Sydney Giacalone is an environmental anthropologist who studies rural US multigenerational producers transitioning from conventional to reparative forms of agriculture. Her work on “ex-conventional” farmers and ranchers focuses specifically on the often contentious social, familial, and political aspects of these efforts. She spent 2023 and 2024 conducting fieldwork across the US with 72 producers from 46 ex-conventional farms to trace their experiences self-critically questioning their past management and internalized human-nonhuman hierarchies, learning to collaborate with multispecies life to remediate degraded ecosystems, relearning histories of inherited land on white family farms, and at times creating alliances with other people and causes that disrupt norms of family, property, and American rurality itself. This research was designed in collaboration with participating farmers and is the focus of her forthcoming book. Sydney received her PhD in Anthropology from Brown University, and she is currently a Postdoctoral Research Associate and Lecturer at the University of Virginia.

Plenary Panel

Regenerating More than Soil: Multigenerational Producers Reckoning With Relational Repair in their Farms’ Histories

Multigenerational producers inherit valuable knowledge, land, and social capital within their communities. This inheritance of heritage is also often laden with complicated histories of the farm’s past not always talked about or engaged with, yet deeply interconnected to the goals of holistic management and regenerative agriculture. This session tackles this uncomfortable yet urgent complexity head on through talks by producers and engaged researchers who are working directly in their operations to reckon with their farms’ place in histories of settler colonial dispossession, enslavement, and inequitable land access. Stacie Marshall from Mountain Mama Farms in Georgia, Beth Robinette from the Lazy R Ranch in Washington, and anthropologist Sydney Giacalone from the University of Virginia will lead this session to ask: how does regenerative agriculture call producers to take on both ecological and social repair upon these storied lands?

Stacie Marshall is a seventh-generation farmer in Dirt Town Valley and steward of Mama Mountain Farms, where she practices regenerative agriculture and works to strengthen food sovereignty in Southern Appalachia. Alongside her father, brother, husband, and three daughters, she raises a small flock of Katahdin sheep and 80 head of grass-fed cattle, offering locally raised meat shares to her community with regenerative practices

Passionate about connecting people through food, land, and conversation, Stacie hosts farm-to-table dinners and community gatherings focused on racial restoration and equity. She is also the co-founder of Hester’s Heritage Foundation which supports black farmers and equal justice initiatives. She serves as board president of the Davies Homeless Shelter, supporting the unsheltered community with compassion and advocacy through a farm food program.

Her land-based work reconciling family and regional land histories through reparative and restorative practices has been featured by The New York Times and BBC.

Whether tending livestock or crafting herbal remedies from the land, Stacie’s work is rooted in restoring soil, community, and connection.

Plenary Panel

Regenerating More than Soil: Multigenerational Producers Reckoning With Relational Repair in their Farms’ Histories

Multigenerational producers inherit valuable knowledge, land, and social capital within their communities. This inheritance of heritage is also often laden with complicated histories of the farm’s past not always talked about or engaged with, yet deeply interconnected to the goals of holistic management and regenerative agriculture. This session tackles this uncomfortable yet urgent complexity head on through talks by producers and engaged researchers who are working directly in their operations to reckon with their farms’ place in histories of settler colonial dispossession, enslavement, and inequitable land access. Stacie Marshall from Mountain Mama Farms in Georgia, Beth Robinette from the Lazy R Ranch in Washington, and anthropologist Sydney Giacalone from the University of Virginia will lead this session to ask: how does regenerative agriculture call producers to take on both ecological and social repair upon these storied lands?

Hannah Breckbill became a farmer out of a desire to be tangibly useful to humanity. She’s a community organizer by nature and loves to channel the power of relationship into right-sized action. She has worked with Humble Hands Harvest in Decorah, Iowa since 2013, raising organic no-till vegetables, grazing sheep, and planting fruit, nut, and shade trees. Through Practical Farmers of Iowa, she works as a Land Access Navigator, supporting land seekers as well as land owners looking to transition. Hannah serves on the boards of the Oneota Community Food Cooperative, the Sustainable Iowa Land Trust, the Iowa Food Hub, and the Farmers Land Investment Cooperative, and she had the privilege of being named a Rural Regenerator Fellow through Springboard for the Arts. She hosts an almost-annual Queer Farmer Convergence, plays music any chance she can get, and is grateful for the bobolinks and meadowlarks on her farm.

Plenary

Unconventional Economics of a Farm Startup (or, Queering the Family Farm)

Humble Hands Harvest is a worker-owned cooperative farm with a community-based land access story and a commitment to public experimentation in the gift economy, commoning, and other alternatives to capitalist norms. Hannah will share some of their stories as well as lessons learned along the way.