Funding for this program was made possible in part by United Food Bank which works with local churches, farmers, and more than 150 partner agencies in Arizona Together they provide 50,000 meals a day to families and seniors experiencing hunger.

More information can be found at UnitedFoodBank.org Director: What is this machine, Rodney?

So it's called a Jang seeder.

It's made in, uh, I think South Korea.

And it allows you to plant things very fast and pretty much precisely in terms of the distance that you're doing.

It allows you to do different types of seeds, uh, that you're trying to do.

So, um, it's it's really it, it's a game changer for small farmers.

It really, really allows us to be more productive.

Director: Awesome.

Thank you.

I'm one of the farmers at Spaces of Opportunity, and I always farm around the Valley and outside Phoenix as well.

I came to Arizona as a PhD student in the School of Community Resources and Development at Arizona State University, and I've been involved in farming because my research focuses on social determinants of health.

So I wanted to learn the theory of it, but I wanted to engage in the practical side.

When I was in Zimbabwe, um , what my dad taught me was to be a gardener.

So at our home, we actually had our own garden.

The city allowed us to use these open spaces, to use that to grow quite a lot of the crops, a lot of the staple food that we, we, we use.

So those years were really what the foundation of that taught me how to grow.

In Zimbabwe, we had the worst economic crisis in the 21st century.

And it was really so bad that you would go in a store and the shelves were bare.

There was nothing.

What allowed us in Zimbabwe to survive that really difficult time was most of our population knew how to grow, so when they lost jobs or any of these things, they started surviving off of these kind of, uh, side projects where people grow their own food to feed their own families.

If you walk into my main room, right here is my main room.

Uh, you can see that kind of just by looking at it, you can see how low my ceilings are.

There's about 8 or 10 inches of dirt on top.

Which is more of a traditional way of (indistinct) used to be.

It helps keep the place nice and cool, it averages about 75 in here during the summertime.

In here, I'm off the grid.

I've kind of combined both traditional, uh, traditional ecological knowledge to build the home, but I've also got modern implements in here, like a propane refrigerator, propane stove.

I'm off the grid completely.

This is my dining room area.

So you come up in here and you can see that I have a little dining room table in here.

It's a great shot of my fields out there.

Uh, I've got plenty of ventilation in here.

That's my degree from, uh, I believe Cornell University.

And then the one behind you is from Pepperdine University, where I got my Master's at.

We're on the Hopi Indian Reservation, about 90 miles northeast of Flagstaff, of an elevation of around 4,000 to 5,000 feet.

The Hopi way of farming is more of the Hopi way of life.

I mean, when when a baby's only two weeks old, they're raised up by their paternal aunt to the sun, and they're put a small little piece of sweet corn pudding in their mouth so that they're always tied where they're from.

Uh, Hopi children are taken to the field at a very young age to learn about the value of farming.

I can teach any kid out here how to farm, but it's more important that I tell them why they're doing what they're doing.

What is their responsibility?

A Hopi is responsible to do this.

We're born farmers.

I'm a 250th generation farmer.

You know, you tell that to people in Iowa we come across at these conferences.

'I'm third generation.'

'I'm 10th generation.'

It's our way of life.

It's integrated into our agriculture, into our ceremonial system and who we are.

There's no separation there.

And that's what supports what we do.

Without that kind of resilience and that kind of faith, we would have given up.

You know, some of our own people, unfortunately, they seem to have lost some of that.

But there's enough of us out here to keep continuing that practice on and on and on.

It's putting the culture back in agriculture, I think, is what I'm trying to say, I guess.

We have a certain percentage of our guests that love the fact that the menu changes so much.

They love the fact that when they come back for more, to choose more, to choose something new, something fun.

But then we also have those same guests who, 'I was here two weeks ago and this wasn't on the menu.

What's going on?'

You know what I mean?

I'm like... BECKETT: Is that your customer voice?

Yeah, it's my customer voice.

I'm like, 'Yes, ma'am, I understand, we changed the menu, but hey, check this out!

We got this on some...

It's from X, Y and Z.

You can go here and get it.'

And then their tone changes and like, 'Oh that's cool.

