Half of America's farmers are set to retire by 2035. There's no plan to replace them.

Most of the next generation set to inherit those farms simply wants to cash out. Unless something is done, corporations, billionaires, and foreign interests will continue acquiring the land of retirees, eroding the number and health of our farms, food, farmworkers, and the natural environment.

We need a large influx of new, first-generation farmers to stem the tide. For decades, we've pinned our hopes on the small-farming movement to provide that influx of new farmers to care for the land and feed our people.

Unfortunately that movement has failed to do so. Intense labor requirements and a poor business model prevent nearly all of these new farmers from lasting a single decade, much less a single or multiple generations.

Blackbird is dedicated to solving this "First Generation Farmer Problem." Our work centers on the idea that the production, processing and distribution of food should be under the integrated control of our communities. It should not be under the control of an adversarial relationship between family farmers and shareholder agribusiness that leaves corporations rich, farmers starved for cash and incentivized to abuse their own land, their heirs looking for a way out, and 2,300,000,000+ people living with food insecurity.

For the time being, we're tiny. Just four optimistic guys who've thrown every dime we have into our faith that we can solve this problem and make farming work for a generation that no one made a plan for. We will win, or ruin ourselves trying.

Please bear with us and our high-ish prices while we're still small. We plan to get (responsibly) big in a way that gets the price of good food in range of most peoples' budgets over the next few years. But our business model that puts profits at the service of people, instead of the other way around, doesn't attract a lot of speculative investment.

Our customers and our communities are our biggest investors, and where we place our hopes. We hope you'll join us one way or another.