About Us

The Farmer Campus Story

Our mission

Cultivating resilient food systems and sustainable farmers to transform today’s unprecedented challenges into solutions. We do this through multimedia education informed by farmer-centered research, impact storytelling, and collaborative network building.

Who we are

Farmer Campus LLC (FC) is a woman-founded small business dedicated to farmer-centered online education for sustainable agriculture. Through an interactive online platform, Farmer Campus provides courses and networking opportunities designed to enhance on-farm practices and strengthen the agricultural community. With strong partnerships and a focus on socially disadvantaged producers, we offer engaging, bilingual, and culturally responsive resources.

Farmer Campus also hosts workshops, conducts research & citizen science through partnerships with universities, publishes multimedia stories and academic papers, creates videos and podcasts, engages in wildfire, climate, and  disaster relief, builds powerful collaborations across sectors, and has been leading the charge to help farmers and ranchers in the West prepare for fires through our innovative, farmer-centered program “Farming through Wildfire Season.” 

We also actively collaborate, incubate and consult with like-minded organizations and farms, and encourage you to be in touch with us if you’re considering running an online course at contact@farmercampus.com.

Our Team

Natalia Pinzón and Katie Brimm are Farmer Campus’s co-founders and a two-woman team. Together we draw from an incredible network of farmers, professors, extension agents, nonprofits, and professionals who steward, advise and contribute to our work. We honor Farmer Campus’s collectivist roots by also functioning like a community kitchen, inviting like-minded organizations and farms across the world to host their own materials and help build an expansive social learning community dedicated to food system transformation. 

Dr. Natalia Pinzón

For over 20 years, Dr. Pinzón has dedicated her career to sustainable agriculture, weaving together research, education, production, and advocacy. As co-founder of Farmer Campus, she has created three web-based learning communities, and 30 online curriculum modules and led six online certificate programs, supporting over 3,000 farmers and agricultural professionals. Her Ph.D. dissertation examined agroecological climate resilience to disasters in California and her postdoctoral research on co-developing climate-based decision support tools for growers. Natalia’s journey has taken her from analyzing soil microbes at the Rodale Institute to wrangling goats as the owner of a micro-dairy, harvesting a diverse variety of vegetables as a farm worker, feeding worms and microbes as a compost maker, marrying mycorrhizae with their vegetable symbiotes as a mycologist at USDA-ARS, designing permaculture systems that recycle human waste to grow food in the tropics, and advocating for Latin American agroecology through scholar-activism across Central and South America, including her homeland of Colombia. She is committed to advancing ecological and equitable farming systems that empower growers to thrive in a tumultuous economic and environmental landscape. Natalia never turns down cocoa, a new variety for her garden, or time with her energetic toddler.

Natalia Pinzón, PhD

Co-Founder and Owner

Katie Brimm has worked for over 15 years in the food movement as an educator, writer, activist, and no-till farmer. She co-founded Farmer Campus to empower agriculturalists with farmer-centered, resilience-based education and has shaped curriculum and facilitated courses that have engaged over 1,800 agriculturalists. Katie previously ran an international solidarity travel program on food sovereignty, fostering deep connections with farmer and peasant movements worldwide. A Yale Public Voices Fellow on the Climate Crisis and a published author, Katie centers underrepresented voices in her work, which has been featured in anti-racism, food sovereignty, and queer ecology trainings. She holds a BA in Global Studies from UC Santa Barbara and is pursuing a Masters at Middlebury College. Based in Colorado, Katie enjoys cooking, fiction writing, and adventuring in the mountains with her dog Posie.

Katie Brimm

Co-Founder and Owner


Additional Founding Members

Leah Atwood

Co-Founder

Agroecology Commons is a nonprofit in the Bay Area of California which cultivates knowledge sharing, community action, and global solidarity for decolonized land stewardship, collective healing, and justice within the food movement. AC was the first member of Farmer Campus and currently hosts the online portion of their Bay Area Farmer Training Program on our Online Learning Platform.

Agroecology Commons

Founding Organizational Members

Our History

The Beginning: With roots in agroecology, farmer-to-farmer and food sovereignty movements, Farmer Campus has been shaped by many hands and hearts over the last decade. 

The first spark was lit in 2011 by a vision of Leah Atwood to expand access to agroecology learning tools and connect farmers around the world to share ideas and knowledge through online exchange, regardless of their ability to travel. In 2013 Natalia Pinzón’s affinity for technology and passion for international agroecology later grew the project into a customized online learning platform, home to agroecology curriculum.  In 2016, Katie Brimm joined the team to update, adapt and offer the curriculum to the public, build relationships with farmers and partners, and bring the full vision of the network into fruition. They saw a world where a small farmer in Kenya could connect with an urban grower in Oakland, allowing for a powerful solidarity network to form,  as well as cultivate the co-creation of farmer knowledge while informing international social movements. Together they began developing and facilitating different online certificate programs for agriculturalists.

Farmer Campus is Born: In 2020, Katie and Natalia formed Farmer Campus, drawing on the initial program, with an expanded vision of a virtual university designed for busy farmers and ranchers, complete with courses in resilience, the ability to connect with peers, find mentors, advance their knowledge, and participate in research to influence the world of sustainable agriculture. As some of the busiest but most knowledgeable people, often resource and time strapped, what better way to connect farmers to each other and allow them to stay on farm while deepening their knowledge? 

Founding Members: Leah went on to co-found Agroecology Commons, a Bay Area nonprofit. They became our founding members and host their own online curriculum with Farmer Campus.

Targeted and Timely: Today, with Natalia and Katie at the helm, Farmer Campus offers the next generation of learning for agriculturalists. Since 2019, we have supported over 3,000 producers with multimedia education and networking to mitigate risks through resilience planning, agroecology, and financial sustainability. We are honored to partner with like-minded organizations, offering courses such as: organic seed production with OSA, Small Business Accelerators with CA Farmlink and the National Farmers Union, Wildfire Resilience with the Community Alliance for Family Farms, and Bay Area Farmer Training with Agroecology Commons.

Our work and mission is still evolving, meant to be nimble enough to respond to the current needs of farmers and ranchers such as climate resilience, disaster financial recovery and wildfire preparedness, as well as the evolving vision of the current team as we are committed to adapting our work to the changing world.

Our Network of Partners

In partnership with sustainable farmers and farmer-serving organizations across the world

Logo

Created by Brazilian designer Bernardo Bittencourt, our logo symbolizes Farmer Campus’s essence. The “F” is made up of agricultural hand-tools to represent the practical nature of our education style, and the “C” references the Bay Laurel laurus nobilis tree, which symbolizes wisdom, excellence in one’s field and the pursuit of higher learning, and happens to be the root for the word baccalaureate. The origin of the variability of the different weights of the letters in the text stems from an American tradition born in the 1800s of using wood type with each letter conveying its own meaning, and here representing the hands-on approach of an agrarian lifestyle.

Photos

The photos featured on this site come from a variety of photographers, but we wanted to thank noyekim (@noyekim) for many of the header images, which feature the beautiful Full Bloom Flower Farm in Occidental, California.