Chris Newman is the founder of Sylvanaqua Farms, a company that grows pastured meats and eggs in Virginia. He also started Skywoman, a community-based consulting organization that helps people organize their food sovereignty. Newman is passionate about the intersection of history, politics, food, and race and does a lot of writing, speaking, and podcasting on these topics as has faced challenges as a minority in the independent farming space, but is using his platform to bring about change.
Who are you? And what do you do?
I’m Chris Newman. I’m the founder of Sylvanaqua Farms, which grows pastured meats and eggs and operates out of the northern neck of Virginia. I also founded Skywoman, which is a targeted, community-based consulting organization that helps people organize their food sovereignty. That’s kind of the long and the short of who I am.
In between all that I do a lot of writing, a lot of speaking, and sometimes do sporadic podcasts that usually involve the intersection of history, politics, food, and sometimes race. Everything’s connected. Everything is everything. I guess that’s who I am in a nutshell.
There you go. How did you get into farming?
I got into farming, kind of by accident. I had a really big health scare when I was around 29. At the time, I was a tech consultant in DC. I loved the people I worked with but did not love the work. It was super stressful. People would sleep at the office. There were no work-life boundaries whatsoever. And in my case, that stress manifested in cancer-like symptoms. Turns out I don’t handle that kind of stress well. I think that if you’re going to be stressed out, it should be for something. And in this case, the stress wasn’t for anything except a paycheck. So I quit.
I decided a while ago that I wanted to be involved with agriculture because I’ve been working with my tribe for quite some time, introducing people to the indigenous foodways from the people in the Chesapeake. Initially, my wife and I wanted to start with a bison farm because we wanted to focus on indigenous foodways, specifically indigenous meats. But I got scared straight out of that when I visited a bison farm and saw a full-grown 1200-pound bison cow leap over a five-foot fence from a standstill. And I was like, nah.
I’ve never seen something that big jump over something that high for no reason at all. It wasn’t spooked or scared, it was just like, I don’t want to be on this side of the fence anymore, off I go. So, we decided to go with something smaller that can’t kill you. [laughs]
We started with poultry and were influenced to go in that direction by Joel Salatin, which is ironic since I’ve had famous issues with him ever since. But back then, 10 years ago, when we were looking to get into this lifestyle, he was the only guy that you saw out in the public. You didn’t have the wider diversity of voices in this space that you do now. I took what I could, and we jumped in. That’s how we got started. And then it was a path from there.
Chris Newman’s family, photo courtesy of Sylvanaqua Farms
What roadblocks have you faced as a minority in the independent farming space?
I’m what I like to call an extremely privileged minority. I have people who can help me get my blackness and indigenousness out of the way when that matters. For example, if I’m going to a space of land to get a new lease, I send my wife, who is basically the whitest woman in the world. She’s like my avatar– and I’ll send her the first couple of times. You don’t know I’m black until it’s too late.
That’s one way I deal with it. I probably would have encountered more roadblocks if I didn’t deliberately use my network of various helpful white folks to help me get away from that sort of thing. They almost provide a shield from it.
I don’t know if I’d describe this as a roadblock, maybe it’s more so just a pain in the ass– but there are a lot of people that like to latch on to indigenous people like they almost have a brown savior complex. They think we should be able to have the answers to everything. And if you don’t have those answers or those answers turn out to be complicated, especially around fairness in employment or certain management techniques on the land, people will act confused or scared or like they don’t know where else to turn.
They look at native people, not as people but as mystics. And I wrote about this fetishization of native people on our Patreon somewhat recently, and how dangerous it is for indigenous people and black people. When white folks look to us for magical solutions and silver bullets to problems, and when those solutions are not forthcoming, or if they disappoint in any way, the reaction to us can be quite violent.
Less dangerously, it’s just hilarious how many people assume that if you’re a farmer or you’re in the agricultural space, especially if you’re operating a business, and not putting it out there that you’re a racial equity organization, they’ll assume you’re white. If you looked at my Instagram today, there’s not a lot that would readily tell you that we are an indigenous and black-run farm. We don’t talk about equity or racial justice in our marketing. We mostly talk about supply chains and circular economies, things you tend to associate with white people, even though a lot of these ideas are derived from black folks and indigenous justice movements.
I see when people expect me to be white. And when I show up, and I’m not, they make that face that they like to do. It’s a pain in the ass, but also kind of funny. Aside from me though, there are a lot of barriers for people who are black and don’t look like me. I’m light-skinned. I’m green-eyed.
