Story and illustration by Nhatt Nichols
“What I want to do is create a farm or a grocery store that will exist in capitalism, and also at the end of capitalism,” Jenson, (they/them) told me over a long phone conversation.
Jensen founded SisterLand Farms along with their five siblings, and have since helped start the Port Angeles, Washington chapter of Food Not Bombs, joined the public school’s equity team, developed the Clallam Growers’ Collective, joined the Port Angeles farmers’ market BOD, stirred things up on the Clallam County Solid Waste Advisory Committee and implemented their first compost pick-up program.
SisterLand Farms’ two-word mission statement, Grow Radically, weaves its way into everything they do, from running a community compost initiative to starting a grocery store and holding adult summer camp. They don’t just grow radically, they grow joyfully and with a great deal of care for their community.
From the outside, this process seems organic and effortless, but Jenson was quick to correct this idea.
“There are a lot of barriers in place and a lot of hurdles that you have to cross if you are determined to challenge existing systems. If you do have revolutionary ideas, the system serves itself by impeding your movement,” they said.
Still, not all of Jenson’s work is fighting the system. One of their most successful projects is the epitome of joyful radical action: Summer Camp.
“It started off as a social experiment,” Jenson said. They brought together a bunch of adults from all walks of life out to the farm and encouraged them to act like children and, as Jenson puts it, “place themselves into scenarios where they have permission to fail, to fall, to scrape their knees, to be embarrassed, to be vulnerable.”
Summer Camp showed participants that being in a space of vulnerability can help strengthen relationships. “It is absolutely radical. It is also absolutely gleeful,” Jenson said. “The potential for deepening relationships is unmatched. There’s usually crying. There’s always laughing. Somebody is putting Band-Aids on a bloody elbow. It’s adorable. It works.”
Though Summer Camp is only once a year, Jenson has found that some of the most wonderful things they’ve achieved have been successful because they’ve learned to play and not be too in control of the outcome. Instead, they’ve learned to trust the community to care for itself.
“I can’t oversee the efficacy of any of these social or agricultural experiments to completion,” Jenson said, but what they can do is set the proverbial table, and see what ways the community brings everything together.
“Making myself redundant in the community is a huge goal that I have,” Jenson said. This is an idea that resonates heavily with a lot of the resilient people I speak with, the desire for your work to continue without being dependent on one person, but on a community that values and shapes what it becomes.
They’ve done this with Summer Camp, with a Growers Collective that helps organize local farms, and now, with a grocery store that helps serve as a third-place for community and as a way to combat a rural food desert.
The grocery store, called Pine and Eight, is in the rural city of Port Angeles not far from the farm. It was born out of the idea that caring for workers and community through all types of situations required multiple income streams that weren’t all dependent on physically fit bodies.
When one of the farm workers was going to need to take time away from agricultural work for top surgery, Jenson and the rest of the crew came together to find a solution.
“We did not have enough work available to pay this person during the stretch of time where they would need to be focused on caring for their body,” Jenson said, “and that was such a disappointment to me, because I thought I’d built this wonderful, accepting, resilient workplace.”
And so Pine and Eight was born. All of their products come from within Washington State, and they work hard to make it a force for resilience and community growth.
“I never thought that I was going to go into the grocery business. But now we have not only a workplace for farmers when they can no longer do the work of farming. We’ve created this kind of beautiful little social center on 8th street and we have all of these free events,” Jenson said.
Of course, it’s always nerve wracking to bring something new into the world, and Jenson is careful not to rest on simply appearing to do the right thing.
“There are things that appear to be resilient, and then there are things that are actually resilient,” Jenson said, “I feel like many of us living through late stage capitalism put on a good show, but feel the economic instability.”
Jenson’s work champions sitting with that instability, and coming into resilience through having hope, being vulnerable and trusting community connections, and also remembering to take time out for radical play with your friends.
