"I'm taking you to the orchard. It's hard to pick a favorite place, but this place is really peaceful. The fruit trees offer a lot of shade. There's been a lot of good energy put into the space. My second favorite spot, it is to the woods, a nice little shady and peaceful gathering space in the backwoods. We have groups, parties, and sometimes we'll hang out back there. We try to be a community space where there's lots of different kinds of events. It's really peaceful, with dappled sunlight and shade. It's warm in the winter and cool in the summer. Very nice, open, and can fit a ton of people, more than you'd think."

"In its most recent form, Chispas started around in 2017, and two farmers, Casey Holland and Ian Colburn had a vision to make the space similar to what it is right now, which is a diversified vegetable farm and community space. Diversified means that we grow tons of different types of things instead of just one type of thing. The person who owns this land is named John Sparks, which is why it's called Chispas, Chispas is Spanish for Sparks. He was looking for farmers to develop a vision, execute that vision, and to use this land for something like that. Casey and Ian developed that vision with an eye towards making this a place where people could work, get paid to grow food, grow a bunch of food for the community, and to have it be a resilient and vibrant community hub in ways that builds on itself. It might even be unpredictable in some opportunities that arise. Casey and Ian ended much work to push that forward. Ian did his own stuff at other farms, and now he's a co-owner of a farm called Farm of Song. Casey stuck around and kept hiring people. We've made the transition to a communal, collaborative leadership project where we each carry different pieces of responsibility. That's a way that we've been pushing this space into even more sustainable and exciting places."

"We try to prioritize soil health, which means that we farm organically. It's a way of only farming and growing food without ‘unnatural additions.’ Only organic certified substances are allowed in the growth of the food. This means no chemicals like pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers. We use a lot of fertilizers that we create here with animal manure or fish emulsion, which we don't create here, but it is easy to buy in an organic way. In other ways, we try to prioritize soil health by keeping soil covered, keeping a living root in the soil, keeping it well watered, and adding organic material to the soil. Soil is a living system, the lighter you can cultivate in the soil, the more it will reward you. The more life you can cultivate in the soil, the easier it will be to grow food in that soil within reason. Soil health is a practice of growing. We have a holistic pest management with some of the animal systems that we have here. Having chickens eat bugs, for instance, or cultivating life for predators that will eat a lot of the pests that would otherwise give us a hard time. That means often leaving debris in the fields to let birds both migrating and non- migrating, make a home here so that they can eat the insects that take refuge in like the root stalks of the debris from the fields. For instance, if you leave tomato material in the fields, latent disease in the soil will build to the point where you won't be able to grow anything very well. It's important to remove tomato biomass from fields. We let that dry and mow it into a mulch and make that into mulch for the paths or the driveway. Having robust, diverse and vibrant life systems means that there's like a huge web of life eating one another. This is really good for fertilizing the soil and feeding itself and others. It also means that there are complex systems that keep things from getting out of balance, so there won't be one type of pest that is out of balance because there's a large web of predator and prey relationships."

"There’s a lot that can be done through collaboration and solidarity with one another, and with the more-than-human world as well. Specifically, I hope to see farm workers and people involved in food production play a larger role in collective struggles for justice. I don’t mean to suggest that our farm is some kind of trailblazer or sole inspiration for that, but I do think there are parts of the culture we try to foster that can contribute to it. We’re living in a moment of extreme crisis when it comes to climate change, environmental degradation, and how those issues connect to food production. The labor and knowledge of people who grow food are going to be essential in figuring out what a new system could look like. My goal is to remain in solidarity with everyone who deserves it, while also asking for solidarity in return. A lot of people don’t always stop to think about how environmental issues directly affect food. They affect the soil, how things grow, animals, ecosystems, and ultimately us. At the same time, the way food is often produced can also contribute to that degradation. Large-scale systems rely heavily on machinery, fertilizers, transportation, and processing, all of which have environmental impacts. As for the growers’ market, we’re usually there during the regular season, but not often during the winter market. What we hope customers experience is high-quality produce, freshness, variety, and friendly people selling it. In general, people appreciate being connected to local agriculture. Our volunteers and our market customers are usually different groups of people. We have a small but dedicated volunteer crew, and they’re often compensated with produce, so they don’t necessarily need to shop with us at the market. We also connect with the community in several other ways. We sell produce at the growers’ market, wholesale to food distributors, restaurants, and food hubs, and we run a CSA, which stands for Community Supported Agriculture. A CSA is when an individual or family purchases a membership for the season and receives a share of produce each week, usually from June through October. What they receive changes throughout the season depending on what’s ready in the fields. So, between the CSA, markets, wholesale, and volunteering, there are several different ways people can be involved with the farm and access fresh food."