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Leilani Mroczkowski (left) and Jihelah Greenwald (right), the founders of Kasama Farm, at their Headwaters Farm location.
In the final piece of the Place Matters: Asian American Farming in the Pacific Northwest series, Emilie Chen interviews Leilani Mroczkowski (they/them) and Jihelah Greenwald (she/they), founders of Kasama Farm. The two farmers speak about their roots in community organizing, the reasons why farming is political, and the deep and emotional connections they have instilled between land and community.
All photos were taken by Emilie Chen, unless noted.
I had begun to wrap up my interviews for this series when I got an email response from Kasama Farm. I jumped at the opportunity to speak with its two co-founders, Leilani Mroczkowski (they/them) and Jihelah Greenwald (she/they).
Kasama Farm operates on two farming plots: one in Hood River and one on Headwaters Farm in Gresham, where we held our interview on a blustery overcast day. Because of their active presence on social media and in the mutual aid scene in Portland, I had thought that Kasama Farm was long established. I was surprised then to learn that the farm has only been around since 2021, launched through a GoFundMe fundraiser.
Leilani and Jihelah met in 2018, while volunteering in a Filipino resources group in Boston. The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted their original plan to go to the Philippines to help out on Leilani’s mother’s farm. But thanks to their shared backgrounds in community organizing, they were able to quickly pivot and tap into the community of farmers of color in Portland. Inspired by other mission-focused farms, Kasama Farm was born as an effort that could grow food acknowledging both farmers’ Filipino and eastern European heritages.
Jihelah and Leilani chat inside a greenhouse.
“What was the spark that started your interest in farming?” I asked.
“For me, it was a mix between growing up in Hood River, which is an agricultural community, being surrounded by farmers and farmworkers… and eating fresh foods every season,” explained Jihelah. “When I graduated [college] and worked on a farm, spending most of my hours out in the field, it was really magical… That feels so special, as a person who’s not Native here, to get to grow my relationship with this place where I was born, to cultivate the foods that are my ancestral crops, and to keep that part of my identity alive.”
Jihelah doesn’t know if anyone in the preceding generations of her family were farmers, but she shared, “I do know that my [maternal] great-grandparents had home-sized gardens. But there was a lot of displacement in the Philippines, so they were never able to stay on the land.”
Jihelah Greenwald gathers a small bouquet of cover crops.
Cover crops, including pea tendrils and flowered kale.
Leilani similarly grew up helping their mother with her “really big veggie garden.” They elaborated, “I actually hated it in high school… you just want to hang out with your friends and sleep. I just didn’t realize how important it was until I went to college and then didn’t have access to green space.”
Leilani’s childhood was split between suburban Chicago, where their family was one of many interracial white and Filipino families, and a rural Indiana town that monocropped corn and soy. Leilani’s father worked in a steel forge, while their mother operated a cleaning business. Their maternal family still owns that farm in the Philippines—the one that Jihelah and Leilani had intended to visit in 2020. As well, Leilani’s paternal family had roots in farming: in Poland, their great-grandparents operated a wheat farm until it was confiscated by the Nazi German regime.
Leilani’s mother grew up in the Eastern Visayas of the Philippines and immigrated to the US in her 20s, after marrying Leilani’s father who served in the US Navy. Leilani contextualized some of the economic pressures driving immigration from the Philippines to the US: “I feel like part of the reason why [my mom] immigrated here was to save the land there. Because the Philippines is a relatively new nation, the government came to where her family had been tending lands for many generations, and were like ‘Do you have a deed to this property? You don’t own it if you don’t have a piece of paper that says you own it.'”
Jihelah added, “From the conversations that we’ve had with people in the Philippines… I feel like people leave so that the rest of the family doesn’t have to leave. If there’s no one outside, if there are no jobs, there’s no way to sustain your … livelihood in your home.
Kasama Farm specializes in growing crops that are culturally important to both Leilani and Jihelah’s Filipino and eastern European roots. They also practice dry farming and low-till methods.
Leilani looks through their seed collection, which is stored in a cream crackers tin chosen out of convenience.
I deeply appreciate the political lens that Jihelah and Leilani bring to their farming. They reflected not only on the displacement and lack of land access experienced in the Philippines, but by non-white farmers in the US as well: “The amount of [folks who are Black, Indigenous, and people of color] who have access to land is already so much smaller compared to white folks who might have intergenerational wealth,” said Jihelah. “Our food is produced by Brown and Black people who are invisibilized within our society… because they’re not farm owners.”
For farmers like Leilani and Jihelah, the start-up cost of farming is a huge barrier. “[We] are coming from families that can’t give us a $10,000 loan. I’m not coming from a family who has access to land,” Leilani said. Other than Leilani and Jihelah, Kasama Farm is a small operation, with just one additional employee.
The lack of land ownership results in “so much impermanence.” Leilani noted that farmers often need to familiarize themselves with their land for at least a year, to learn the unique challenges and logistics that come with growing food in a new place. “But people don’t often have a year’s worth of income or safety net to withstand making very few sales because they were forced to move.'”
