Finca Seremos: Chris Nickell and Brenda González

Finca Seremos aims to provide agro-ecologically-grown, nutrient-dense diversified vegetables, fruit, and poultry products primarily for farm share (CSA) subscribers in the Northern Manhattan and the Bronx with a wide range of incomes—including Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) recipients—who value fresh, local, and culturally-appropriate food.

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.

Finca Seremos seeks to bend our arc toward justice in three key components of farm operation: production and land stewardship, community relationships, and labor practices. Over the 2024 and 2025 seasons, we aim to scale up a no- / low-tillage, lightly mechanized, diversified vegetable and perennial cultivation on 4+ acres using a rotational system tailored to the land, along with a pastured poultry operation on 1.5 acres focused on laying hens. By going beyond requirements for organic certification under the National Organic Program, Finca Seremos aims to boost the strength and resilience of the ecosystem by increasing soil health and diversity of species at all trophic levels while providing food for ourselves and our communities.

Community relationships are the second key to the vision of Finca Seremos. Brenda’s background as an educator and Chris’ experiences as a community organizer, both in working-class communities of color, inform Finca Seremos’ approach to forming community in the Hudson Valley and supporting existing ones in New York City. We will build on relationships established with Hudson Valley farmers to provide our CSA subscribers with access to high quality, regeneratively-grown animal products as add-ons to their produce shares.

Finca Seremos aims to organize in Northern Manhattan and the Bronx through food. Complementing the many organizing models that respond to emergency and crisis, our work will slowly build the kinds of deep relationships that only food can cultivate. Concretely, this work will begin over conversations at CSA pickups, getting to know our customers and building relationships with them, 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 can leverage to help our community solve everyday problems starting at CSA pickup times.

As the farm scales up, we will create a non-profit arm with a focus on education, taking inspiration from practical and justice-oriented training programs like Farm School NYC and Soul Fire Farms. Finca Seremos will partner with local high schools where we have strong relationships—including Comp Sci High, George Washington High School, and Gregorio Luperón High School for Science and Math—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 will provide an opportunity for many students with farming in their family’s recent past to reconnect with that ancestral knowledge, and so create another much-needed pipeline for farmers of color to skill up, get on land, and feed our people.

The final piece of Finca Seremos’ vision involves creating a worker-owned cooperative. As long-term residents of a low- and middle-income housing cooperative, customers of several commercial coops, and people hailing from cultures of cooperation and mutual aid in Appalachia, Puerto Rico, and Cuba, founders Chris and Brenda understand how cooperative principles form a solid bedrock for ethical and sustainable decision-making in workplaces. During the first year of operation, Finca Seremos will solidify an initial team of 3–4 collaborators to begin building out the structure of the coop as we build out the farm itself together. Taking inspiration from Rock Steady Farm, the cooperative will thoughtfully delegate power and responsibilities to different levels of the emergent governance structure so that we can maximize both worker dignity and input, as well as financial stability. This cooperative structure is essential to the vision for Finca Seremos because it bakes sustainability into the organization at the outset by ensuring interdependence of cooperators so that no one person becomes irreplaceable when knowledge and responsibilities are shared.