CHICAGO — Laid off by a bar during the COVID pandemic, Jarvi Schneider turned to the internet for job leads.
The Chicago Botanic Garden was offering a training program for would-be farmers that included paid, hands-on experience, and Schneider signed up. That led to a business class and four years growing vegetables at a shared plot in Bronzeville.
Now Schneider, who is transgender and uses they/them pronouns, is taking the next step with their spouse, Soraya Alem.
The couple is leasing a 43-acre farm in McHenry County, with the intention to buy.
“Unlike a regular job that you go to, where maybe it’s not what you want to be doing, it’s rewarding to have a spiritual and emotional connection to what you’re doing,” Schneider, 36, said of farming. “And then it’s also it’s your business, and you’re in charge of it.”
Schneider and Alem are part of a new wave of LGBTQ farmers who are more visible and better organized than previous generations, with “convergences” — or regional grassroots gatherings, support resources such as the Queer Farmer Network and farm websites that include the owners’ LGBTQ identities.
The Department of Agriculture’s census of farmers and ranchers doesn’t track gender or sexual orientation, so data is very limited. But enterprising researchers crunched the agriculture census numbers for two-person farms and found that 1.2% of those farmers were in same-sex marriages.
That equates to about 24,000 LGBTQ farmers in the U.S. And that number is likely a big undercount because the findings, published in 2020 in the journal Society & Natural Resources, don’t include LGBTQ farmers who aren’t married, aren’t living on two-person farms, aren’t married to the person they farm with or are transgender or gender nonbinary.
The only large U.S. survey, by the National Young Farmers Coalition, found that 24% of farmers age 40 and under don’t identify as heterosexual, and 64% say they are not cisgender males.
That survey of 3,300 farmers included participants reached through various organizations, and the findings may not be representative of farming as a whole. Still, the large numbers are in keeping with anecdotal reports from progressive places such as Chicago and Austin, Texas.
“It feels like there are so many more queer farmers,” said Chicago-area farmer Fresh Roberson, using the younger generations’ preferred term for LGBTQ.
Roberson, who is queer and owns Fresher Together, a collaborative food and farming project in Beaverville, said it’s hard to know if there has been an actual numerical increase, or if queer farmers are just more visible, due to factors such as the rise of the internet.
Either way, Roberson, 42, has noticed a big uptick, even in just the past seven years.
Making the leap
Queer farmers — and young farmers in general — often don’t come from established farm families that pass down big plots of land from generation to generation.
Instead, they discover farming on their own, while navigating an industry that tends to be white, male and socially conservative. The American Farm Bureau, for instance, still defines family to include only blood relationships, legal adoption and “marriage between male and female.”
Schneider and Alem were already interested in sustainably grown food and how to make it accessible to more people when Schneider began their farm training program.
In addition, both had childhood experiences at their grandparents’ hobby farms: Schneider’s grandfather had a horse ranch and vegetable farm in Michigan, and Alem’s grandmother grew corn, tomatoes and cucumbers in Louisiana.
“We have the same passion for growing food and being outside, and the importance of getting in the dirt and connecting to the earth,” Alem said.
Schneider’s training at the Botanic Garden’s Windy City Harvest apprenticeship program played a big role in their journey, allowing Schneider to get hands-on work experience.
“It was cool through the apprenticeship to see a couple of rounds of produce that I had either grown or our class had grown from start to finish,” Schneider said. “It just always seemed (that) to operate that way, you needed a big team, you needed to have all these tools, and you had to have all this space. (But) you can actually do this with less space and you don’t need all the tools and resources.”
Scheider and Alem never thought they would be able to own a farm — the financial hurdles were just too great. But Schneider had a knack for the work, and was drawn to the idea of running their own business.
The couple both took a business class after Schneider’s apprenticeship — and then took the leap to farming at Windy City’s incubator farm in Bronzeville. Their farm, Otter Oaks, is named for Schneider’s grandfather’s ranch.
“It’s been a learning process every year,” Alem said with a laugh.
“We don’t have employees. We’re doing the labor, on top of running the business, and on top of having other jobs,” Schneider said.
“Fortunately, Windy City has so many resources that have allowed us to figure all this out — inch by inch,” Alem said.
Roberson, who grew up in North Carolina and came to Chicago to attend college, also had family roots in farming: maternal grandparents who were sharecroppers growing tobacco, cotton and peanuts.
