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 is a woman-run, minority-owned small business with grassroots. In addition to building and offering targeted, multimedia courses on our Online Learning Platform, Farmer Campus hosts workshops, conducts research & citizen science through partnerships with Universities, publishes stories and academic papers, creates videos and podcasts, engages in Wildfire and Covid-19 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.

As a Colombian immigrant working in three continents, Natalia has seen the diversity of ways that farmers and peasants are impacted by and responding to globalization and climate change. In addition to Co-Founding Farmer Campus, she specializes in agroecology as a means to reduce global climate risk as a PhD Candidate in Geography at UC Davis. She also consults other agricultural nonprofits on evaluation. As a biologist & science education specialist, Natalia has created three web-based learning communities, 30 online curriculum modules and led six online certificate programs, supporting over 1,500 multicultural farmers. Natalia never turns down cocoa or a good backpacking trip.

Natalia Pinzón

Co-Founder and Owner

Katie Brimm has worked for over a decade in the food movement as an educator, writer, activist, & no-till farmer. She ran an international solidarity travel program focusing on Food Sovereignty where she gained an intimate connection to farmer & peasant issues, leading her to co-found Farmer Campus. Katie consults in facilitation & communications. She is currently a Public Voice Fellow on the Climate Crisis and as a published writer, she centers underrepresented voices in the food movement. Her work has been featured in anti-racism, food sovereignty and queer ecology trainings. Katie has a BA in Global Studies from UCSB and is getting her Masters in English. After 13 years in California, she works remotely from Colorado with her dog Posie.

Katie Brimm

Co-Founder and Owner

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, Farmer Campus offers the next generation of learning for agriculturalists. 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 Northwest Agriculture Business Center, 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.

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.