We didn't know that.

We didn't know that X, Y and Z grows here.

What kind of squash is that?'

And we have those discussions and it's, and now, it now becomes fun.

We need to realize what is here.

And whether you talk to somebody who's lived here their whole life and is not interested in food, or whether you talk to somebody from, you know, across the US who is very interested in food... Arizona produces almost everything.

When you're a chef and you're going to the market to buy something You're not just looking at it and saying, is it big?

Is it... ...Look good?

Those are not your main concerns.

Yeah you want to know that it's beautiful, but you're probably going to be more tolerant of slight imperfections if you know that that product tastes phenomenal.

I met David when he used to farm in Maine during the off season of farming here in the Valley, and his dog met my dog.

And so it's kind of a love story on how I got here.

Here we're doing everything so that you go to the farmers market and you're dazzled by, oh my God, there's brussel sprouts and there's three different colored cauliflowers.

There's four.

I didn't even know that.

I didn't even know that I could get that because Fry's doesn't have that.

We do various types of chards.

Kales.

We do collards, dandelions.

Brussels sprouts.

Carrots, radishes.

Well-picked dandelion patch.

Parsley, cilantro.

Fennel, dill.

This parsley here is probably been cut I don't know even how many times.

Several types of cauliflower, broccoli, brussel sprouts, leeks.

Spring onions.

This is fennel.

Bulbs of fennel.

Green onions, strawberries, melons.

Squashes, summer squash, hard squash.

Peas.

Garlic.

That is a spring onion.

Kohlrabi, cabbages, baby spinach, arugula, lettuce mix.

Bulbing onions, all different colors, like that's a green one.

And here's a purple one and a white one.

And then they'll bunch those.

It's a little more mature than a scallion, but it's still delicious.

It's generally what can we fit in.

It's not about, you know, how much... How much land do we have and what can we fit in.

And I've never felt connected to a community in a space like I do here in Arizona.

Yeah.

And and, um, you know, whether it be us chefs hanging out or whether it be hanging out with producers, I think I think that their commitment to supplying us with, you know, food or other is, is, is so high and they, they take such pride in it that it almost like is infectious on my end.

Those relationships he's talking about before.

The romance of that.

Yeah.

Go plant that seed and I'm going to serve it and create it into something amazing.

It's really, really cool.

Right.

And it's from dirt.

Yeah.

It's dirt.

And he's so happy about it.

See, you know 70 year old man was so happy about something.

It's amazing.

Do you have systems or techniques or even, like a secret bat phone?

I mean, how do you how do you find these hard to find producers or even, you know, an everyday producer?

How do you make that connection?

Honestly?

Farmers markets.

Today we're here at Prescott Farmer's Market on a Saturday.

There are cottonwood seeds flowing.

It looks like snow.

And it's a beautiful, busy day at the market.

The Prescott Farmers Market was started in 1997 by a few farmers, one of which is here, Whipstone Farm, and a bunch of people got together and decided they wanted fresh food in the community.

And so that was in 1997, and we're almost 25 years old.

Today we have about 60 vendors when we're at full capacity, about 26 of those are agricultural vendors.

We also have food vendors and a few craft vendors.

We have guest artists program in case people don't meet our requirements.

We are a producer only market, which means that everything you see here is either grown or raised or made by the person selling it.

So there's no resale allowed.

And to ensure that, we do farm inspections on an annual basis.

So we go out to farms and we check their crop plan that they submitted at the beginning of the season to make sure that they are growing what they're selling at the market.

My name is Joseph Schaffer with Schaffer Farms.

I live out in Paulden.

That's Paulden, Arizona.

Um, I guess we're mostly out there.

Most of us farmers are out there because that's where they still have land and, I guess, arable soil.

Uh, I'm Juan Aguiar, and I'm Keeton Aguiar, and we own Blooming Reed Farm.

Uh, we're a small four acre farm.

We prioritize cut flowers.

We do mixed veggies as well.

And some fruits like watermelon.

Melons.

Um, and we are, this is our second year as a farm, and we try to grow year round.

Um, and our farm is located in Paulden, Arizona.

