Every Saturday in the summer months, these wheels of hope pull up to the PFC International Farmers Market on Buffalo’s West Side to spread the word of food justice with fresh produce grown by people cast from their homelands and making their way in a new land through food.

Since its founding in 2019, the farm collective has helped hundreds of refugees and immigrants set down roots and find healing through access to farming tools, expertise, land, and camaraderie, emerging as a beacon of best practices in small farm startups, regional-scale food justice, and community-building for New Americans. 

At the same time, the organization – at risk today due to the recent withdrawal of a major grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture – is a case study in the persistence of systemic stumbling blocks to equitable food system development, from policy incoherence that disorients and delays action, to barriers in access to land, water, healthy soil, and capital.

The successes and struggles of PFC are of interest to scholars and students at UB's School of Architecture and Planning, including those in the Food Systems Planning and Healthy Communities Lab. The School’s faculty and students have written about how PFC has provided access to agricultural opportunities for New Americans and strengthened the regional food system despite facing regulatory barriers ("Equitable food value chains through collaborative action [in an inequitable landscape]," Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems, and Community Development, by Micaela Lipman et al). PFC has also been a site for learning for graduate students in the MS in International Development and Global Health program, some of whom have written their theses about the farm’s work. PFC and the School's strengthening relationship is a prime example of how the overlapping missions of UB and community entities foster new lines of research and critical experiential student learning.

"Providence Farm Collective exemplifies the very best of community-engaged partnerships. It is not simply a site where we study community-based approaches to addressing challenges; it is a place where community members, practitioners, students, and researchers co-produce knowledge that directly informs policy and practice," says Emmanuel Frimpong Boamah, chair and associate professor of UB’s Department of Urban and Regional Planning, a PFC board member and Food Lab faculty affiliate who brings his water governance class to PFC’s Orchard Park farm every year to study its practices.

"Some of our most important research questions have emerged not from the classroom, but from listening to the lived experiences and expertise of PFC's farmers and leaders," he continues. 

“To PFC, food dignity encompasses the full circle of a fair food economy, one that pays farmers fairly and provides healthy, fresh food access for all,” says Kristin Heltman-Weiss, executive director of PFC, adding that it’s important not to let the day-to-day challenges distract from the bigger issues at hand. “We have to throw all that aside and ask, as a region, ‘how do we come together and make the laws that we need to support all of us eating, and to make the policies that are needed to support the entire system, from land access to affordable housing to education?’” 

Providence Farm Collective can trace its roots back to 2004, when Hamadi Ali of the Somali Bantu community landed in Buffalo, escaping a life of civil war and refugee camps. Longing for a connection to home and his people’s farming tradition, he started a backyard garden of African corn and cooking greens like amaranth and cowpea leaves. But he soon grew frustrated, as the small garden’s yield barely fed his family of eight. And so began his decade-long search for what farmers need most – land. 

In 2015, Ali and the newly formed Somali Bantu Community Organization had the good fortune to meet Heltman-Weiss, a recent volunteer for the group’s after-school program who had the idea to invite the aspiring farmers to her home for a potluck dinner with community leaders eager to help. “Sure enough, that night, the idea of the Somali Bantu Community Farm came to life, and within a week we were planting our first farm on a retired horse pasture in East Aurora," says Heltman-Weiss. 

But the Somali Bantus weren’t the region’s only new arrivals looking for land. In its first year of operation, the Somali Bantu Community Farm was inundated with inquiries from communities including Vietnamese, Congolese, Burmese, and Eastern Europeans. 

In 2019, PFC was established to extend the mission of farmer-led, community-rooted agriculture to the region’s entire community of refugees, immigrants, and other marginalized BIPOC  groups. Today, the collective operates out of a new barn and 37 acres of arable land in Orchard Park thanks to a $2.5 million joint capital campaign with the Western New York Land Conservancy that also supported the purchase of easements to protect the farm in perpetuity from development.

Providing everything from land and farm incubator training to fair market access through an onsite farm store and wholesale networks with food pantries and grocers, PFC supports 29 small farms, 21 incubator farms, and eight community farms, totaling 200+ farmers working small plots on the Orchard Park farm. Altogether, the farm grows over 100,000 pounds of produce that feeds more than 14,000 Western New Yorkers every year. Both its farm incubator and community farm programs have waitlists while all 37 acres are filled end to end with crops as diverse as sweet potatoes, Bok choy, and African eggplant. 

That promising path of success has had its interruptions, however. First, PFC had to jump through hoops to get its plans for the barn – needed for cold storage and a wash and pack station – off the ground. As a nonprofit, PFC doesn’t fit into current state and local definitions of a “farm operation,” which put PFC into a gray area for permitting and regulatory approvals. 

