The work we do at Farm Fresh RI wouldn’t be possible without our partner farms! Today we are celebrating farmers Chai Thao and Leng Yang of Daily Farm! Daily Farm is a family business whose mission is to grow local food to feed their community.
Hope’s Harvest first began working with Daily Farm in the 2023 gleaning season; they were one of eleven farms Hope’s Harvest contracted with that season. Farmers Chai Thao and Leng Yang run the farm which is primarily located at Southside Community Land Trust’s Urban Edge Farm in Cranston, RI. Daily Farm fulfilled their contract quickly in 2023 and will be growing even more for hunger relief during the 2024 season!
Chai and Leng connected with Hope’s Harvest after learning about the program from their neighbor farmers at Urban Edge Farm and were interested in working with the program to help their community by feeding families with their locally-grown produce. They are also very appreciative of the help of Hope’s Harvest gleaners in harvesting.
Chai and Leng arrived in Rhode Island in 2004 from Thailand and connected with the well-established Hmong urban farming community present in the state. They first became involved in urban farming in Rhode Island through the Hmong community garden as a way to access food from their home country that is otherwise unavailable. Through these connections, they learned about Rhode Island farmers markets and connected with Southside Community Land Trust to access farm plots. In 2019 they were able to secure a plot of land at Urban Edge, which has grown from half of an acre to an acre and a half. They recently secured additional land at Snake Den Farm in Cranston, and will be farming on an additional two acres of land there this summer.
Chai and Leng are of Hmong heritage and were born in Thailand after their parents were among the many members of the Hmong community who were forced to flee Laos. Farming has been a way they are able to remain connected to their culture and cultural foods as well as connect other members of Rhode Island’s vibrant Hmong community with their cultural foods. They grow numerous crops from their homeland including asian corn, asian cucumber, bitter melon, Thai chilis, and jicama.
The transition from growing these crops in Southeast Asia to farming in Rhode Island is significant: the climate differences alone mean that the same crops require different farming practices and require adaptation on the part of farmers. In Rhode Island, Chai and Leng have been able to draw on community knowledge and resources to learn how to make the necessary adaptations to continue growing thriving produce; their farming knowledge comes from a variety of sources including their parents, cultural knowledge shared among Hmong farmers in Rhode Island, and Southside Community Land Trust programs.
Daily Farm sells their produce primarily at Farmers Markets. You can find them at farmers markets in Woonsocket, Providence, Cranston, Central Falls, and Quincy, MA. The summer growing season is extremely busy for Daily Farm.
In addition to selling at many markets, they manage numerous plots of farmland spread across different towns in Rhode Island. Thai and Leng identify this as a significant challenge they face as a growing small farm business. Securing farmland in itself is a major challenge in the state and having numerous farm plots in different locations increases work and travel time and complicates the logistics associated with running a successful farm business. An additional challenge Chai and Leng identify is the language barrier they face which makes completing all the necessary paperwork and documentation involved with running a farm business extra difficult.
In 2023 Hope’s Harvest recovered a wide variety of crops from Daily Farm including mustard greens, cabbage, lettuce, mixed greens, kale, bok choy, swiss chard, onions, beets, malibar spinach, cucumbers, peppers, zucchini, chayote, and sweet potatoes. We look forward to many more wonderful gleans with Daily Farm in the future!
Thank you, Daily Farm, for growing nutritious produce to feed your community and being an excellent partner to Hope’s Harvest!