I'm loving it.

I always wanted to be a farmer.

The goal was to become a farmer at 53.

But, uh, with the support of my wife, Shante, she encouraged me to start early.

So here we are.

It was a lot of work at the beginning, and it's still kind of a lot of work keeping everything, um, up without too much machinery.

I like to see what's out there.

I'll come here, Downtown Phoenix for the public market.

Or go to the Uptown market and kind of see what's going on.

A few different varieties here.

We have some piopinno mushrooms or, you know, a little bit of golden oyster and some of the (indistinct) oyster that you know, that we use here.

Yeah.

Um, oyster in the black pearl.

King trumpet There as well.

> Nice, nice.

Appreciate you.

Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Most of the mushrooms , or actually all of the mushrooms that we grow, are hardwood based mushrooms.

So in nature you'd find them growing right out the sides of trees.

So we start with like an oak hardwood based substrate.

So we'll store everything right here in our facility.

We also have grain, um, that we utilize in the production of the grain spawn.

So we can grow out the mycelium on freshly sterilized and hydrated grain.

Uh, some of our sterilized grain will come directly out of this autoclave.

So it's a double door autoclave.

On the other side, we can load in fresh, hydrated grain and basically sterilize it at 15 psi.

This is the culture fridge.

This is where, uh, mushroom mycelium can grow out on a petri dish or throughout a liquid broth.

So we can see nice, healthy mycelium in there.

And this will be taken out with a syringe and then placed into a bag of sterilized grain.

We have some shiitake, uh, substrate that was just inoculated, uh, two days ago or three days ago.

And, uh, mycelium has been inoculated into sterilized sawdust.

And we can see each little point where the mycelium is leaping off of the sterilized grain and onto the sawdust, basically utilizing it as a food source.

It'll continually colonize throughout this sawdust until it becomes this white mass of mycelial, uh, just like a mycelial mass, um, once it ripens and determines that the substrate is basically been completely devoured of nutrition, it will start producing mushrooms.

So yeah, these are the mushrooms that kind of take some of the longest here to really reach their full stage.

Now we see them about six months, almost six months after inoculation.

So this is the shiitake mushroom.

Director: I started as a hobbyist, just growing as a kid at 15.

By the time I was 16, I was growing more mushrooms, and then I decided to turn it into a business as I got older and started having a family.

Thinking about the future generation, like, what kind of knowledge will we pass on to our kids?

And mushrooms is one of the things that I, you know, that I have that I can, I can pass down.

We're out here in Buckeye, Arizona, uh, on the Kerr Dairy Farm.

Director: It's your farm.

Yep.

We built this place in 1990.

It seems not that long ago.

It's amazing.

One thing you can tell the health of a cow.

They call it, um, chewing their cud.

That means life is good.

Everything is..

If a cow ever gets sick, she won't do that.

That's always a good, healthy sign to see them chewing their cud.

But if you see all of them out there, they're all doing it.

Most of them are.

This time of year, here we are in August and our fans will be turning on right now.

Happens to be a nice day, but once it hits 90 degrees, our fans and misters turn on and everything on a dairy farm is the comfort of the cow.

We treat them like family, and we really do, because if they're not happy, they're not going to produce milk for you.

So we're always taking care of them to make sure that they've got all their needs necessary to live a happy life for a cow.

A lot of grocery stores back in the day would call us and say, we don't need your milk today.

And with the dairy cow, they're constantly milking.

We're milking cows every day.

So the dairy farmers came together and made a co-op, which is United Dairym en of Arizona.

My dad was a part of that in the 1960s to develop that.

I think the people need to start really looking around and getting serious about what does it really mean to have a sustainable community?

You know, we started as a small farm.

So I love small farms.

Farms of all sizes play a role in a sustainable community.

When the kids used to come out to the farm, we used to, we used to laugh about about the bus leaving the farmyard.

And and you knew just about where the guide told the kids they were going to be harvesting broccoli that morning.

Kids had this, had this concept that all broccoli was bad.

And so you'd hear this as the bus is going down the road, this 'EWWW'.

