that didn’t make the Earth feel bad. Turns out, I wasn’t alone in this sentiment—not by a long shot.
In fact, while I didn’t know it at the time, a coworker who sat across the room from me was brewing a similar transition, at the very same time. Meet Nicole Yeo, a product designer-turned-farmer who, in a COVID-era leap of faith, left her own creative-tech job to become a mission-driven farmer.
Now, five years later, Nicole helps run Choy Commons, “a nonhierarchical cooperative of Asian-led farms engaging our communities in building food sovereignty for the Northeast.” As we’ll get into below, Choy Commons was born out of a desire to create a visible community of Asian American farmers who, by supporting each other, could go farther together. Now, they’re piloting critical mutual-aid programs that deliver fresh produce to food pantries, while also working together to bolster their farms as viable businesses and hubs for building solidarity.
Nicole has plenty of tips to share for anyone else out there who’s squinting into the future to see if, one day, you might be able to quit your job and place yourself in a verdant field of growing vegetables, tired and muddy, but with a full heart.
I hope you enjoy our conversation.
~ Willa
Willa Köerner:
I think the last time we spoke was when we were co-workers, back in 2018. You were a product designer, and now I’m here interviewing you about farming. How’d you pull off the pivot?
Nicole Yeo:
My transition out of tech has been a long journey. Back in 2020, I was being groomed to be a C-level tech executive, but at the same time, I had all these anti-capitalist values. I initially went into design wanting to make activist campaigns, but was swept into the tech industry where I found myself making apps, and witnessing the growth of what ultimately became this consumption-driven mess that hoards everyone’s attention and time. My job had become totally misaligned with what I cared about.
During the pandemic I felt myself sitting with the question, what should humans be doing on the Earth right now, with our awareness of the climate crisis? I ultimately found a lot of resonance when I started listening to farmer activists. I always pinpoint Juneteenth 2020, in one of those COVID-era webinars, as my ah-ha moment. There was a panel of Black and Indigenous farmers, including Leah Penniman from Soul Fire Farm. That was the first time I ever listened to a farmer talk about their work in the context of social justice, racial equity, and building a better future. It was an intergenerational panel of land workers, and I was completely moved by it.
After that webinar, I dove deeper into Black and Indigenous farming, and discovered it as an area that is ripe with life. I realized I’d been thinking about sustainability and environmentalism in the context of merely being and doing less, like “reduce, reuse, recycle.” But farming, food justice, and land justice is so much more about building, expanding, and reclaiming life. It woke up something that had been asleep in me, and exposed how dead I felt working in tech. So I decided to quit my job, and took a leap of faith in following this farming thread.
WK:
A lot of people share the sentiment of wanting to quit a job that feels misaligned with their values, but they don’t know how to take action. How did you plan out your transition?
NY:
As I was deciding whether to leave tech, I took off two weeks to intentionally map out what a new career could look like. I was researching farming degrees, because that’s what I’d been trained to think: What degree do I need to get this other kind of job that I want?
But most of the advice I got was, “Just go farm. Be with the land, touch the soil, and then go from there.” So I got on my CitiBike—because it still wasn’t safe to ride the subway—and I went to all the community gardens and farms I could bike to. I went to Earth Matter Farm on Governor’s Island for my first volunteering day, and then I went to Battery Park’s farm and volunteered there, too.
With farming, you really do need to start from the very bottom, building relationships with your local community and land. It’s crucial to see who is already around you, and to understand that you are stepping into their space. A big part of transitioning out of something like tech, or corporate or upper-class work—is to step softly, and earn your welcome.
Also, you really need to have patience and perseverance to learn the knowledge of farming. So yes, I went to all these different farms as often as I could, and lucky for me, they all have fantastic teachers running them. Finally, I quit my job in October of 2020, and took online courses to learn about production farming. Then I applied to Farm School NYC, and got rejected, which was an important part of my journey.
As a person who now manages a program with 10 slots for hundreds of applicants, I understand that many of these programs are designed for low-income Black and Brown people. In a way, I’ve come full circle. I now see that so many people applying for these programs are like, “I worked in corporate, or did this upper-class career for a long time, but now I’ve decided to bless the farm world with my skills.” There is no humility with that approach, so it’s good that I was rejected. [Laughs]
In 2021, I got a job at Randall’s Island Urban Farm, where I worked as an environmental educator and urban farmer. We grew food on an acre of land, and taught K–12 students on farm visits two to three times a week over Zoom, because vaccines weren’t fully rolled out yet. But we did get to grow substantial food while teaching.
That was the first time I had the lived experience of making a crop plan, seeding it, and going week by week to learn the rhythms of everything. We had 112 beds to keep up with, plus chickens. After that season I knew that I liked farming in my body, but I wanted to be on a bigger, production-scale farm.
WK:
From there, how’d you get together with the other farmers in Choy Commons?
NY:
In the application for the Randall’s Island job, one of the questions asked, “Who is your community?” I didn’t know how to answer that question at the time. Shortly after that, I went to a conference for the National Young Farmers Coalition. They offered all of these affinity spaces for marginalized communities—all except Asians. It’s actually quite common for us to be excluded. On the Trump administration’s list of DEI terms, every marginalized group is listed except Asians. Even Sky High Farm had a grant for a while that listed every marginalized group, but Asian wasn’t on their list, either. It kind of mirrors and echoes this consistent pattern of invisibility within Asian American culture in the United States.
Once I realized there was no Asian affinity group to join, I decided to try organizing one—and nine people joined. From this, I met Christina Chan, the owner of Choy Division, which is also in New York. She invited me up to the farm, and everything evolved from there.
