Welcome to The Abundant Table, a 501(c)3 non-profit, certified organic farm, as well as a BIPOC and women-led worker collective currently enrolled in Kiss the Ground’s Farmland Program. We’re thrilled to share their journey with you. With four acres located in Ventura, California, their mission is to “transform our food system towards justice, liberation, and increased health for all people, while caring for the land and all who tend the land.”
The Abundant Table grows a wide variety of vegetables, from carrots, to spinach, to summer squash, to fava beans. On the farm, they practice low-till agriculture and cover-cropping with peas, oats, and ryegrass. They also raise chickens in partnership with The Hippy Chicken, rotating the chickens for nutrient cycling.
Their organic produce is offered through an almost-year round CSA program, which provides no-cost boxes to farmworker families through their Solidarity Shares program. They also sell produce at their farm stand and at farmers markets in food apartheid areas like Oxnard. Part of their mission is also to foster a better relationship between humans, nature, and food, which they do so in part by offering several educational programs that teach on topics such as soil science, climate change, seed saving, cooking, field journaling, and Indigenous philosophies in a comparative lens with Western philosophy. They also work with the Rodale Institute to perform research on tillage effects on water usage, as well as providing no-till demonstrations.
Adriana, QuiQui, Guadalupe, and Reyna all contribute to The Abundant Table’s democratic structure, which ensures that all workers have equal say in the decisions that affect how they relate to the farm, to the community, to Mother Earth, and to each other. Ultimately, the farm and its workers strive to be in harmony with the land, seeing the land and other-than-human beings as relatives who also do enormous work to nurture life. QuiQui emphasizes the importance of these relationships, saying “plants teach us about how our task, while we’re alive, is to leave an inheritance to keep life going after we die… This is different from the teachings of capital, where living is not about nurturing life but about accumulating profit and power.”
In favor of a collective versus individual mindset, QuiQui says that as they work to tackle the difficult topics of climate change and the current mass extinction, it will be important to “learn how to have these conversations together across all age groups so none of us is holding this pain and grief by ourselves.” Doing this grief work together, she says, “can strengthen us to better organize and figure out how we’re going to collectively defend Mother Earth.” Learn more and connect with The Abundant Table on their website or Instagram.
