Kitchen Table Advisors (KTA) meets farmers where they are – literally. Whether it’s in the fields, on the back of a pickup truck, or at an actual kitchen table, the nonprofit’s Farm Business Advisors show up in person to provide business support and connect client farmers and ranchers with the tools, resources, and relationships they need to thrive.
Often coming from agricultural communities themselves, KTA’s Business Advisors counsel clients on everything from bookkeeping to navigating a land purchase. “It's less about giving advice and more about coming with questions,” says Pei-Yee Woo, KTA’s Co-Executive Director of Organizational Resourcing. “What is it that they want to build for themselves… and how can we help them get there?”
For more than a decade, KTA has worked with farmers and ranchers across California to help them grow thriving businesses. Small-scale farms and ranches are leaders in sustainable farming practices – often drawing on traditional and ancestral methods of cultivating healthy soil and crops. At the same time, they support local economies and build generational wealth for families.
Historically, small-scale farms have faced barriers to land, water, capital, and markets, as many programs intended to help are often designed for much larger operations. Now, small farms also face growing challenges from climate change, rising costs, and economic uncertainty. KTA helps farmers and ranchers shape their own futures through one-on-one business advising and ecosystem-building efforts that expand equitable access to land, capital, and markets. This work also strengthens farmer governance and connects them to partners and systems that uphold their leadership in the agricultural economy.
Ultimately, KTA’s work is rooted in community – a vision of a future where all farmers and ranchers can thrive. Waverley sat down with Woo to learn more about how they work with farmers. “It's being with them for the whole journey,” she explains. “It's a lifelong relationship that we have with our farmers.”
Waverley Street: What does Kitchen Table Advisors do?
Pei-Yee Woo: We work to transform the food system by working with small scale farmers and ranchers in California. We provide them with individual business advising and also work at the institutional level to build new solutions around access to land, capital, and markets.
Waverley: What's the problem you're trying to solve?
Woo: Our farmers that we work with are brilliant and talented and full of so much wisdom and know how to really heal our food system. But at the scale that they operate at, they don't have the access to power and the resources that they need to really be able to build their businesses in a way that tends to the community.
Waverley: Can you give me an example of a farmer that you work with and what the struggles are like?
Woo: We have a farmer who is based in Watsonville, California. She began as a farmworker. Her family had grown up farming in Mexico, and then she immigrated here, began her work as a farmworker, learned a lot, bringing in the practices that she'd grown up with, and also just recognizing that working in the field was only going to get her so far. She really wanted to be able to build a future for her family. She went through an agricultural training program and learned some additional skills, and was able to launch her own business. In doing so, she was able to start to build the momentum to grow her future for herself and her family. She was successful at doing that and then also needed to have land security.
Waverley: What does that mean? Land security?
Woo: It can mean a lot of different things. Oftentimes for small-scale farmers, they're farming on year-to-year leases or a handshake lease, where they can't actually have the stability to put the sustainable practices into the ground. When they're able to have a long-term lease for 10 years, 20 years, or be able to purchase land, then they can really invest in the soil. They can invest in the ecosystem around them. They can put in plants that are going to take years to grow and to mature. But they're anchors within that farmland and with that ecosystem. Having that permanence, having that stability, is security for our farmers.
For our farmer, she was able to purchase land. We started working with her probably eight years ago, and about two years into advising, we were able to support her in a really monumental purchase, to be able to purchase 11 acres of land, just 10 minutes down the road from where she lives, and she's been able to grow and steward that and grow her business and increase her market channels. She has the ability on this parcel of land to grow blackberries, strawberries. She was able to get a grant to be able to install solar so that they could run their irrigation through solar. It's a family business as well, so her children are helping. Their grandkids are running around on the farm with her – it's pretty magical to see what she's been able to accomplish.
Waverley: So Kitchen Table Advisors – is that basically what you do, you come and you meet with farmers and you give them advice over the kitchen table?
Woo: It really is. It happens at the kitchen table. It happens on the back of the pickup truck. It happens walking through the fields. And it's less about giving advice and more coming with questions. Their advisors are folks in the community. They're folks who are coming from agricultural communities as well too. They grew up in farm worker families. They grew up as farmers. They're bilingual as well, so they're able to really meet our farmers where they're at. That's really the guiding principle for us, to find out, what are the goals of our farmers? What is it that they want to build for themselves, for their families, for their farms, and how can we help them get there?
It's an ongoing project process and collaboration. It's not, ‘we're going to sit down for, you know, a coffee and here's the advice,’ and walk away. It's being with them for the whole journey. It's a lifelong relationship that we have with our farmers, because we want to be in deep community with them.
Waverley: What is the place of joy in climate action?
Woo: It's a necessity. It's an absolute necessity in that it reminds us of what we are striving for, what we are working to care for, what we're working to tend to, and it keeps us motivated. It's hard, I think, if we focus on all the things that are hard and challenging, but when we can look at those pieces of joy, at that bright spot, that's what's keeping me moving forward, because that's what I'm building towards.
Learn more about our grantee partner, Kitchen Table Advisors.