Then, in the summer of 2024, PFC experienced delays in opening its new facility due to a lack of water access. Based on its large number of farm workers, the Erie County Department of Health required PFC have access to a public water source and obtain special permission from the Town of Orchard Park to connect to an existing water district. It wasn’t until April 2025, after months of negotiations, public hearings, and a lawsuit, that the town permitted connection and a water agreement was signed. 

The next setback hit in 2025, when PFC’s three-year, $750,000 Beginning Farms and Ranchers Development Grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture was terminated midcycle for operating DEI programs in violation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The funds were temporarily reinstated late last year but rescinded again in April. PFC has filed a lawsuit to win back the funding, while the cuts have been partially offset by a $200,000 New York State Department of Environmental Conservation grant.

Some challenges are structural, such as transportation for its farmers, most of whom live and work in more urban areas like Buffalo, Lackawanna, and Cheektowaga. Additionally, graduates of PFC’s three-year incubator program – offering agricultural and business workshops and 1-on-1 technical assistance – face an uphill battle in accessing land. Both statewide and regionally, smaller farm parcels (5 to 30 acres) are limited due to continued consolidation of agricultural land.  

Says Heltman-Weiss: “Throughout our history, newly arrived communities of Americans have formed the foundation of our food system, from farming, to food production, to feeding us in restaurants. But it’s a challenging environment for small farmers, and any beginning or emerging farmer really. There is a large community of young farmers who want to farm more sustainably. To do this, however, you have to be able to access smaller plots of land.”

Over the years, PFC and the UB Food Lab have convened around the same growing network of food justice actors across the region to mobilize change. In 2017, Samina Raja, Food Lab principal investigator and UB urban planning professor, worked with United Way of Buffalo & Erie County to support and document the work of a coalition of 13 community organizations, including the Somali Bantu Community Farm and then-emerging PFC, to promote food equity through a $1 million grant supported by the General Mills Foundation. The startup PFC has since grown to be a powerhouse in the regional food system, working closely with many of the original 13 organizations repeatedly. In 2020, PFC participated in Seeding Resilience, a community-led response to food insecurity in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, of which UB Food Lab was a member. PFC has also participated in health and policy conversations for refugees and immigrants through UB’s annual New American Health Summit.

Alexandra Judelsohn, an assistant professor and co-PI of the UB Food Lab, who leads food systems research in partnership with the region’s refugee communities, has written widely about the potential of organizations like PFC. She and Heltman-Weiss are co-authors of a forthcoming PFC case study to be published in the Springer Urban Agriculture book series, edited by Andrew Adam-Bradford, René van Veenhuizen, Isabela Vera, Mary Njenga, Joe Nasr. The chapter documents how PFC links New American farmers to land and water, cultural connection, and economic opportunities for farmer-led agriculture.  

“There are a lot of immigrant and refugee communities in Western New York with agricultural backgrounds. For many, it’s important to grow food that is culturally familiar and which supports their mental and physical health, and communities,” says Judelsohn. “There has been demand for this for so long; other programs have tried and failed. One of the amazing things about PFC is they bridge immigrant communities that wouldn’t otherwise have any interaction.”

Indeed, PFC has developed its governance structure to empower farmers. As of 2025, 61 percent of PFC staff and 35 percent of its board are composed of PFC farmers. “It really is a farmer-led organization, and that comes from its success in bringing different groups together,” says Judelsohn, noting that the farm provides daily lunches in its barn kitchen, where members share stories and lessons learned and discuss issues in their own communities.

In a recent paper on "Planning for Regional Food Equity" (Journal of the American Planning Association), co-authored by former Food Lab post-doctoral scholar Yeeli Mui, along with other Food Lab scholars including Judelsohn and Raja, the authors report that PFC fills a critical gap in the availability of culturally appropriate foods for New American and underserved populations. “Planners can support ethnic food retailers, like those in Buffalo, that have been shown to serve important economic and social functions,” the study recommends, identifying culturally appropriate foods as one of six key dimensions of an equitable regional food system. 

“Being able to grow your own food builds connection to culture, land, health, and just agency in general,” says Heltman-Weiss. “We come here with a shared purpose. All of these things fuel each other and have built a community.”

Health disparities faced by the region's refugee, immigrant, and underserved communities is another area of shared interest. For instance, Judelsohn is working with the Massachusetts Avenue Project to lead a second-phase study of refugee and immigrant perceptions and remediation practices around soil contamination in Buffalo, where one-third of the state’s New American population is resettled. The first phase of the project found spatial distribution of lead contamination matching the city’s segregation patterns, with residents largely engaging in self-help actions as well as adverse behaviors like planting directly in the soil. 

“Most of those surveyed say they amend their soil because it’s clay, not because it might be contaminated with lead. Many immigrant gardeners are growing directly in the ground, and blood lead levels are higher among immigrant children compared to U.S.-born children," says Judelsohn. “Unfortunately, much is siloed in our region, and often people aren’t aware of the dangers or the remedies available, including free soil screening resources and safe growing practices like raised garden beds.”

