A community can fill the role of a business owner as well as any individual entrepreneur and arguably better.

Community ownership can apply to any business in any sector: housing, agriculture, banking, tech, you name it (for help on how to start a business with your neighbors, read this article).

With that in mind, what would large-scale community-ownership, control, and cooperation between farmers look like? First, let’s review the barriers farmers face in transitioning to sustainable growing methods.

Photo by Anna Tukhfatullina Food Photographer/Stylist

Adopting sustainable farming practices can require new equipment and technologies, which come with a learning curve. Farmers may need access to information, training, and educational resources.

Only 5 percent of the US population shops organic, so market demand is perhaps the biggest barrier to the widespread adoption of sustainable farming practices.

Each of the barriers above are financial (there are others). At FareMarket, however, we envision and aim to foster such a cooperative future.

During the Syrian Civil War in 2012, Kurdish Rojava in Northern Syria began promoting collective decision-making and cooperative structures.

Under these new institutions, traditional farmers who’d worked alone or in small family units instead began to collaborate with other farmers.

These new parterships gave them an opportunity to collaborate by pooling resources, expertise, and knowledge. This allowed Kurdish farmers to efficiently share the costs (and benefits) of transitioning to organic methods.

Another benefit of these community-owned farming models is that farmers can share equipment, tools, and infrastructure to reduce their individual financial burdens.

By investing in these resources as a collective, farmers have access to the right equipment, irrigation systems, and storage facilities needed for organic farming.

These same principles apply to knowledge exchange, training and education, access to markets, and influencing legislation to support these activities.

Obviously, quite a lot happened in Rojava before organic farming was widely adopted. But the key to success was in collective decision-making at the community level and the development of cooperatives.

As individuals, we cannot help farmers transition to organic practices. As communities, we stand a fighting chance. The clock is ticking, and we must begin to organize with our neighbors now.

Face-to-face conversations are the best way to do this. Invite someone to have a conversation with you about organic food and local farms, concerns about the climate, and what you can do to make an impact TOGETHER.

Keep doing that until you've got a community working together, then help other communities join you. Help them organize to make decisions in their communities so that they can support this transition too.

That's a nonviolent revolution, friends. And, of course, I'm at the Bernice Garden Farmers' Market on Sundays from 10am-2pm, if you'd like to talk more with me about this!

Kurdish Rojava’s cooperative farms are rooted in the principles of Social Ecology, a philosophy developed by Murray Bookchin (an American political philosopher from Vermont).

Social Ecology stresses the importance of decentralized and ecological communities in combatting climate change. Bookchin's ideas have inspired social and ecological movements around the world.

Rojava’s agricultural cooperatives are designed to promote self-sufficiency, sustainability, and democratic decision-making, while also providing opportunities for farmers to learn about and implement organic farming practices.

Rojava's communal agricultural cooperatives were also inspired by Abdullah Ocalan, the founder of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK). Ocalan, who is currently imprisoned in Turkey, wrote extensively about the importance of ecological sustainability and democratic decision-making in building a just and equitable society.

His ideas have helped shape the vision of Rojava as an eco-socialist society that prioritizes the needs of people and the environment over profit and exploitation.

By taking advantage of the community-owned farming models we see in Rojava, traditional farms can gain access to the resources and knowledge needed to transition to organic growing practices. These models prioritize collective ownership of land and resources, democratic decision-making, and ecological sustainability, which can help support small-scale farmers in building resilient and sustainable food systems.

These models can also help address the systemic challenges farmers face when transitioning to organic, such as lack of access to markets and the financial risks associated with shifting away from chemical-intensive farming practices.

Community-owned farming models like Rojava’s offer promising alternatives to the largely environmentally destructive and socially unjust industrial agriculture model.

By building collective ownership and democratic decision-making into their farming practices, traditional farmers can transition to organic growing practices that are more sustainable, resilient, and equitable.

The influence of Murray Bookchin's philosophy of social ecology and Abdullah Ocalan's eco-socialist vision can provide a useful framework for implementing these models in other contexts.