If a black farmer is looking to lease a piece of land or even buy land, they’ll face unconscious racial bias. It’s the same dynamic as when someone with a black-sounding name has their resume discarded, while someone with the same resume, but a different name that sounds a little less black has theirs looked at. You know it has to be taking place when people are trying to get access to land or access to farmers market stalls. These are elements that you have to be able to get access to do this work. I’ve been fortunate enough that I mostly get around it, but a lot of people can’t.
Do you see any of this changing? Are people becoming more open to diversity in independent farming?
I can give you lots of examples of people of color and of white folks who have been very intentional in trying to make sure that people like me have access to what they need to do the work. But there are no numbers around how many people are conscious of that versus how many are defaulting to the racial bias that keeps us at an arm’s reach.
There are good people out there. Some people are recognizing what’s wrong, people who are in it for the long haul. I feel like there are two kinds of people. There are the ones that put up the black square on their Instagram feeds during the George Floyd protests, then forgot two years later, and then there are people that were too busy doing the work to even put up the black squares. A lot of people exist in that latter group. And that gives me hope, even though I don’t know exactly how many of them there are.
Photo courtesy of Sylvanaqua Farms
What are the biggest issues with being an independent farmer? Distribution? Getting costs down?
The biggest problem with being an independent farmer is being an independent farmer. I mean, I’m just going to say that being an independent farmer is stupid. It’s a bad idea. If you’re trying to be a farm-to-table or direct-to-market kind of farmer, what you’re consigning yourself to is becoming an entire supply chain of one. It’ll wear you out.
One of the amazing things that I’ve found with Skywoman, was that when we were doing these talks at the beginning that were designed to be business planning sessions or figuring out how we all can cooperate, they turned into makeshift therapy sessions, because farmers don’t get to talk to each other a lot, surprisingly enough.
You would be amazed, almost to the point where you think that it was intentional, or there was a conspiracy behind it, where people are in this game for 10 years. And then they burn out. 10 years is like a magic number. If someone starts out, and they’re in their mid to late 20s, by the time they hit the late 30s or 40, they become aware of their own mortality and realize they can’t do this forever. It’s too much. You’re trying to be a vertically integrated supply chain. And you’re also trying to be the face of it. You’re doing marketing, you’re doing production, you’re getting into farmers markets, you’re establishing relationships with wholesalers and restaurants, you’re securing your seeds, you’re securing land, you’re managing your leases, and often doing your own books.
There’s a reason that agriculture, and specifically agribusiness works the way it does. There’s a reason why there are specialists, internal markets, brokers, market makers, people who just do production, and people who specialize in the input sector. Nobody can operate these supply chains by themselves and do it in a way that makes food affordable. There’s only so much you can produce if you’re doing everything. If only 15-20% of your time is dedicated to production, your prices are gonna be sky high because of it.
A lot of people go into farming as a family thing. A lot of partners go into farming together. If you take a hard look at the landscape of farming, there are smoking ruins of marriages all over the place. That’s how hard it is, and how invasive it can be on your life. The problem is that trying to be an individual is so ingrained in our culture, even among people who think they have a “decolonized mindset” and are trying to move away from certain practices. It’s wild to watch people follow Thomas Jefferson’s footprint of independent Yeoman farmers.
So it’s a romanticized view.
It’s extremely romanticized. But it’s not because people are stupid, it’s because there are very convincing people selling this idea as something that’s possible. I’ve talked about my dissolution and falling out with Joel Salatin. He sells this go-it-alone notion that anybody can do it and tends to gloss over what he receives that he did not earn that allows that to be possible. But he’s a compelling speaker in a lot of ways, especially if you’re not a subject matter expert in how food safety or public health works. He’s an easy guy to be beguiled by.
It’s nobody’s fault, but we need to start to understand that the only way that we’re going to scale is to look at what conventional agriculture is doing and surgically remove the bad parts. So, remove the linear economics and the planned obsolescence that’s all over this industry. Deal with the access problems that we talked about in the last question. Deal with the waste issues. Make things more human-centric than market-centric, but not completely divorced from markets because we live in the real world.
The independent farming thing, it’s cute, it’s nice, and it sounds great in a way but when you really look at it, independent farming leaves you all alone in a trade that demands very intentional design and cooperation.
Photo courtesy of Sylvanaqua Farms
And is that the impetus for Skywoman? I follow the Discord and it seems like there are farmers all over the country that are plugging into this. Is it a way to communicate, a way to try to become more efficient?
It’s hard to explain exactly what Skywoman is because it’s been different things in the short year that it’s been around. What I’m trying to do with Skywoman now is very slowly help people shift their mindset away from the do-it-myself, island mentality. I’m trying to move people more toward the mindset of instead atomizing things at the farm level.