“I often say I feel like there is something ancestral that is calling me back to the land, that I don’t quite understand,” said Roberson, who uses they/them and she/her pronouns.
Growing up in a small town surrounded by farmland, Roberson said they had access to sweet potatoes harvested from a local field, and greens bought from a truck that would pull up in a parking lot.
There were many steps on their long road from studying engineering and physics at Northwestern University, to culinary school, to full-time farming, but a big moment came when Roberson was a first-year college student.
Roberson went to the store to buy pecans for pecan pie, but couldn’t afford them.
“I was like, ‘What?’” they said. Back home, their aunt had a pecan tree next to her house. “I didn’t realize how expensive this thing was — or how inaccessible.”
As a chef Roberson made sure that they worked at restaurants where they could afford to eat, and today their customers include a local food bank.
Targeted by Trump
Farming is a tough business, with many farmers in the Young Farmers survey reporting barriers such as lack of access to land or capital and high health care costs.
And LGBTQ people can face additional problems, including discrimination and social isolation, research indicates.
President Donald Trump has added to the pressure on queer people in general by insisting that there are only two genders, and attempting to block gender-affirming health care for transgender teens.
In March, Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins brandished two triumphant scissor emojis on X in a post saying her department had terminated a $361,000 grant in New York City to support queer and transgender farmers and urban consumers.
Chicago-area farmers, including Schneider and Alem, were directly affected by the Trump administration’s attempt to freeze funding for the Local Food Purchase Assistance Cooperative Agreement Program, which increases profits for small farmers and provides fresh produce to communities in need.
Schneider and Alem were set to participate in the program for the whole season, Schneider said. Then, all of a sudden, the funding stopped: “That was really scary.”
Some farmers did get money again for a short period, Schneider said, and recently there was more good news: The money would be back until Sept. 30.
Schneider and Alem figured out how to keep selling their produce, although for less money than they had planned. Alem said they were heartened by the way small farmers worked together, sharing strategies and solutions.
“We’ve all been doing this for years, and we’re not going to just stop,” Alem said.
Being in Chicago has shielded the couple from outright discrimination, but there are times when they are clearly in the minority as farmers.
“I think as queer people — and I’m trans — you’re around a lot of people who aren’t those things and sometimes it’s fine, it doesn’t really matter, and other times you can feel like you’re in a really traditional setting and it’s like, ‘Is it worth talking about this? Is it work bringing this up?’” Schneider said.
“For me, usually not — unless I’m in the company of people that are comfortable,” they said. “There are not many queer people who own their own farms, and there are even less trans people.”
Roberson has also noticed some self-censoring, in their case regarding clothing choices.
“I might not go into my USDA office as this Black, fat, queer person in my Dyke March shirt and sit down and talk. … Maybe they’re cool, but I’m in Iroquois County. I don’t know,” they said.
Studies indicate that many queer farmers anticipate discrimination, and that fear of discrimination itself can have a real impact on peoples’ lives.
Michaela Hoffelmeyer, an assistant professor of public engagement in agriculture at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, recalled interviewing early-career queer farmers who worried that valuable internships and apprenticeships would place them in hostile work environments or unsafe communities.
Queer farmers may also be forgoing good farmland because they want to avoid harassment, Hoffelmeyer said.
Paying it forward
Alem and Schneider arrived at their farm plot in Bronzeville in broad-brimmed hats and sturdy boots, ready to harvest zucchini and cucumber under a blazing summer sun.
Schneider’s enthusiasm was infectious as they delved into the specifics of mushroom cultivation, brushed aside the notion that farming is particularly hard work and jumped up to rescue a dragonfly from a puddle.
Alem cheerfully described working a full-time job in digital publishing, but still managing to farm on some evenings and early mornings — and all day on Saturdays.
“For me, it’s really fun to do something so productive,” Alem said of farming. “It’s the most productive thing I do.”
Asked about the future of queer farming, Schneider was similarly upbeat.
“In 10 years, if I had to guess, they’ll probably be a lot more queer folks who are farming and living sustainably, even if they don’t own their own farm,” they said. “It just seems that that is really popular.”
The couple hope to help pave the way at their new farm in McHenry County. They want to host music events and workshops, renovate an old dairy barn so guests can stay there, and launch a farm incubator project, with space and support for early-career farmers.
“We really want to help people find their own journey with farming,” Alem said.
nschoenberg@chicagotribune.com