But when they came back, when they got to go and harvest their broccoli, it wasn't just broccoli, it was 'their' broccoli.

They knew where it came from.

And they took that broccoli home to mom and dad and they said, this is my broccoli that I picked today at the farm.

The broccoli farm.

The broccoli didn't come from the store, and it didn't come from that frozen package.

It came from a farm.

To have that kind of effect Even just a little bit, you know, I think people think that if they can change one person's life, they feel that they've had a valuable life.

It's kind of cool.

We are here at Spaces of Opportunity with the Food Forest Cooperative, where we have one acre of land in the middle of South Phoenix.

Our community needs to be able to be self-sustaining in a way, you know, how can we reconnect to land physically?

How can we reconnect to our ancestors, really, through doing this work of knowing the plants and knowing the land and knowing the water and knowing, you know, different ways of of growing from the land.

And so urban farming is really important to us because as urban indigenous peoples, for us, it's really hard to have accessibility to land in general.

20 acres.

You could see now all this growing space and these farms and everything being harvested now.

But before it was just dirt, an empty lot, you know, and who knows what was done here, you know, abandoned.

And and now we're trying to heal that land, you know, by, by just working it, reconnecting with it and growing food.

I have now been in the indigenous food realm, um, for over 20 years now.

Out of culinary school, I was able to adjust my diet because I had actually gained about 80 pounds in culinary school.

So when I after graduating, after completing that, I was able to then start focusing on foods like nopals and just learning, you know, making a lot of the dishes my mom would make.

There's so many different versions that grow.

I would always, if you have, if you're growing any yourself or us or have some in your neighborhood and community, if you're out foraging at all in the desert, always have a set of tongs!

There will be times that you'll see bears in the distance and they'll just watch you.

They know you're there for food too, and they won't bother you.

So you'll see bears.

You'll run into, um, deers, elks, all kinds of animals, wild animals out here, and they do their own thing.

I do my own thing.

You do, you will get thorns on you.

That's no, no mistakes there.

But you just have to be very careful.

And once you start to know, it takes a while to learn this.

It's something that doesn't come easy to a lot of people.

And you can basically use any brush that you do find.

You'll always find a tool, a natural tool that you can use to help you collect these.

After I'm done processing, which is peeling it and removing the thorn and the outer skin, is, there's different things you can do.

You can roast them like this, then peel them like you do green chilli.

Get the flesh and serve it with your whatever you want to eat it with, salad or pasta or whatever you want to have it with.

Salad is really good.

And the other one is jam.

Oh God, this is like prickly pear jam season.

So you got a lot of people doing preserves, syrups jelly and also candy.

Myself, I do a prickly pear chips as a very, um, nice, beautiful dried fruit.

And it looks just like a little pink potato chip.

DIRECTOR: Oh, yum.

Yeah.

So these are the this is like, you know, the best time to do all this right now.

This was really a personal journey.

I lost myself to who I really was.

Who I really am is this beautiful Apache woman that just stayed dormant and got lost in the society of drugs and alcohol.

I have relatives, you know, they're basket weavers and do a lot of traditional thing and had some take me out, we went to go get, um, materials for a project they were doing.

Something.. Just being out here and being out here.

Just being here.

I felt so much love that I've never had my whole life.

I've never experienced my whole life.

Tongs are the best thing.

I couldn't find my tongs.

So these are another ones that really excellent garden tool.

Put it underneath and you just pry it.

And there we go.

And this is like, the coolest tool.

It reconnected me to not only the land, but to this really large void that I've been carrying most of my life and filling that void with traditional knowledge.

So bringing people out here to help them heal through different traumas they've all experienced, whether it be abuse, alcohol, sexual violence, suicide, anything.

Coming out here is like the first moment I came here.

And the only reason I enjoy bringing people here is because I know what it personally has done for me.

For nearly 20 years, we've been leasing about 23 acres from the dairy next door to us to the south.

The dairy is owned by, uh, a woman whose husband passed away.

He was the dairyman for many, many years.

And, anyway, she has decided to sell it.

And we're going to have approximately 670 new neighbors.

The state of Arizona in the early 80s decided that they would turn farmland into rooftops, for lack of a better term, that they would pursue growth.

