Meet Modern Farmer’s Guest Instagrammer: Sidewalk Ends Farm
Say hello to Sidewalk Ends Farm in Providence, Rhode Island. They’re taking over Modern Farmer’s Instagram account for a couple of weeks. Stop by and have a look!
Meet Modern Farmer’s Guest Instagrammer: Sidewalk Ends Farm
Say hello to Sidewalk Ends Farm in Providence, Rhode Island. They’re taking over Modern Farmer’s Instagram account for a couple of weeks. Stop by and have a look!
Sometimes a farm is more than just a farm. For the 20-something women who run Sidewalk Ends Farm, farming is a platform for social issues and creativity as much as a way to provide great food and beautiful flowers for their community.
Tess Brown-Lavoie, 25, says farming provides an opportunity to “explore the political dimensions of issues regarding food access, justice and environmental sustainability through our relationship with land, and the principles of stewardship we work within.” It’s also “creative work” that allows them to “manifest” their “interests, values and aesthetics,” she says.
Tess Brown-Lavoie and her older sister, Laura Brown-Lavoie, along with Sarah Turkus, both 27, grow a variety of vegetables and flowers on two separate plots. One, a 5,000-square foot urban garden in the city’s Armory Park neighborhood, was started in 2011. Last year, the farm expanded to include a two-acre plot in nearby Seekonk, Massachusetts.
The farm was started by the Brown-Lavoie sisters and Fay Strongin, 27, of Brookline, Massachusetts, at what was once a vacant city lot, but thanks to lots of hard work and dedication has become a food production hub and focal point for community agricultural education, with classes on such subjects as seed sharing and soil remediation.
“We don’t make lots of money, but we eat the best food there is, and we are able to be generous with it with our friends and neighbors,” says Tess Brown-Lavoie.
Strongin is still helping out with the farm when she can, but is headed off to graduate school at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to study urban planning this fall. Turkus joined the farm last year.
Besides selling their produce and flowers at a nearby mixed-income market, they have a 50-member CSA, and also provide produce to Providence and East Bay restaurants through the Little City Growers Co-op, a wholesale cooperative of small farms.
“We try to take advantage and give back to the resources in our community as much as possible, by trading homemade bread for tractor repair advice from a neighbor, harvesting seaweed from the Rhode Island coast to add fertility to our soil, shoveling manure at the Providence Mounted Police stables to add to our compost piles, along with the food scraps from a few local soup kitchens,” says Turkus in an email.
The Brown-Lavoie sisters and Turkus began farming right out of college. They are first-generation farmers, and all three have apprenticed at various farms before their involvement with Sidewalk Ends Farm.
Besides farming, the three have other passions they pursue. Laura Brown-Lavoie writes and performs poetry and stories. Tess Brown-Lavoie writes and is the drummer for the band Mother Tongue. She and Turkus also coordinate the Young Farmer Network, an organization that works to support young farmers in the region. Turkus does after-school programs with young children.
“We love working with our bodies and being outside. We don’t make lots of money, but we eat the best food there is, and we are able to be generous with it with our friends and neighbors,” says Tess Brown-Lavoie.
Photo: Sophie Sarkar
Follow us
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Want to republish a Modern Farmer story?
We are happy for Modern Farmer stories to be shared, and encourage you to republish our articles for your audience. When doing so, we ask that you follow these guidelines:
Please credit us and our writers
For the author byline, please use “Author Name, Modern Farmer.” At the top of our stories, if on the web, please include this text and link: “This story was originally published by Modern Farmer.”
Please make sure to include a link back to either our home page or the article URL.
At the bottom of the story, please include the following text:
“Modern Farmer is a nonprofit initiative dedicated to raising awareness and catalyzing action at the intersection of food, agriculture, and society. Read more at <link>Modern Farmer</link>.”
Use our widget
We’d like to be able to track our stories, so we ask that if you republish our content, you do so using our widget (located on the left hand side of the article). The HTML code has a built-in tracker that tells us the data and domain where the story was published, as well as view counts.
Check the image requirements
It’s your responsibility to confirm you're licensed to republish images in our articles. Some images, such as those from commercial providers, don't allow their images to be republished without permission or payment. Copyright terms are generally listed in the image caption and attribution. You are welcome to omit our images or substitute with your own. Charts and interactive graphics follow the same rules.
Don’t change too much. Or, ask us first.
Articles must be republished in their entirety. It’s okay to change references to time (“today” to “yesterday”) or location (“Iowa City, IA” to “here”). But please keep everything else the same.
If you feel strongly that a more material edit needs to be made, get in touch with us at [email protected]. We’re happy to discuss it with the original author, but we must have prior approval for changes before publication.
Special cases
Extracts. You may run the first few lines or paragraphs of the article and then say: “Read the full article at Modern Farmer” with a link back to the original article.
Quotes. You may quote authors provided you include a link back to the article URL.
Translations. These require writer approval. To inquire about translation of a Modern Farmer article, contact us at [email protected]
Signed consent / copyright release forms. These are not required, provided you are following these guidelines.
Print. Articles can be republished in print under these same rules, with the exception that you do not need to include the links.
Tag us
When sharing the story on social media, please tag us using the following: - Twitter (@ModFarm) - Facebook (@ModernFarmerMedia) - Instagram (@modfarm)
Use our content respectfully
Modern Farmer is a nonprofit and as such we share our content for free and in good faith in order to reach new audiences. Respectfully,
No selling ads against our stories. It’s okay to put our stories on pages with ads.
Don’t republish our material wholesale, or automatically; you need to select stories to be republished individually.
You have no rights to sell, license, syndicate, or otherwise represent yourself as the authorized owner of our material to any third parties. This means that you cannot actively publish or submit our work for syndication to third party platforms or apps like Apple News or Google News. We understand that publishers cannot fully control when certain third parties automatically summarize or crawl content from publishers’ own sites.
Keep in touch
We want to hear from you if you love Modern Farmer content, have a collaboration idea, or anything else to share. As a nonprofit outlet, we work in service of our community and are always open to comments, feedback, and ideas. Contact us at [email protected].by Andrew Amelinckx, Modern Farmer
May 19, 2015
Modern Farmer Weekly
Solutions Hub
Innovations, ideas and inspiration. Actionable solutions for a resilient food system.
ExploreExplore other topics
Share With Us
We want to hear from Modern Farmer readers who have thoughtful commentary, actionable solutions, or helpful ideas to share.
SubmitNecessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly. This category only includes cookies that ensures basic functionalities and security features of the website. These cookies do not store any personal information.
Any cookies that may not be particularly necessary for the website to function and are used specifically to collect user personal data via analytics, ads, other embedded contents are termed as non-necessary cookies.