Now we’re entering our fourth season of Choy Commons, which is surreal. The first year it was just me, Christina, Larry Tse, and my coworker Anna from Randall’s Island. We just put this idea into the world, like, “We are Asian American farmers who care about food justice, and we want to grow cultural foods, and bring people together for on-farm experiences.” That first year, we invited all these aligned community groups—Heart of Dinner, and Asian American Feminist Collective, to name a couple—and also invited Asian seniors to come up. I used my design skills to put a pitch together, which we sent around to some organizations in the city. We got a great response. So many young Asian Americans wanted to get involved, and other Asian farmers wanted to join forces, which gave us the traction we needed for our second year.
As a collective, a big part of our ethos was recognizing that farms in the United States are in constant crisis, because small-scale farming is just not a viable business model. We wanted to explore how to make it sustainable by working collectively. So, in year two we started organizing with Star Route Farm and Gentle Time Farm to try building our businesses in a collaborative way. We thought, if three farms worked together to develop a cooperative wholesale program, this could work better.
We also knew about this large fund called New York Foods for New York Families. It’s part of a larger USDA grant to supply food pantries and schools with local food, which just got cut in all the Trump cuts, unfortunately. But that program was new and shiny at the time, and we realized that supplying food pantries who serve Asian American seniors was a viable way to actually build up all of our farm businesses together, while serving our community.
The first year we worked together, we scrappily put together a joint trucking-logistics route, shared cold storage, and managed new accounts together. We also split up what we grew, so we had a really good variety of crops. With all three businesses collaborating, we set up a cooperative wholesale system and did around $60,000 together, mostly in weekly deliveries to food pantries and restaurants. The next year, we refined our systems more, and increased sales to $150,000.
While growing the organization, we continue to have a lot of conversations about how to practice food sovereignty, and how to make the intention behind our work more explicit. We want to showcase how owning the means of food production can build interdependence and actual self-determination in our community. We’ve also been having conversations around expanding our network to help more BIPOC farms, to build solidarity. That will be a project for the next five years, as there are a lot of pieces to make it happen, but it’s very top of mind for us.
Overall, we’ve been able to set up a genuine community food system where real food is being grown, real people are eating it, real farmers are getting paid, and real land is being restored and cultivated and loved. We’re saving seed, and working cyclically. So much is really happening. It’s hard to believe that we have this business that we are really running, with just five people.
We’re always trying to enhance viability, and find ways to better support ourselves. It’s an unending question: How do we do what matters most to us, and make sure that every hour of labor we put in is bringing forth something that is meaningful, whether financially or monetarily? With every piece of it, we have to love it and believe it’s worth doing. So we’re very efficient and economical, in that sense.
WK:
The more I talk to people who grow things, the more I realize that almost everyone has to have supplementary income through a day job or another kind of gig. Do you think that pooling resources and networks might be a real way to reduce farmer burnout?
We are increasingly leaning into the reality that the current system can’t support individual farm businesses and entrepreneurs with a conventional road to growth and success.
What I really believe is, instead of standing up a lot of new businesses on their own, we have to work collectively. So many different businesses are making the same motions, having the same business conversations, driving the same delivery routes, and buying the same cold storage. So, what are the ways that farmers can maintain their own independent farms, and grow what they want to grow, while also trusting other businesses enough to fill orders together, and make a bit of compromise so that we can all do better?
Working collectively might feel weird. Some farmers might have to agree to really strange pickup times, or to circular trucking routes. But by growing our collective capacity, I do believe we can make farming a more viable vocation. At Choy Commons, we share our finances with anyone who asks. We also share our planning documents, because our collective wellbeing—our collective food system, and our collective liberation—is all tied up together. When we lean into that reality, more becomes possible.
As one example, there are a couple of farm businesses I support where they all want to grow rice in New York, because the northeast’s climate is really good for growing rice. The tools to cultivate rice are prohibitively expensive, though. You need combines and excavators to move land around. But, if we work together to go in on a grant, and share equipment, it becomes way more attainable than five different businesses trying to do it alone.
It’s a great time for all kinds of farms to start thinking this way. If you have a lot of land or resources already, how can you start sharing? I want to encourage people to build ladders that bring other people up, instead of making everyone start from the bottom, over and over again.
On Choy Commons’ website, it says you’re organized around the question, “What does it mean to be visible, engaged, and organized as Asian Americans within the food and climate justice movement?” Have you been able to answer that yet?
There are a lot of nuanced layers to the Asian American and Pacific Islander identity, but it’s been very healing and meaningful to find belonging in each other, with the land. As Asian Americans, we have this really unique, complex tension that is ours to keep processing: How do we stay visible when it feels more dangerous to be seen?
So many people spend their entire existence carving out and discarding parts of themselves to become more assimilated; more invisible. But by being visible, we can find collective power by connecting to each other, leaning on each other, and restoring our connection to ancestral cosmologies.
There are many layers of healing and embrace that can start with food and land, which can then permeate out into culture and collectivity. Articulating these words with each other and telling stories, passing them back and forth—it helps us reclaim our identity. And by claiming ourselves back, we’re saying that we are visible to each other, and that is what matters.
Overall, we think it’s radical and audacious to be Asian Americans who have turned away from trying to do what everyone else wants us to do or be, towards what we want to do and be for ourselves.
WK:
With that in mind, do you have a five-year vision or plan for yourself?
NY:
I really enjoy the role of weaving together all these different businesses, and all this community that has come to depend on each other. There are so many exhausted farmers with so much heart, who are constantly running up against the limited hours in the day. But, something that working in tech taught me is, the world can be anything we design it to be.
I’ve seen technologies bend the possibilities of everything, and reinvent our world time and time again. So for the next five years, I want to focus on designing more cooperative capacity into farm-based businesses. How can we redesign what a farming lifestyle looks like? Reimagining our collective ability to sustain and feed ourselves, and to take care of our people, is the design challenge I’m most excited about.