Um, not of the vegetable variety, but more of the people variety.

And that's what's happening.

That's what you see 40 years later, is we're losing, you know, the ability to feed our people.

Director: Are these part of the, uh.... Land we will lose?

Yeah.

This whole field is part of the land I will lose.

Plus part of the field over there.

Um.

When you talk about losing the land like this, I mean, it's land that's been built up over 20 years.

20 plus years.

And, you know, when you get soil samples back now that have organic matter around 2% here, it's an amazing, joyful thing that you've achieved a level of success you didn't know if you would ever get.

And to know that that's all going to be paved over for houses, it's a gut wrenching feeling.

So you've worked your whole life for something and somebody is just going to take it away, you know?

And you know, people will say to you, well, why didn't you buy the land?

Because even when land was only $50,000 an acre, that's a real that's a lot of money for farmland.

That's still way beyond a farmer's reach.

And Maricopa County has lost 240 square miles of farmland to building in the last 19 years.

Our ancestors always lived along the Colorado River from time immemorial.

Currently we are in, um, a multi-year drought and it impacts all of the water users of the Colorado River, the upper basin and the lower basin.

So we are in a crisis.

We are farmers, we'll always be farmers.

It's more or less in our blood.

And so we've maintained farming of our lands because our creator gave us our lands and he gave us the water, the Colorado River, so that we could live off of these resources.

And so that's what the tribes continue to do today, is to live off of our, our resources.

The Colorado River Indian Tribes has senior water rights to the Colorado River.

Because of our senior water right, we can help others in the state of Arizona.

We can do this by leasing our water.

Our President Biden signed our legislation, CRIT Water Resiliency Act 3308.

Now we're able to lease our our water, so we can enter into agreements with other water users and help the state of Arizona.

This is where we milk our cows.

We have 20 cows on a side, so 40 cows are getting milked at one time in here.

They all come in and line up and the milker milks them from behind.

We milk 24 hours a day.

We're milking about 1100 cows.

And the cows enjoy coming in here.

Look at this one over here.

That's where she's enjoying getting milked.

And she's just chewing away.

DIRECTOR: It feels good, huh?

Oh, it feels good.

They want to get milked.

The milking machines get put on.

And then when they're, uh, not producing any more milk, the machines come off automatically.

The economy and the economics of running a dairy farm is pretty tough.

It's become a tougher, uh, livelihood.

But I think the more and more people realize, especially coming out of Covid, I hope that we realize more how important it is to have local food.

What this program taught me about a food system was basically the the vulnerability of our food system previously.

We were not at a good place.

But now we're getting in a better place where we now know, hey, these are the players around here.

Here are the people who can grow.

Oh, by the way, we are growing.

But we may be growing for the compost bin because we're not growing what the restaurants need.

So the communication between the farmers, the local farmers and the local restaurant was not as robust as it could be.

I find myself, you know, obviously in this day and age with with many more challenges.

And so one of my challenges is, you know, can I buy this product for the next three months?

Can I buy this product for, you know, however many weeks?

And if I can't, am I okay subbing in a box from somewhere else?

JONES: Exactly.

A regional facility that can, that we can deliver product to in some manner, that can take this product and instead of having it go away and be turned in as fertil- ... really expensive fertilizer, um, now it's food for the hungry and that we just have to figure out a way to do that.

When you start to understand the numbers of people that are hungry in the state, um, that are hungry anywhere, and you can make even the smallest dent, you kind of have to.

So the United Food Bank has a mission to unite communities to alleviate hunger.

So we work with local churches, local schools, local community partners to provide 50,000 meals every day to families and seniors who are experiencing hunger in our communities.

In Arizona, 1 in 10 people are food insecure, which means that they don't know for sure if they know where their next meal will come from.

Local produce is really important to United Food Bank because it supplements our food streams and enhances our programs so that we can offer a complete and dignified experience to our neighbors.

The alternative might be that people don't eat fresh, healthy, nutritious food just because it's expensive or difficult to access.

