Gay farming

(Audrey Richardson/Chicago Tribune)

Danie Roberson holds an eggplant flower on their farming plot at their home in Beaverville, July 7, 2025. The feeling stemmed from the food growing around them.

Roberson, who uses she and they pronouns interchangeably, was raised in Rocky Mount, North Carolina. Will you stop and help somebody change their flat tire on the side of the road?”

Even when LGBTQ farmers aren’t making a conscious effort to enact change, their presence offers alternatives to family norms.

“It’s not just a heterosexual man does this, a woman does this, children do that,” said Jess Frankovich, 30.

One day, they decided to bake a pecan pie but discovered they could not afford a small bag of the shelled nuts.

Back in Rocky Mount, Roberson had been able to locate the food she needed, whether from an aunt’s pecan tree or a cousin’s grapevine.

“I don’t think I really thought about it in that perspective until something that was always abundant for me, I couldn’t afford,” Roberson said.

Chef Fresh Roberson gathers herbs at the Fresher Together urban farm in South Chicago on Oct.

30, 2022. Excluded from that vision — or perhaps myth — is a space for them.

So they are creating one.

The presence of LGBTQ people in agriculture challenges stereotypes of who can, or should be, interested in farming. Each week of the growing season, the team creates harvest bags filled with produce, herbs and value-added products from the urban farm and other businesses owned by people of color.

The business has grown and is relocating to a permanent home in Beaverville, Illinois, near a historically Black farming town.

Bennet Goldstein

Not all LGBTQ farmers link their identities to farming.

Liz Graznak, an organic vegetable grower who lives outside of Columbia, Missouri, believed that she had to stay guarded when she moved to her rural community in 2008.

“I didn’t want people to know that I was a lesbian,” said Graznak, 46.

“The two of us. So I decided to apprentice at a farm.

What attracted you to farming?

I love working the land, taking care of the land, that relationship with the earth.

The two women here.”

This story was first published in Wisconsin Watch, a nonprofit, nonpartisan investigative reporting organization that focuses on government integrity and quality of life issues in Wisconsin. She did not attempt to secure an FSA loan when she started farming because she lacked confidence the agency would take her efforts seriously.

Shannon and Eve work to feed people, not livestock or cars.
Shannon wears her politics on her coveralls. I love being outside, I love feeding people, growing seed, being part of the life cycle.
Did anyone in your family farm?
Not really. And he loves to work in the garden
What has changed since you began farming?
Life as a gay in the countryside has become more and more “normal.” The acceptance in our society is growing and that is very positive… but it is still worth being engaged with the gay rights movement for equal rights.

Kareno Hawbolt
Sweet Digz farm’
Richmond, British Columbia, Canada
How did you get into farming?
I was traveling across the province, teaching in high schools.

Last year Kimi and I found land, and started our farm, Sweet Digz Farm.
You also started the Rainbow chard collective. Wedding into ownership was not necessarily an option across the country until 2015 when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that all states must issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples and recognize same-sex unions performed in other states.

The business, located in Chicago’s South Shore neighborhood, exists to improve community access to fresh food. It conducted a pilot study in late 2021 to gauge whether their inclusion would affect response rates.
Responses decreased significantly when the questions were inserted, despite the survey’s confidentiality.

I was born into farming and knew from the start that I wanted to be a farmer. Is it work bringing this up?’” Schneider said.
“For me, usually not — unless I’m in the company of people that are comfortable,” they said. “It’s the most productive thing I do.”
Asked about the future of queer farming, Schneider was similarly upbeat.
“In 10 years, if I had to guess, they’ll probably be a lot more queer folks who are farming and living sustainably, even if they don’t own their own farm,” they said.

Outside, dusty brown fields — freshly combined during the autumn harvest — stretched across the gentle hills surrounding New Vienna, Iowa.

John Hoefler and his husband, Andy Ferguson, milk cows at Hoefler Dairy in New Vienna, Iowa, on Oct. 23, 2022. That would make them ineligible for the types of USDA loans that help the majority of farmers.

“There’s a value of the traditional family that overlooks other ways to be a community, to be in a relationship, that operates outside of blood and marriage ties,” said Michaela Hoffelmeyer.

Outside, Shannon and Eve tend to arugula, broccoli, peas and radishes using intensive planting and heavy rotation techniques — never pesticides or synthetic fertilizer.
Their operation is an exception to the sprawling corn and bean fields that dominate the landscape. Still, the large numbers are in keeping with anecdotal reports from progressive places such as Chicago and Austin, Texas.
“It feels like there are so many more queer farmers,” said Chicago-area farmer Fresh Roberson, using the younger generations’ preferred term for LGBTQ.
Roberson, who is queer and owns Fresher Together, a collaborative food and farming project in Beaverville, said it’s hard to know if there has been an actual numerical increase, or if queer farmers are just more visible, due to factors such as the rise of the internet.
Either way, Roberson, 42, has noticed a big uptick, even in just the past seven years.
Fresh and Danie Roberson, owners of Fresher Together, on their farming plot at their home in Beaverville, Illinois, July 7, 2025.

Roberson filled milk crates and kept them to overwinter in the bottom of closets throughout her home.
Roberson moved to Chicago in 2001 to study biomedical engineering at Northwestern University.