About Blackbird
After a decade of working as a small farmer, Blackbird co-founder and Sylvanaqua Farms founder Chris Newman couldn't help but notice that regenerative agriculture seemed to be really bad to two important things:
- Making food available at a price point affordable to most people
- Getting first-generation farmers on the land and keeping them there
For all its hype about solving climate change and being a new way to feed the world, etc., regenerative agriculture seemed to be little more than a playground for rich consumers and well-off farmers.
Blackbird was conceived as an agricultural and agribusiness cooperative designed from the ground up to solve that problem, shifting the small-farming and regenerative agriculture narratives in several important ways:
- Individual Enterprise -> Collective Enterprise
- Thinking Small -> Thinking Big
- Emergent Solutions -> Intentional Solutions
- Audacious Claims -> Audacious Goals
- Farms -> Agribusiness
- Pulling Communities to Us -> Reaching Out Into Communities
After a successful pilot of the cooperative model in 2023, this year (2024) marks our first official year in operation!