You know, we we work with growers, we work with manufacturers, we work with distributors and processors, and we also work with the retailers and so on each of those steps, we work to recover food from each of those sources, or we work to purchase them well in advance in large quantities.

So that way we can provide it to those who need it.

United Food Bank participates in a program spearheaded by Arizona Food Bank network called Friends of the Farm, which is where growers and cooperatives come together and are supported, and their product is purchased with the sole intention of distributing to food banks and food pantries in the network.

Those are the kinds of things we can we can strengthen people in terms of economic security, but also providing the right types of foods for their needs, that will give them security for the long term to be able to meet those needs for tomorrow.

Having local farms provide food to the food banks is an incredible aspect of not only supporting the farms and the work that they're doing, but supporting the community, and it leads to the perfect combination of food security and food sovereignty, where people have control, choice and ownership over the food, while also feeling confident about the sustainability and fulfilling the needs of the population.

Last year, we distributed about 21 million pounds of food, and half of that food was sort of fresh, nutritious food.

And much of that comes fresh and locally, either from a grower or from a local grocery store with which we move that food to someone who needs it.

Last March, we started the Feed Your Neighbors program in response to food insecurity that was that has always been here, but really became apparent when people were struggling to find food at the stores.

Uh, so we have every week we do boxes and we partner with local agencies to get food to people in need.

So we have volunteers that come and package up boxes of food, greens, eggs, all those kind of staple foods, bread.

And then we have partners that deliver them to people who need them within this community and also in Baghdad, which is which is a really food insecure community.

We also work with the Headstart Centers to get food to families out there.

Um, sometimes we do coupons so that they can come to the market and just shop for themselves and buy what they need for their families.

Director: > Okay.

All good.

Thank you.

I appreciate you all very, very much.

> Thank you.

We appreciate you.

Thank you for letting us come and crush your party.

We are harvesting citrus.

We're harvesting today lemons and grapefruit and Seville orange.

Working with UN refugees from Africa, Asia, the Middle East and Latin America.

Usually the one below.

You don't find fruits because the owners usually eat the ones below.

Then the ones higher is the one we get, because usually it's hard for the owner to to pick from the from the bottom.

From the top.

So Iskashitaa means working cooperatively together... which is a local organization working in southern Arizona to, um, really capture the backyard bounty that, um, is so often overlooked not only in southern Arizona but all across the US.

In fact, with all the calculations of food waste, backyard garden and backyard edible trees have not been calculated as part of that food waste.

Right now we're harvesting about 5,000 pounds a week.

That goes to organizations that are also, um, providing food to the community.

So food banks, soup kitchens, shelters and schools, that we also work with, Market on the Move that brings out the food out to rural areas and the Pascua Yaqui Tribe and the San Carlos Apache, um, bring the food to them on the reservation, from Iskashitaa.

We'll go out to the, we're going to be going out to the field that, um, that I planted this year initially, uh, because of the drought, dry conditions in the wash. And so down in here, as you'll see, is where some of my, some of my plants are at on this area, what they call the wash. And we'll walk down in there and I can show you a little bit about, about that kind of stuff.

But.

So yeah, that's about it.

Yeah and so this is a this is a typical plan.

You can see right now there's a couple of ears that are coming out on here.

Um, they usually get to be about this high sometimes five or sometimes six feet high.

Depends on the moisture.

But you can see, you know, um, the they're pollinated.

And so when you shake them like this because they're close together, they pollinate pretty well.

It's 100 degrees today guys.

Maybe 105 down here in the wash.

But you can see how vibrant this plant is.

This is 3000 years of genetics by our Hopi women that allowed us to come like this.

Uh, because they because they are because they are the geneticists of our society.

That's why they're so important.

And so I gotta give credit where credit's due, and that's for the women.

That we have a lot of, you know, some of this brush, a lot of the brush that I cleared out was away from the plants or weeds.

I left a lot of this in here this year because of it's a new field.

It takes about 2 or 3 years to get a good field out here at Hopi.

That's that's the main thing.

But a lot of this will help.

If it does fill up, it'll hold some of the plants in place because it'll help slow down erosion.

When that tends to happen.

