The Collaborative Farming Podcast · No-Till Market Garden Podcast

Looking to Ecology to Build a Cooperative Farm Future with Andrew Adamski of Full Circle Community Farm

·43 min·3 clips

Andrew says the co-op lets Full Circle Farm grow what it likes and let other farms grow potatoes.

Andrew comes on to talk about Full Circle Community Farm. He came back to his family farm in 2017 after college with his wife Heather, and the conversation starts with how they wanted to keep the farm going without locking it into its old shape. That point comes up more than once. They walk through a simplified, flexible business structure that lets the farm change as new people join and as the work on the ground changes. Ecology shows up here too. Andrew uses what he learned about ecology to think about ownership and membership as something living, not something you write once and never touch again. He does not gloss over the risk. The farm is still at a stage where bringing people into the business has to be done carefully, because they do not want to hand someone ownership before the farm itself has proved it can stay standing. Heather brings in the co-op side. She runs the Slow Farmers Co-op, a farmer marketing cooperative made up of eight small farms that offers a free choice direct-to-consumer CSA. That did not happen overnight. The episode walks through how the co-op grew over time and how COVID helped it take off. Keystone Farms is the other useful example. The idea there is plain enough: use a larger production base to sell more produce and make room for beginning and specialty farmers instead of crowding them out. The legal part stays messy. Andrew keeps circling back to the tension between giving people a real sense of ownership and not dumping taxes or bankruptcy risk on them before the farm is ready. That honesty helps. The episode works because it admits the structure is still being worked out instead of pretending there is a polished final answer sitting on the table. The 2024 award fits. The farm's Marvel Seed Farmer of the Year Award makes sense here, because the conversation sounds like people actually doing the work and figuring out how to make cooperation real one step at a time.

As heard by us

A practical farm conversation about cooperative ownership, ecology, and the work of building a new structure without rushing it.

Andrew's story is about the slow, practical work of turning a family farm into a cooperative without pretending the structure is settled. He returned to Full Circle Community Farm in Wisconsin in 2017 with his now wife Heather, and the episode sticks to the mechanics: a simpler…

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You want to hear how a generations-old family farm evolves into a cooperative without losing its footing.

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