“We’re still a very segmented region, economically and racially,” adds Heltman-Weiss, noting that food insecurity for New American and underserved communities extends well beyond Buffalo (the sixth most segregated metro area in the U.S.) to Western New York’s rural areas and smaller cities like Lockport and Batavia. “For a lot of people, you don’t know what you don’t see. There are huge needs here.”  

Such challenges are exacerbated by the complexity of regional food systems, which encompass physical assets (e.g., land and facilities), transportation systems to distribute food, natural resources like soil, water, and pollinators, and human resources from farmworkers to food processors to chefs.  

In the case of PFC, confusion around its right to access public water is a significant – and unique – example of how the fragmentation of policies governing the food system impedes resilience. Kate Hays, a graduate of UB’s Master of Urban Planning/Master of Public Health dual degree and now a research associate with the Food Lab, is among a team of Food Lab scholars authoring a paper on the PFC case that will examine local and state-level policies governing water and land use. 

“PFC is a novel model. It’s not familiar to local policy makers. The fact that they are providing land to people who would not otherwise have it, and the way they incorporate their farmers into the organization’s leadership structure is unique. This led to confusion about what types of land uses were involved. It wasn’t as cut and dry as local government might like it to be.”

“There was also a disconnect in understanding what PFC was trying to do, and even what they needed the water for,” Hays explained. The question at hand referred to the use of water for crop irrigation, which PFC handles through a rainfed surface lake. Even though they had the correct permits and infrastructure to connect to the water line, they still faced delays due to a lack of policy and regulatory clearance.

“We’ll be looking at other instances of policies like this not aligning well, the drivers of this incoherence, and what the results of that are,” adds Hays, who helps direct the Food Lab’s Growing Food Connections initiative, a national education and planning policy initiative supported by the Agriculture and Food Research Initiative of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. 

The structural disconnects impeding PFC stirred recent UB graduate Cassie Prinsen so much that she made it the topic of her thesis for the MS in International Development and Global Health program. Prinsen, who also landed a field work placement at PFC through the MSIDGH program and served as a research assistant on UB’s soil health study, said she saw PFC’s story as a window into systemic barriers to environmental justice.

“These challenges stem from structure, but also how that structure has informed people’s thinking. It has created a culture of an absence of farming.” Her thesis recommends local and state budget restructuring to support small farms – particularly regarding land ownership – and community agency through representation on food system governing boards and agencies.  

Prinsen’s working experience with PFC also exposed her to the less measurable returns of community-building around food. “One thing that sums up Providence Farm Collective is joy. Everyone is happy to be there working hard,” says Prinsen.

She was particularly taken by the organization’s collective resolve to persist despite the setbacks. “They just have this attitude of ‘we’re not stopping.’ I saw them come up against endless red tape and then just move through it.”

Reflecting on the road ahead, Heltman-Weiss says: “The loss of farmland to development has destroyed not only the world’s food economy, but regional food systems, too, in a very alarming way to the point where we’re at a crisis. It’s either figure out a way to develop the next generation of farmers and get them onto land, and transition and protect that land, or accept that we won’t ever have the security offered by local food production.”

The small-farm advocate is optimistic, however, that PFC’s base of community support and ongoing efforts with the region’s food system coalition, including UB, will ensure that PFC endures. Recent successes include the election of Hamadi Ali to the Erie County Farm Bureau; the New York Farm Bureau’s addition of an update to the state’s “farm operator” definition to its legislative agenda; nurturing a relationship between Northeast Farmers of Color Land Trust and PFC incubator graduate Kandolo Makongo to access a one-acre farm plot on Buffalo’s East Side; and the launch of an art exhibition that highlights PFC members and their agricultural heritage. Last year, PFC completed a strategic plan for land acquisition and infrastructure development for small farms and is investigating innovative models from across the United States to protect farmland.  

Meanwhile, PFC’s “Food With Dignity” delivery truck is still making its weekly farmers market runs, Judelsohn is ramping up the soil health survey for implementation in the coming months, Hays is pursuing new research on land tenure for small farms, and Prinsen, who graduated in May, is considering either advanced study or a career in the region’s environmental and food justice movement.  

Concludes Frimpong Boamah, who will take urban planning students in his Fall 2026 water governance class back to PFC for a site visit: "Providence Farm Collective reminds us that food justice is about much more than food. It is about reimagining the institutions that govern land, water, economic opportunity, and belonging. The story of Providence Farm Collective demonstrates that some of our greatest innovations emerge when historically excluded communities become leaders in designing solutions. Our role as planners, design professionals, researchers, and public institutions is not simply to study those innovations, but to learn from them, support them, and help remove the structural barriers that limit their potential. That is the kind of partnership we hope to continue building across our School and the university.“