Women of the Earth

(gentle music) - New York City is one of the largest populations of Asians outside of Asia, and yet there's only a handful of Asian owned farms growing culturally relevant produce locally.

Food has been such a strong touch point for the Asian American diaspora.

The standard East Asian diet relies very heavily on vegetables.

It was really frustrating to go to the farmer's market and see so many different things available but not the things that I wanted.

And so it felt like, why not do it?

Before, I was a passive consumer, but now I get to be part of the fabric of the city and part of how it functions, and I get to be part of its food system and how it thrives and what makes it special.

(upbeat music) My name's Christina Chan, and I am the farmer and owner of Choy Division here in Chester, New York.

Grace, what's your number?

What number are you on?

(Christina laughs) There are 3.4 million farmers in the US, but only 1% of those farmers are Asian.

Our farm's mission is to provide culturally relevant produce grown locally for the Asian American diaspora of New York City.

On average, we grow about 40 to 50 different types of crops each year.

It is pretty challenging to find organic and locally grown Asian vegetables in New York City.

(gentle music) So most of the time when you're buying vegetables from the grocery store, those are being trucked in from far away and often overseas.

Those vegetables are conventionally grown and they can come from Florida, California, or maybe in like the Dominican Republic, so warmer climates where it's also cheaper for them to grow conventional produce.

And so that's why it felt really important to us to bring Chinese and Asian vegetables into the conversation of the local food scene where we are championing flavor and important environmental practices.

We believe that Chinese food should be valued in the same way that all the other vegetables we love are valued.

(engine starts) (engine rumbles) All right, I did the math.

We're picking 62 each.

We'll cut everything and then we'll collect it.

Everybody can take each side of a bed.

All right, 62.

(mellow music) So right now we're harvesting this really beautiful sprouting cauliflower.

This is the type of cauliflower you usually find in like Chinese cooking, and all of these heads are gonna go to our CSA members.

We have a CSA in the city with four different drop sites, about 300 members, and hopefully the second round of this that we planted will go to our mutual aid partners and get distributed at no cost to those who need it most.

So this is our Napa cabbage patch over here, and you know it's ready to harvest when you touch the tops of the heads and when it's nice and firm, there's no give, that's when it's ready to harvest.

It's like this is pretty good, this is like a little soft, those are all pretty good, and this is like a little soft, so I would give it a little longer.

You could pick it now, it would still be, it would still taste great, but to get the most out of it, you wanna wait till it's like really nice and firm to harvest it.

(leaves snap) We push off all these outer leaves to reveal the beautiful, tender inner core and let we just cut it right at the bottom, just like that.

We love growing cabbage in the fall because the cooler temperatures really encourage it to produce sugar as an antifreeze.

So as the nighttime temperatures get colder and colder, it produces more and more sugar.

So a winter cabbage is always much sweeter than a summer cabbage.

So even though you can grow this year round, I think it tastes so much better in like November and December, really.

I think this is another four pounder.

So when I think about growing, I think about flavor a lot and how it's going to be used in its final product, whether it's fermented, pickled, or cooked fresh.

So I will select varieties first that we know have great flavors.

Sometimes that's through trial and error or we talk to other farmers and we take feedback from them.

But a lot of it is also down to when we harvest something and maybe how we harvest something.

With most things that you'll buy at the grocery store, not only are they sprayed with pesticides, so they aren't as good for your health and they're bad for the environment, but they're also things that are chosen because they're good for storage and they're good for transit.

And when you select for those things as traits in a plant, you are losing something and often, the thing you are losing is flavor.

As a small diversified farm, we're really lucky that we get to choose what we grow based on what tastes really good, as opposed to like a larger scale of farms that are trucking things really far away, they're choosing to grow things based on how well they can store and how well they can be transported.

And so that means you often lose a lot of the best flavor, you lose the best texture.

So we like to pick things for their flavor, for their texture, for their vibrancy, because we are able to harvest within the same week they get to our customers, sometimes just even the day before.

Load her up.

So right now on the farm, we have a whole bunch of different things ready to harvest.

It's like that beautiful time of year where all of your summer crops are still flourishing and all your fall crops are really starting to come in.

We have sprouting cauliflower, we have Napa cabbage, flat cabbage.

We also have choy sum, and we have gai lan, which is Chinese sprouting broccoli.

We have baby bok choy, we have daikon radishes, Taiwanese eggplant, shishito peppers, sweet potatoes.

The list goes on.

It's just like a true time of bounty.

Growing up, food felt like the one thing I really had in common with my family.

We all wanted to eat the same food.

We all the same palette, we all loved sharing the same dishes and going out to a restaurant together.

So that was the one thing we could always talk about and like find joy in.

And so when I find myself coming back to farming and realizing, oh, I want to grow these Asian vegetables, it allowed me to really reconnect with my food and my heritage in like a much deeper way.

