Hi, We’re FINCA Seremos.
Finca Seremos is the first project of Seremos Collectivo.
The name Finca Seremos means “We-will-be Farms” in Spanish. It comes from the closing line of “Love Sonnet LXIX” by Pablo Neruda, a nod to the love that founders Chris and Brenda have for each other and their family, for stewarding the land, and for their communities in Inwood, Washington Heights, and the Bronx. The poem’s final line—“And through love I will be, you will be, we will be”—also frames the deep understanding of interdependency and mutual aid at the heart of Finca Seremos’ approach to farming.
THE NUMBERS
We believe in the value of transparency as a crucial tool to build community and run our business. Farming is inherently risky, and we work hard to make sure our members get insight into what we are doing to mitigate that risk.
We also didn’t invent the wheel, and have been able to learn as much as we have about running a farm business from other farms who have shared their models, practices, and lessons they’ve learned along the way.
Click the ‘Our Data’ button above to see the numbers from our last season and get more insight into how we work.
Our approach
Finca Seremos seeks to bend our arc toward justice in three key components of farm operation: agroecological stewardship, community power, and cooperative labor.
AgroEcological stewardship
Agroecology is a framework for approaching food systems that emphasizes responsible land stewardship AND a just social life for food and the people who grow and eat it. Assembled by farmers in the Global South in response to the encroachment of chemical-intensive agriculture and expounded by global peasant movement organizations like La Via Campesina, agroecology today can be helpfully condensed to 13 principles. Seven of them address growing practices, with the other six take aim at transforming our food system.
Growing Practices: Input reduction, soil health, animal health and welfare, biodiversity, synergy, and economic diversification
Food System: Co-creation of knowledge, social values and diets, fairness, connectivity, land and natural resource governance, and participation
Part of the attraction of agroecology, beyond its origins, is its connection between the life of the farm and the life of our communities. Because of that connection, agroecology is resistant to being co-opted by agribusiness or capitalism writ large. In order to practice agroecology, you cannot succumb to logics of the market or play along with our broken food system. These principles resonate with us individually, and their combination captures the main thrust of our project.
COMMUNITY POWER
We believe access to good food is an end unto itself and a means to bring people together to form durable networks of mutual aid.
Mutual aid is a modern name for the ancient practice of reciprocity that has more recent roots in Black and poor communities in the US and had a huge resurgence in many places during the COVID lockdown. Often simplified as 'solidarity, not charity,’ mutual aid networks facilitate community care, bringing people together to address a shared injustice or concern by collectively finding solutions that don’t rely on any one person, corporation, or government entity. This approach is closely aligned with the history of member labor in CSAs supporting the farmers who grow the food in a mutual network of solidarity.
Complementing the many organizing models that respond to emergency and crisis, our work slowly builds the kinds of deep relationships that only food can cultivate. This work starts over conversations at CSA pickups, building relationships within our membership, trading recipes and resources for housing, education, healthcare, and labor concerns. We’ve cultivated broad networks of support and social services across all these areas through our previous work in government and education that we leverage to help our community solve everyday problems, starting at CSA pickup.
Finca Seremos also plans to partner with local high schools where we have strong relationships to offer internships for our majority Black and Brown neighborhood youth to experience farming outside the stigmas that agricultural work carries for many of their families. In this way, we’ll provide a chance for students with farming in their family’s past to reconnect with ancestral knowledge, creating a much-needed pipeline for farmers of color to skill up, get on land, and feed our people.
Cooperative labor
Cooperative labor is the final piece of Finca Seremos’ vision, implemented by creating a worker-owned cooperative. As long-term residents of a low- and middle-income housing coop, customers of several commercial coops, and people from cultures of cooperation and mutual aid in Appalachia, Puerto Rico, and Cuba, we understand how cooperative principles form a solid bedrock for ethical, sustainable decision-making in workplaces. Inspired by Soul Fire and Rock Steady Farms, our coop will delegate power and responsibilities to different levels of the governance structure so that we can maximize worker dignity and input, as well as financial stability.
At our full scale, we plan to be able to support a minimum of 4 worker owners with a competitive annual salary and benefits. Ensuring that everyone who works at Seremos has a living wage and a path to access to benefits, decision making power over the conditions of their labor, profit sharing, and investment will enable our team to sustain dignified career in farming, and ensure that Seremos can feed our communities for years to come.
Meet the Team
Chris Nickell and Brenda González founded Finca Seremos in 2022. Originally a dream to pursue in 10–15 years before the COVID-19 pandemic, we accelerated plans at the end of 2021 because we felt a heightened urgency to facilitate food-based healing work in our communities.
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Brenda brings 15 years’ experience as an educator into our mission to organize community through food. As the founding Director of School Culture at Comp Sci High in the Soundview neighborhood of the South Bronx, she spent 5 years leading work to create a healthy school community focused on restorative practices and healing. Complementing Chris’ 4 years of experience farming, she brings a passion for the healing power of food, her vision for design, and her organizational and logistics skills to the Seremos team. In addition to being part of the field crew and managing wash/pack, these gifts allow her to lead the ‘business’ side of this project, building an equitable and accessible CSA experience, and a network of mutual aid with our members around nutritious, delicious produce that spreads health and power among our people.
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Founder
Chris Nickell is a farmer and community organizer. Studying vocal performance in college led them to the academic study of music, and after spending several years with independent musicians in Beirut, Lebanon, they completed a doctorate in ethnomusicology at New York University in 2019. A background in labor, housing, and community organizing led Chris to serve for three years as Deputy Chief of Staff for State Senator Robert Jackson. Since 2022, Chris has studied agriculture on farms throughout the Hudson Valley, organized around soil health and farmer and farmworker housing in the region, and deepened their connection to food justice serving on the steering committee of the Washington Heights & Inwood Food Council.