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!