Mai-Nadine Nguyen is a CCOF Foundation Organic Transition Grantee.
Mai-Nadine Nguyen brings professional experience as a climate scientist to enhance their farming career. “I want to farm to fight climate change and advance social justice with culturally-relevant foods and uplifting traditional knowledge,” Nguyen says.
Nguyen’s family came to the U.S. as adult war refugees. “We, along with our community, planted our ancestral foods wherever we could: apartment patios, backyards, informal community gardens, and any marginal spaces,” Nguyen says. “This upbringing instilled in me the importance of food as a means of making a home, of connecting to community, and of transforming the built environment into a place of nourishment.”
“This grant is instrumental to a first-generation farmer,” Nguyen says, “because I am creating a farm without generational wealth or land.”
Before starting their own farm in 2014, Nguyen apprenticed on grain and vegetable farms in Canada, California, Vietnam, Laos, and Thailand. Combining experience as a climate scientist and farm apprentice, they designed a farm that grows climate change-adapted, non-patented grains.
Nguyen currently farms 40 acres of wheat and 10 acres of rye. With the assistance of the CCOF Foundation grant, they plan to transition all 50 acres to organic.
“The funds from this program would cover the costs of on-site compost development,” Nguyen explains. “Standard compost available for purchase assumes low carbon in the soil, whereas my soil has high carbon from the residual straw. Additionally, there is no high-quality compost available locally and the nearest vendor does not have the volume I require, so I plan to generate it myself.” To ensure high-quality compost and soil, Nguyen will continue current practices of cover cropping, intercropping, rotating with sheep, dry-farming, and refraining from applying non-organic inputs. Grant funds will be used to save non-patented seeds, manage cover cropping with diverse seed blends, grain storage facilities, and milling maintenance costs.
Nguyen says, “I farm organically because it is the natural way to farm that made it possible for civilizations to exist for millennia, and, I believe, critical for our survival in the years to come.”
The CCOF Foundation is proud to support producers like Mai-Nadine Nguyen with the Organic Transition grant, which provides three-year grants of $10,000 per year to farmers transitioning their land to organic production. Grantees receive multi-year funding and 1:1 organic technical assistance.