(insects hum) (birds chirp) We farm in a really special kind of soil called the black dirt.

Some people also refer to it as muck soil.

And so what makes this soil really special is that it is really high nutrient content and it has really high organic matter.

It's about 40 to 50% and most soil has about three to 6%.

So farmers are usually trying to always add organic matter back into the soil.

And so we are blessed to have already so much here and that's how our vegetables grow like so big and so beautiful.

And so we don't add any compost, we don't have to add any amendments.

We do cover crop to help keep the soil here so that we can have it for many generations to come.

When we talk about organic matter, we're really talking about like plants that have decomposed, any living matter that is breaking down essentially, and those, they break down to the basic building blocks that all life really needs.

So when we have high organic matter, that just means the next round of plants have a lot of nutrients to draw from.

Whereas when we look at most agricultural soils when they only have three to 6% organic matter, that means most of it is inorganic matter and then most of that is rocks or sand or silt.

And those things provide like a physical structure to grow in but don't provide any of the nutrients needed to build strong, healthy living things.

As you can see, the soil's really rich and dark in color.

It's really soft, very silty, great texture, no rocks at all.

And I could just like keep kind of digging down there and if you go far enough too, you'll find that there is moisture here and you can see how well the black dirt really holds water.

So we actually don't need to irrigate here as much as you might in other soils as well.

One of the challenges we face growing East Asian vegetables can be sourcing seeds for the things that we like.

Unlike growing like a tomato or a carrot where there could be like almost like 100 varieties to choose from, sometimes we're really boxed in and have maybe one or two to choose from if we have it at all.

We do the work because we know that that system is broken.

We're trying to create something new.

To truly be food secure, you need to start with seeds.

Without seeds, there are no vegetables and I think often that gets forgotten.

And for us, we like to practice seed saving for a couple of crops on our farm.

There are a few different benefits to seed saving.

One of them is adaptability to my local bio region, so they maybe are more resistant to some of the diseases that I have here because I've selected for plants that have survived and thrived in those conditions, maybe better adapted to the heat, things like that.

It also means that I don't have to rely on companies stocking that same seed year on year, I will always have my own supply, and it also allows me to select for the like the best tasting thing.

So I have like full control over what I'm getting from that plant, which is really great.

(gentle music) For Asian Americans, food is a really central touch point because we have all had the same shared experiences of being children and opening up your lunchbox at school and having people kind of look at you like, "What are you eating?

Why does it smell weird?"

And you have like all of this shame that is like built up over time and that builds into like this shame of like who you are.

But as we've grown older, we've really reclaimed that and become proud of our own food and being able to provide like such fresh and flavorful food for people to now make dishes that they're really proud of and like reclaim their heritage and reconnect with their roots has been a really powerful experience.

Okay, let's go pick some stuff for hot pot.

Let's get some baby gai lan, some choy sum.

Start with that and see where we get.

(gentle music) Cute!

For our crew members, we invite them to show up fully as who they are with every part of themselves and let that inform their experience and we celebrate each other.

That helps us be better farmers, it helps us connect more to our community and there's a lot of spiritual nourishment that comes with that.

- [Crew Member] Thanks for prepping.

- [Christina] Thanks for growing everything, guys.

- Okay.

- Wow.

- Damn, okay.

Great job, y'all.

I think people have been really drawn to the farm because they see themselves reflected in this place.

As anyone who's ever gardened can tell you, just putting your hands in the dirt, it's just a magical feeling that brings so much healing.

And so being able to do that with people who you share a culture with, who you can share food with, just means the entire world to us.

Often when you greet each other in Chinese, the first thing you'll ask the other person is, "Have you eaten yet?"

And that is a way of conveying your care and your love for somebody.

That's why so many of us like care about food, I think, is it just like so embedded within even just the language and for me, it feels like growing this food and being able to give it to my community is my way of saying, "Have you eaten yet?"

(crew laughs) - It's so good!

- That's the hype we want.

- I know.

- Working everyday.

- There's something really deep and kind of hard to put into words about growing the same foods that your ancestors grew and learning how to cook them fresh from the earth in the same way that they must have done for generations.

(gentle music) (water splashes) A large part of mutual aid and food access work doesn't really recognize people as full human beings, and it's just this concept of feeding people physically.

Here's food so you are full, you're not hungry, we're good.

But there's so much more to that, as we know, like food is culture, food is belonging, and so when we can give them foods that they recognize, that tastes like home, it's a reminder that we see your humanity and we recognize that you need like spiritual nourishment and love too.

So often you hear about how difficult this work is, but it's also a real privilege and a real joy because we're able to feed people and we get to be part of their lives.

I think at the end of the day, when people buy our vegetables, when they bring them home and cook them, what I really want them to be left with is a sense of belonging.

(gentle music) (birds chirping) (gentle music)