This Holiday Season, Choose a Gift that Supports a Farmer
If you’re looking for the perfect present, check out these farm offerings.
This Holiday Season, Choose a Gift that Supports a Farmer
If you’re looking for the perfect present, check out these farm offerings.
In many cultures around the world, the winter season offers an abundance of occasions to gather, celebrate, and demonstrate gratitude or affection. While the act of gift giving is often viewed as an interaction between two people (the giver and the receiver), it’s also an opportunity to have a much broader, lasting impact. Purchasing a present is not only a chance to care for our loved ones; it can also support our communities, sustain businesses that share our values, and advocate for healthy ecosystems.
Rather than gifting a tangible object this year—and wrapping it, shipping it, hoping it’s something someone wants to store in their home indefinitely—opt to adopt from a farm.
Farmers around the world have launched adoption programs for everything from cacao trees to grape vines to dairy sheep. By adopting a piece of a farm, you can offer someone a way to connect with the land and our food system in a unique and meaningful way. You also help farmers continue their vital (and often financially challenging) work.
Bee hives
With Bees & Co’s Adopt a Beehive program, you can make every day a little sweeter for someone special in your life, while also benefiting the winged and walking members of the Bees & Co farms in London and Lincolnshire, England. It is a carbon neutral honey farm, thanks to itscommitment to using renewable energy and recyclable packaging. Bees & Co is also a recipient of the Green Tourism Gold Award for the workshops and experiences that it hosts, including classes on beekeeping, mead making, and planting for pollinators. But you don’t need to purchase plane tickets to share its raw honey or support its work to increase populations of native bees; instead, you can simply adopt one of its working honeybee hives. This gift includes an adoption certificate, updates on the hive, and jars of their honey with personalized labels.
Cacao trees and equipment
The Nyack family has grown cocoa since 1944 at Belmont Estate, a 100-percent Grenadian-owned business producing single-source tree-to-bar chocolates from its organic farm on the Caribbean island. Belmont Estate began offering folks the chance to Adopt a Cocoa Tree in 2022, but the program has expanded and gained deeper meaning this year. On July 1, 2024, Hurricane Beryl struck Grenada, devastating the land at Belmont Estate and leaving the community in crisis. Through the Adopt a Cocoa Tree program, you can help plant and maintain 20 cocoa trees for a full year. Alternatively, you can Adopt a Field, thereby supporting the replanting of the farm’s other crops, which include nutmeg, pimento, and bananas. Belmont Estate is also seeking contributions to reconstruct greenhouses and farm buildings, as well as purchase new equipment for essential agricultural activities. In return, participants receive regular updates on the progress of the farm they are helping to restore.
Coffee trees
The founders of Colombia coffee tree created its Adopt a coffee tree program as an invitation to coffee drinkers worldwide to better understand the process of cultivating these beloved beans (which are actually fruit). If you have a friend who can’t start the day without a cup of joe, this gift is for them. The trees’ adoptive “parents” receive seasonal updates, explaining the processes from flowering to harvesting through to the arrival of packaged coffee at their front door. As part of the company’s commitment to more transparent and ethical coffee production practices, the farm in Antioquia, Colombia is Fairtrade and Rainforest Alliance Certified.
Dairy sheep
La Porta dei Parchi is an agritourism business located in Abruzzo, Italy, where farmers Nunzio Marcelli and Manuela Cozzi raise sheep, produce organic cheese, and run a hotel. Their Adopt a Sheep program is the perfect pick for the person in your life who is at their happiest in front of a cheese board. Participants receive a large gift box containing an adoption certificate, two award-winning sheep milk cheeses, a pair of woolen socks, assorted food products from the farm (such as pasta and honey), a tote bag, and a voucher for a discount on a future stay at the farm to meet the flock and sample more wheels of pecorino.
Grape vines
Old World Winery produces natural wines in California’s Russian River Valley according to regenerative, organic, and biodynamic agricultural practices. This family-owned business has been growing rare varietals, such as Abouriou, on this land for over a century. If you’re seeking something special for a wine-loving loved one, sign them up for the Adopt-A-Vine program. Participants receive a bottle of the vine’s first vintage and can arrange a visit to the vineyards, where they will find their name hung on a tag among the leaves.
Olive trees
Through the Adopt an olive tree program at Palazzo di Varignana in Emilia-Romagna, you can adopt one of three olive cultivars that are indigenous to the region: Nostrana di Brisighella, Correggiolo, and Ghiacciola. The rarity of finding and tasting these particular olives makes this the perfect option for any true olive oil aficionado. Upon adoption, a customized name plate is attached to the tree and participants receive updates about its growth, along with a three-liter container of Palazzo di Varignana’s award-winning extra virgin olive oil. The estate also has a restaurant and hotel overlooking its olives groves and welcomes anyone who wants to visit their adopted tree in person.
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 Elena Valeriote, Modern Farmer
December 2, 2024
Modern Farmer Weekly
Solutions Hub
Innovations, ideas and inspiration. Actionable solutions for a resilient food system.
ExploreShare 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.
I need to see prices.