Cultural isolation and racism creates further barriers for Black and Brown farmers. “So much of farming is being able to connect to your neighbors… If you’re just starting and you haven’t had years and years and generations of experience, you need to talk to your neighbors,” Leilani said. But from their experiences—and others they know—white neighbors can sometimes create an unwelcoming atmosphere by filing noise complaints or displaying political signs that imply racial intolerance.
Leilani strolls down a row of overwintered kale.
In the Portland Metropolitan Area, Black and Brown farmers have built a community of solidarity. “Organizations like Black Food Sovereignty Coalition are so important,” Leilani emphasized. “Because [it’s] an institution that is able to get pretty good [crowd sourced] money, and they’re able to get equipment and create lending libraries or educational opportunities at low or no cost to people, and in a safe environment.”
The mission of Black Food Sovereignty Coalition is “to ignite Black and Brown communities to participate as owners and movement leaders within food systems, placemaking, and economic development.” Among its programs, the Coalition also runs Come Thru Market, a Black- and Indigenous-centered farmers market that provides a Farmer Training Program from which Jihelah and Leilani graduated in 2021.
“I love being outside. I love growing food. But it wasn’t in a vacuum,” Jihelah explained. “I really wanted it to be for the community and to have people come and see our crops in the field, to deepen their relationships with this land. I feel like being a person in the diaspora is really confusing. We have to navigate the fact that we don’t belong here… when you get to tend to land, you learn that we do have belonging here.”
Kasama Farm’s mid-August 2024 CSA pick-up offered beets, carrots, saluyot, lettuce, eggplant, alugbati, cucumber, lemongrass, komatsuna, Thai basil, hot peppers, bell peppers, shishito peppers, summer squash, and a variety of tomatoes. Photo courtesy of Kasama Farm.
The author loves eating celtuce (lettuce stem) but had never tried cooking it herself until it was offered in Kasama Farm’s mid-June CSA pick-up. It’s pictured here diced and stir-fried with spring peas, fried peanuts, and garlic and topped with chili oil.
Kasama Farm began with a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) model, of which I joined as a member in 2024. CSAs typically involve customer members paying the farm upfront for all the vegetables they would receive through the growing season. Then, as harvests begin, members can pick up pre-sorted seasonal produce on a weekly or biweekly basis.
I have never experienced a CSA quite like Kasama Farm’s. Not only do they specialize in Asian crops, but they also offer a “buffet”-style set-up with baskets of each vegetable lined up inside the Filipino Bayanihan Center. Members pick up an allotted portion of each vegetable and can leave any items they do not want, to be donated to the Center.
In my past CSA experiences, the weekly subscriptions would westernize my diet, as I scrambled to use up the kale, red radishes, and ambiguously labeled “Asian greens” before the vegetables spoiled. But Kasama Farm’s offerings—which included Thai basil, Asian eggplant varieties, gailan, cilantro, huge napa cabbages, to name a few of my favorites—were far easier to consume in my Taiwanese-Japanese household. I experienced a cultural visibility that I had never previously known as a CSA consumer.
In early 2025, Jihelah and Leilani announced in an email to their membership: “We have decided not to do a 2025 CSA share this season. It was a hard decision to make, because we really love growing food for y’all and seeing your faces every week. …Ultimately our decision is grounded in the desire for us to have a better balance between the farm and our relationships with our families, our friends, with one another and with our individual selves.”
In addition to staffing changes and wanting to put roots down for family planning, “We are moving away from ‘contracts’ with y’all,” they wrote. Instead, they will be selling produce with sliding scale pricing, at the Filipino Bayanihan Center on Wednesdays from 4-7pm, from May through November. They will also be distributing produce to the Filipino Bayanihan Center’s Kalusugan Pantry and Wellness Clinics, Milk Crate Kitchen, and Ikoi No Kai. Additionally, with Native American Rehabilitation Association of the Northwest, Native American Youth and Family Center, and the Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde as distribution centers, Kasama Farm is partnering with Duane Lane of 1855 Plants to distribute produce to Native families in Oregon.
This new chapter for Kasama Farm is rooted in their original vision for the farm. It echoes what they shared during our interview: “It’s important that the farm—and food in general—can act as a gathering place,” Jihelah said. “We can start to be in community together. And as those relationships get stronger, we can build the connection and power to make changes.”
“Being with land, opens up people to be vulnerable to process their pain,” Leilani observed. “Many times people would come out [during volunteer days] and be like, ‘This is the first time that I’ve been with other Asian people on a farm’, or ‘This is the first time that I’ve talked about how much I miss my home.’ Those stories are really critical, especially as Southeast Asians—there is this push by the dominant narrative for us to be a model minority. And I feel like it’s important for Filipinos to understand that US colonization and imperialism are why we are here; people are forced to migrate here. The more that we can talk about that, the more we can talk about how hard it was for many of our families. We can begin to do that healing, and we can also start to demand more out of this government, so that more people don’t have to be forced to migrate and have generations of trauma.”
“I feel like I really do this for my mom,” Leilani took a deep breath, holding back tears. “This is my love letter to her.”
Follow Kasama Farm on Instagram and visit their website to learn more about where to buy from them in the 2025 season.
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