SEEDS of SANCTUARY
A Texas farm empowers refugees to cultivate and share their native nutrition.
by LAURA MALLONEE photographs courtesy of THE REFUGEE COLLECTIVE
/ COMMUNITY SPR UT
“We’ve heard anecdotally from our employees that they and their families often experience a decline in health upon coming to the States,” says farm manager Matt Simon. “This can have many causes, [including] lack of access to grocery stores that carry fresh, culturally desired produce where they live.” Texas has resettled more than 44,000 refugees — including people from Myanmar, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Afghanistan — since 2013, more than any other state. In 2009, a group of refugees and locals in Austin formed what’s now called the Refugee Collective to help displaced foreigners earn income through farming and textile making. “Two things [they] expressed were the desire to get their hands in the dirt and grow food for themselves and to sew to make things for their families,” says co-founder and CEO Meg Erskine.
The nonprofit’s agricultural arm started small, with three community gardens. Nearly a decade later, RCF has expanded into a 20-acre property, thanks to a local landowner who leases it to the organization at a low rate. It currently farms four acres with 33 fields, each measuring 50 by 100 feet — the exact size of its mobile chicken coop. After each block is harvested, 130 Production Red chickens move in for a month, gobbling grasshoppers and pooping out fertilizer ahead of the next planting season. It’s one of the regenerative agriculture methods that RCF has embraced as part of its Resilient Farm Plan, the first of its kind in Texas. (The plan follows the Carbon Farm Planning framework developed by the Carbon Cycle Institute in California.) When fully implemented, the farm could sequester 345 metric tons of carbon dioxide per year — the equivalent of taking 77 cars off the road.
“We’ve heard anecdotally from our employees that they and their families often experience a decline in health upon coming to the States,” says farm manager Matt Simon. “This can have many causes, [including] lack of access to grocery stores that carry fresh, culturally desired produce where they live.”
ING IS HARVESTING ROSELLE hibiscus for a tea company that contracts with the Refugee Collective Farm (RCF), where she has worked since 2020. Located in Elgin, about 30 minutes northeast of downtown Austin, the organization provides jobs to refugees in the Austin area while also increasing their access to the fruits and vegetables they once enjoyed in their countries of origin. “I eat [roselle] every day,” Cing tells The Rooted Journal, explaining that she likes to fry the leaves with bamboo shoots and fish paste. It makes her happy to be cultivating this shrub in the United States, since she also grew it in her garden in Chin State in Myanmar, which she was forced to flee in 2013. “All Burmese people plant roselle,” she says. It’s late October, and Esther Cing is standing waist-deep in a patch of roselle hibiscus plants, a woven hat shielding her face from the Texas sun. All around her, magenta branches bow under the weight of their calyxes — the young leaves that surround the seeds at the base of the flower — which are small, rotund, and juicy-red. Cing moves from plant to plant with a pair of pruning shears. She snips the heads, and they fall with a subtle thud into her green pail.
ABOVE & RIGHT: ON THE TEXAS REFUGEE COLLECTIVE FARM MANY GROW VEGETABLES FROM THEIR NATIVE COUNTRIES TO GET THE NUTRITION THEY’RE USED TO.
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ISSUE 02
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