Think about your food system level; who needs to be fed? How do they need to be fed? How much food needs to be produced? How does it get stored? How does it get distributed? How does it stay safe and wholesome? How do you follow food safety regulations? Where do you get the land to do it? Think from a much more strategic and design perspective. And then figure out where you and your talents are needed. In that way, we get away from farms being the center of the universe and people begin to understand that it takes all kinds of people, not just farmers, to make an equitable, resilient, and productive double food supply chain work. You need farmers, you need food safety experts. You need people who can navigate the regulatory environment. You need politicians who are on board with your agenda. You need attorneys, accountants, bookkeepers, you need chefs, you need food service people of all kinds, you need insurance experts. You need a whole economy surrounding these efforts.
Skywoman is a way of attracting people from all these different walks of life, who are interested in getting beyond the farm-to-table movements, and the myopia around the relationship between the farmer and consumer. Right now, we are a targeted team of three people. It’s me and two other people who I’m training as analysts. We’re helping mostly farmers who want to cooperate with other farms so they can scale up, get more profitable, get more product out to people, have a more mature supply chain, actually make a living, spend time with their families, and enjoy their lives.
Right now, we’re very project-focused. We’ve got this deep well of expertise that we can tap into to help out farmers. We have a stable of about a half dozen projects that we try to work on at any given time. On different days, we might be helping a new farmer start a poultry outfit in a farm incubator setting or helping RVA community fridges with a landlord issue that they somewhat famously had a little while ago, I forget exactly where that was, I think outside of a tattoo shop.
We’re trying to get some of these projects off the ground, and document everything we do with them. Then we put that out there in the public and publicize the hell out of it. So that there’s something compelling that’s showing people a different way to do food supply chains, and to do agriculture besides the my-own-farm, linchpin of my community, do-it-myself simplified model. We build it, and hopefully, they’ll come.
In rethinking our relationship with food as consumers, is there any pushback from the corporate structure? Or is it not even on their radar that there are independent farmers on the outside looking in? I always go to Kroger and buy groceries. The knowledge that there are independent farmers bringing food to Richmond and that I can meet them at the farmers market is not something that has crossed my mind much in the past.
I’m a big fan of meeting people where they are. I’m radical, but in some ways, I’m conservative, with the definition of conservative being– adapting yourself to the way the world is. I think there are a lot of ways that the world needs to change, but a lot of the ways to make that change, and to push people in a certain direction is to meet them where they are right now. And where they are right now is 99 out of 100 of them are not going to farmers markets.
Growing up where I did, and seeing the kinds of people that go to farmers markets, I know it’s just a wildly inconvenient way to get your food. It’s usually on a weekend and outside and you really have to plan to go there. Whereas Food Lion and Kroger are open all the time. They’re open all the damn time. And they usually have everything you want. And it doesn’t cost an arm or leg, you’re not going to pay $4 for two tomatoes or whatever.
I think what farmers need to be doing is getting themselves organized to the point where there’s enough of us controlling land and producing food. We need to be surrounded with enough expertise and post-processing so that our stuff is in Kroger. Because Kroger would love to carry stuff from people like us. People tend to think that Food Lion and Kroger and Harris Teeter are evil. They’re not, they’re just in an extraordinarily low-margin business and they can’t carry our products.
There was one guy I was talking to who used to be one of the EVPs at Whole Foods, and he told us what their minimum orders of eggs were, and I’m telling you right now, Polyface couldn’t do it. Even the “big-time farms” don’t have enough product. Given that 99% of people are shopping at a supermarket, we just don’t have it. And a lot of the reason we don’t have it is that, remember that 10-year thing I was talking about, people who are working seven days a week, and hauling their ass down to the farmers market on the weekends, and waking up at 4 AM and going to bed at 9 PM– that’s not something that scales. That’s something that burns people out. And hopefully, you get the next sucker to come in and take their place but you’re not growing. You’re not growing to the point where you could stock a supermarket, sell to a school system, or fill government contracts.
When I came in around 10 years ago, the idea was that people, the general public, were the ones who needed to change their consumption habits. Everybody else needed to change to make the farmer’s life more convenient. And when you look that in the face, it’s an incredibly selfish attitude that farmers have. Why should the world bend around you? Come on, nobody’s forcing you to work yourself to death. You could try to do better. We’re just choosing not to because we want to eat up the marketing that frames us as the “poor farmer.” We want people to hear “support your farmers” and then do everything they can to make us feel good. And that’s easier than trying to cooperate with your neighbors and deal with the messiness of putting together a real food supply chain. But 10 years later, I think a lot of people have come to Jesus and realized that things had to change.
