GLR January-February 2026

early summer, hard-necked varieties will try to form a flower by shooting a tough stem outward. If you remove this stem, the plant will instead direct more energy to producing a larger bulb. If you wait a couple of weeks, however, this stem will spiral and form a funky-looking curlicue called a garlic scape. You can harvest that and get the same, larger big bulb—in addition to a woody, flavorful, early-season allium. In our capitalist food system, garlic scapes are an expensive specialty crop. If you have a row of garlic, however, you’ll have more scapes than you know what to do with. Gift-giving and generosity were central to much of what we learned about queer farmers. Social identities like race, class, gender, (dis)ability, and sexuality shape the ways that farmers are able to engage in agricultural networks, resources, and communities. Marginalized identities, queer and otherwise, are under-resourced: They struggle to get access to land, to find suitable markets, and to become enmeshed in the necessary peer networks of farmer education and resource-sharing. And yet, like garlic scapes, they’re finding funky ways to tap into abundance and generosity. For example, many are connected to the Queer Farmer Net work. This group has an active listserv, a social media pres ence for resource sharing, and a growing online list of queer growers. They also host bioregional and racial affinity conver gences for queer farmer community-building and skill-sharing. Queer farmers share opportunities and connections, even if the government or nonprofits overlook our needs. Queer growers’ mutuality is also displayed in the ways that they often work in economies that subvert dominant ones. For example, an artist on our editorial team wanted to try an experimental dyeing method using elderberries for their work with Playing in the Dirt . Within a week, we’d bartered for them from another queer farmer friend. Queer farmers often share knowledge freely, borrow equip ment, crash on each other’s couches, and barter for goods. We learned about a farmer who takes photographs in exchange for haircuts, and another who will bring herbs in exchange for dance lessons. As Maya, a farmer from Wisconsin, said in her interview with Tig: “We need to come up with some alternative of how we’re going to meet our own needs outside of extrac tive colonial capitalist processes. We can be ‘anti’ all we want, but if there’s no alternative, then we’re going to be limited in what we can actually accomplish.” Queer farmers are coming up with alternatives. Like gar

lic scapes, they may be funky, or curlicue, or stinky. Just in the production of the book itself, we’ve been able to distribute dozens of copies for free and raise thousands of dollars for mutual aid by offering the book on a sliding scale. Access begets abundance. E COLOGIES AND D IVERSITY “T HERE ARE ALL OF THESE PLANTS AND ANIMALS that grow the soil by being soft and quiet and only popping up for two months, like the spring ephemerals—they just pop up for two months and then they go back down,” one farmer said. “And there’s all these different ways to be in the community in these ecosystems, and that has been really grounding and im portant for me to continually remind myself. It actually wouldn’t be useful if we were all the forty-year-old dude farmer, lugging stuff around and trying to muscle through it. It’s actually really important that there are way more versions of us out there, checking each other and meeting each other’s needs.” Farmers know we need biodiversity. Plant too many of one species in one place, and all season you’ll be fighting pests that love that. Many plants need cross-pollination, and promis cuous interplanting can address this. Similarly, we need a di versity of methods to take down heteronormativity, the patriarchy, and other oppressive systems. Tig’s doctoral re search is finding that queer farmers’ political engagements often do not look like front-line protests or get out the vote campaigns. Instead, queer farmers are finding integral niches within the expansive and expressive queer farming movement that can draw upon their unique skill sets. A farmer, for ex ample, may be gifted at facilitating hard conversations or have a practice of cooking for a disabled friend. And, yes, some might even be muscular and capable of “lugging stuff around” for needed infrastructure projects. “I feel like I have so much to learn from the other life around me,” Cedar, a queer farmer working in Illinois, says as they weed a row of beets while chatting with Tig. “Ecosystems hold all kinds of different life, and the ways that they function just hold so much knowledge that isn’t always completely rec ognized, and even when it is, there’s so much more that we don’t even know about how things intersect.” A diverse mediascape is important, too. And when it comes to place-based information, like plant care or agrarian season ality, independent publishers are doubly important. In this way, the project takes inspiration from Lobelia Commons, based out of New Orleans, and its annual Earthbound Farmer’s Almanac or Mergoat Magazine ’s quarterly on environmental and posthu man politics for Appalachia. We recognized a need for think ing and theorizing about what is happening in queer, agrarian flyover country. Reading, writing, art-making, fermenting, cooking, shar ing, and celebrating are all important pieces of the dynamic world that queer farmers are building. When we know our niches, our communities, our resources, and our needs, we’re better able to show up in solidarity for others. We need our strong, daring oaks as much as we need the understory trilli ums that arrive each spring. We need our funky garlic scapes and our flamboyant sunflowers, and, of course, our elderberry aunties.

TheG & LR

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