We plant corn here to fit the environment and do not manipulate the environment to fit the corn.

And that's a strong statement.

But that also means that when when you allow it to fit the environment, we have to take everything the environment gives us.

Sometimes it gives me cut worms, sometimes it gives me too too dry soil, sometimes it gives me too much wind, sometimes it gives me too much crows, too much rabbits.

You know, all these all these natural variables that occur on, on a, on a natural landscape, on a, on that diverse natural landscape.

I'd have to say, because we have the benefit of having all that biodiversity out here.

And so it's a beautiful way to think about it.

This is kind of like my little corn field in the desert.

So I'm just glad to have the opportunity to show you, you know what a little corn field in the desert looks like.

I out here can tell you where my food comes from.

You know, I can tell you how healthy it is.

I can't tell you out there where your food comes from.

I mean, you go to the store and you pick up a bag of potato chips.

There's no there's no tags on it.

Like in Italy, for example, they have software on all their foods so that you're able to take that little code and take a picture and it takes you to the where it was processed at, where, where, where it was, what the quality of it was, who made it.

We don't have that in in the United States.

So we don't know what we're eating.

And that's scary.

When our sweet corn, for example, our ears are really small, they look like the kind you would see at a museum that are like in the prehistoric section with the dinosaurs and stuff.

But we still grow small corn, like that, original sweet corn, I call it, and that's off the charts.

It's not a water logged.

It tastes good.

You know, um, we have a system out here where we roast it, and then we can have that corn 50 years later because it just dehydrates it.

And then when you soak it in water for a day or so, it blows it back up.

And when you boil it, it blows up to the same size as it was when you picked it.

It's just a preservation method that we have.

But the contents (indistinct) are still there.

You know, people always say, how do you grow stuff in this arid environment?

Because we know how to do it, you know, and I just think that, you know, people don't quite understand that we've been doing this forever.

Our knowledge is deep, you know, but it's not really tapped upon.

But if it does get tapped upon, then we need to make sure that we have control of that knowledge and not just become exploited and not make the Indian agriculture another mining industry.

You know, we're survivors.

We're resilient people.

And so the drought will just, um, strengthen us.

We may see it in a negative way, but I think it's it's strengthening us in all areas of life.

Water is life.

And it's the life of the... Of my people.

Water is, uh, is such a precious commodity.

Using drip irrigation, using sprinklers and micro sprinklers.

All these things are very efficient ways of producing food and not wasting water.

The International Rescue Committee is a non-profit organization around the world.

Um, here in Phoenix, we primarily do refugee resettlement.

The New Roots program is, um, a program for people from all different backgrounds - refugees, exiles, immigrants - to come together and grow food and grow the types of food that they are familiar with, that they want to grow, that they want to share with their communities.

When I came here, I was not speaking English at all.

We were speaking Arabic language.

I spent like five years just fighting to learn English.

Uh, I think I am still behind, but I try to do, to do my best.

And then I find my position over there as the farmer, that's what I'm looking for, and I find it.

We grow watermelon, cucumber, cantoloupe, pumpkin.

Something called mulukhiyah in our language.

Very popular, but a lot of people, they don't know that.

I feel like, I feel very happy, enjoy myself.

When they come to ask about how to be a farmer, if we do not meet the people from IRC with the new program, it's a good program, if you don't give me the key, I cannot make it.

I am not here to be a farmer today.

I am still can be a driver or can be anywhere, can be anything.

So that is the kind of help, we can do that from organization or from your family, if you have family here or friends, if you have friends, that's all the support you I'm talking about.

Don't assume that you're good at it.

Don't assume that you know much.

Start small.

Start small and be prepared to fail!

Make sure you love it.

Make sure that you are quick to adjust.

Ask for help.

The help is there.

There's, there's so much that we keep learning.

Uh, here we are in Arizona, and we're having a drought right now.

And, uh, we've learned the different kind of, uh, feeds that we can feed our animals that doesn't take so much water.

Our dairy farm right here is in the Buckeye Valley is what we call it.

This is western, uh, west of Phoenix.

It was just last week came out, the fastest growing city in the United States of America.

So the property here is very desirable.

