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Catalyzing worker co-ops & the solidarity economy

Farmer Co-ops Are Giving Latinx Communities Room to Grow

On Sundays, Edith Alas Ortega travels 20 minutes from her home to a farm field in Henderson County, North Carolina, and takes a deep breath. “There’s a mental and physical healing that happens out here,” she said in Spanish. Ortega is one of five members of Tierra Fértil Coop—“fertile ground” in English—an agricultural, worker-owned cooperative for and by Latinx immigrants. The group—three Salvadoran and three Mexican immigrants—meet every week on their one-acre parcel in Hendersonville that provides vegetables for the families involved as well as enough for resale, with a focus on culturally appropriate ingredients for the Latinx market.

Ortega marvels at the first strawberries of the season on a recent morning in June—just 40 for now. But dozens of bushes shoot out of mounds that she helped shape and cover in black plastic, just waiting to bloom into berries.

Read the rest at Civil Eats

 

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