Photo courtesy of Sylvanaqua Farms
Listening to you speak, I have to ask– are you still excited about farming?
I freaking love it. People think I hate farming. It’s not that. I’m frustrated by farmers.
You came from an IT background. So, it makes sense that you’re analyzing and trying to figure out more efficient ways of doing things.
I considered that, but I think it’s less the IT/engineering thing and more of the consulting background. My job used to be to find out what was going wrong with people’s organizations and businesses and shine a light on it and say, “You gotta stop doing that.” I think that’s what I brought with me. I looked at what was being said, all the promises that were being made, and all the marketing shtick and compared it to what was on the ground– and they weren’t the same story. It was bullshit.
At that point, it would have been easy to quit and be jaded and disillusioned by it and walk away. I could have gone back to tech and worked on the startup or something that I actually cared about, but I liked farming enough to want to find a way to do this better. And that’s where I ended up.
That’s a lot to process, but I love it. I want to know, what goals do you have with Skywoman? What would Skywoman look like if everything was working?
Skywoman is going to be turning into a nonprofit. The big reason for that is that there’s a lot of federal money, especially coming out of the USDA, that is geared towards doing the technical and business training that we want to do. There are a lot of rural development programs that to be able to access, we have to be a nonprofit. So, we’re gonna bite the bullet, we’re gonna organize and do that.
But ultimately, our goal with Skywoman is to have a budget of about three-quarters of a million to $1 million with a full-time staff of analysts whose sole job is to help farms organize themselves in material terms. We will be the business expertise that you often have to hire to become successful. We want to be a deployable institutional memory in helping farms and other food businesses and social entrepreneurs get their organizations running well. We want to help them cooperate with other organizations so that they can all succeed together and there can be a multiplier effect and a network effect in what they’re doing.
With Sylvanaqua Farms, we’re also going the collective route. I’m becoming as much of a food broker as I am a grower. We’ve scaled things back to where we’re only doing poultry and we’ve got about two-thirds of our poultry coming from other partner farms– one in Palmyra, one in Charlottesville. In a way, we’re becoming a market maker. I’m looking for other farms now that have product to sell. I want to know if you have pigs to sell or if you have a bunch of stuff that needs to go. Do you have chickens that you can’t move?
When a farm wants to scale up, the scariest thing is wondering, “How will I sell all this?” I want to be the guy that you can sell it to. And then eventually, my goal is to retire Sylvanaqua Farms and instead set up a cooperatively owned Terminal Market that all these different farmers can own. I want it to be centered on a very large customer base, so people can grow without having to be scared half to death, so they don’t have to worry if their stuff has an endpoint.
This year, our goals are to solidify the cooperative agriculture model between the farms that we’re working with, grow our poultry, sell to our community, and educate our client base on this new model of independent farming. Because right now, everybody wants that personal relationship with one farmer, and people’s minds need to shift. I don’t think they need to completely abandon grocery stores in favor of farmers markets, they just need to get used to the idea that there can be a new kind of agriculture operating, where people are cooperating, that doesn’t destroy the environment or abuse immigrants– all the things that traditional agriculture tends to do.
Photo courtesy of Sylvanaqua Farms
How can people support the farm or get involved with Skywoman?
Oh, just check out our websites Sylvanaqua.com for my farm and Skywoman.community for Skywoman. That’s got all the information you need on how to support us, either financially or with your expertise. If you want to buy food from us, you can do that there. And make sure to sign up for our email list.
You’re off Instagram now, right?
We’re off everything, Instagram, Facebook, all that. We’re gone.
Why did you make that decision considering it’s such a marketing tool?
It was extremely distracting. I talk a lot about the importance of building strong ties within communities, face-to-face communication, engaging in trade, and intercultural dialogue. It’s too easy to feel like you’re doing that on social media, but not actually be doing it. So I quit. I was telling people that all these changes needed to happen, but I was just running my mouth on Instagram and Facebook all the time. Like, why don’t I go and do what I tell other people to do?
That’s probably been great for your mental space.
Yeah, you don’t realize how much time you’re spending on it until you’re off of it and what else you’d be doing in the opportunity cost that’s involved with it. I was fortunate to be in a position where I could quit since it’s not like I was just starting out. I had a huge audience, so I was able to create an email list with around six or seven thousand people on it. So don’t cry for me. I still can reach out and get in touch with people when I need to. I just don’t have to deal with all the extra that comes with it.
Follow Sylvanaqua Farms HERE
Join the conversation with Skywoman HERE
Copy edited by Audrey McGovern