Well, what that means is people are moving here and building houses on the ground that we used to be able to farm and feed our animals.

So there is challenges.

But I feel with the next generation of kids coming up, I call them kids, but the next generation of dairy farmers, uh, they'll meet that challenge.

So I think last time you guys were here, we were still farming the entire pieces that we used to have.

We've since then lost 23 acres to development and we have found another place to farm.

Here we are.

DIRECTOR: Where are we?

Well, we're here at my new farm.

Um, it was tough to find, but it was really offered to me by someone that was aware of the situation, and I'm grateful for that.

But I've earned every bit of it.

It was all trees and pasture and, um, it's been a real big challenge, which is, all farmers face almost every day to, uh, turn it into a productive piece of land.

But I'm, I think we're making good progress.

The efforts to find farmland for us were difficult, incredibly difficult.

And David and I had decided that we had a very strong deadline, um, in our heads and in our family, about if we hadn't found it by a certain date, we were going to leave the state.

We'd started looking at a few places around the country.

And then literally a week before our deadline, the 40 acres that we have now happened.

It's been hard, but at the same time, I've never been prouder of anything we've done.

It's an amazing oasis of agriculture and it's surrounded by industrial development.

Every building looks similar to the others.

And, uh, there's some big multinationals that are busy at work here, and it is changing this landscape.

It's all being built from what I can see almost exclusively on farmland.

The big question is, you know, what will happen in the future.

I've got three years left.

I have no idea.

I do not have a sense yet that I will be here beyond three more seasons.

We're in the way, us farmers.

And instead of that, we should be an integral part so that there can be development, but that it doesn't just extinguish us.

Alright.

> So is it different coming out here?

Yeah it is.

> And seeing the whole thing done.

Yeah.

Like how they make it seem more complicated, but seeing like how my grandma just picks it, that's like how we used to do it and how her grandma did it.

> So are you doing it?

Yeah.

When it's still green, we don't bother it.

You just go pass it and till till we get it this color.

And we only pick just enough.

You know, we don't, we don't want to take all of it.

We give some back.

Like to the animals, you know, to the birds, to the w ild pigs, deers, elks.

We leave some for them.

We, you know, again, we say thank you for it too, because this is our food.

Our elders used to eat this.

Our ancestors, you know, they're the ones that picked these.

And it's brought down to our generation.

And now I'm showing it to my granddaughter.

DIRECTOR: You got pricked with the pear?

Yep.

DIRECTOR: Let me see.

It's definitely a lot of pressure being able to learn things from my grandma and then thinking, oh, well, you know, this is my culture.

It's what I grew up on.

Then having to one day have kids and pass it on, it's like, I don't want this to die out because it's something really special.

Today I canceled my classes because she told me that, um, she was coming out.

So I was like, oh, I have to cancel my class and wait until later on today to take it.

So because I really wanted to come out, I love coming up here.

DIRECTOR: Why?

It's just it heals you in a way.

Like we're coming out and picking the prickly pear and getting tea or even just for a drive.

It's like some, you can't experience this in the city or even like on a reservation because of the houses.

And it's like it's open and it's like, oh, this is where my ancestors came from.

And it's really nice learning about just family, how they would come out here.

And it's like, I think that's what connects me so much to picking and harvesting.

It's just like learning that my grandma's mom did it, and she's doing it, and I'm doing it.

And it's just like, it's so makes you...

Sorry, makes you emotional thinking, oh, I get to carry this on and share it.

I find hope in the process of farming.

In the journey of farming.

There's not a day that goes by where I don't see something that's hope.

You know, when I see a little kid out here with a hoe.

That's hope.

For me, it's able to continue to farm to have those little kids that I had up here from their little elementary school come up here and run around and laugh and sing songs and playing a little bit, you know, that's hope.

That's, it doesn't have to be big, you know, even the smallest little light can bring the biggest amount of hope.

Funding for this program was made possible in part by United Food Bank which works with local churches, farmers, and more than 150 partner agencies in Arizona Together they provide 50,000 meals a day to families and seniors experiencing hunger.

More information can be found at UnitedFoodBank.org