ABOUT THE QFN!
The QFN was conceived to build community among queer farmers and to reflect on and interrupt racist, capitalist, and heteropatriarchal legacies in Agriculture. We strive to create a stronger web of support for and address the isolation of queer farmers in both rural and urban spaces across the so-called USA.​
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The network was dreamed up by several friends in northeast Iowa - the traditional occupied homelands of Ho-Chunk, Sauk, Meskwaki, and Oceti Sakowin peoples - who longed for more support and community among queers in agriculture. It's first project was the Queer Farmer Convergence, a homespun gathering that has served the queer farmer community for 3 years now from the base of Humble Hands Harvest, a queer, worker-owned cooperative farm in Decorah, IA.
All things QFN related currently happen through the volunteer efforts of a roving line up of queer farmer friends in the Driftless bioregion. If you'd like to volunteer leadership, skills, organizing, or other aspects of time and presence to the network, drop us a message!
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Many hands have helped co-create the QFN, which wouldn't exist without the joy, generosity, creativity, and skills of our nearby and far flung extended community. So far, we've hosted three queer farmer convergences in the Midwest, created collaborative zines, produced 2 calendars, and helped connect queer farmers all over the continent with new jobs, friends, partners, and community.
While this network is here to build community and celebrate all things queer farmer related, we are also here to address and rethink the many things that dearly need shifting in our current food & ag systems. We believe in our collective visionary capacity to weave new ways of relating with the land outside the agricultural legacy of stolen land, labor, and colonization of stolen lands.
LGBTQ+ farmers make up a very small percentage of the total % of the population of those who own land and farm in rural spaces. Within that, QTBIPOC farmers occupy an even smaller space. We recognize that the overrepresentation of white bodies in the QFN reflects the overrepresentation of white bodies who have to access land ownership and the resources necessary to farm through generational privilege.
As majority white folks in the ag sector, we seek to use this network as one tool to interrupt historical patterns of racism as they play out in agriculture, center the work of BIPOC farmers in & out of the network, uplift landback initiatives, and actively support QTBIPOC in having access to our gatherings and other offerings.
If you'd like to donate to our BIPOC farmer travel stipend fund to ensure it's easy for folks to attend the queer farmer convergence, you can donate here!
