For generations, queer people have fled their rural hometowns in search of community, belonging and glamour in the big city. So the idea of any gay, non-binary or trans person choosing to work on a farm may seem counterintuitive. But according to almost a dozen queer and trans farmers, the face of farming is changing. And as a result, farming itself is being transformed, with queer growers favouring small-scale, community-supported, environmentally-sustainable practices.

Women-run to queer-run

Rake and Radish sprouted beside a pocket of small farms on Vancouver Island that’s home to a long line of queer growers. The now-inactive LGBTQ2S+ farmer group Rainbow Chard Collective made its debut in 2009 at Victoria Pride. “All the clean gays with tight bodies and corporate floats were about to get a taste of filthy, dirty working queers of all shapes and genders,” wrote Larkin Schmiedl, a founder of the collective, in This Magazine in 2014. He wore a shirt printed with “gender modified, not genetically modified” as the group trundled a wheelbarrow through the parade.

Mel Sylvestre, who now runs the farm Grounded Acres with their partner on B.C.’s Sunshine Coast, was another one of Rainbow Chard Collective’s founding members. “I came out, got my first girlfriend and started a job on the farm all at the same time,” Sylvestre says, sounding almost surprised at their luck. “I think it’s the first time I’ve said it out loud.”

Their first fateful job in B.C. was on a Vancouver Island co-op farm run by three straight women. “But there was definitely a trend of seeing women and, almost by default, queer people being attracted to small-scale, by hand, organic, ecological farming,” Sylvestre explains.

Where there are women-led farms—still a minority, but a growing phenomenon—queer-run farms seem to follow soon after. Although there are no federal statistics on LGBTQ2S+ farmers in Canada, according to the latest numbers available in the 2021 Census of Agriculture, Canada’s female farm operators make up a little more than a third of the country’s total, with B.C. commanding the highest share of this demographic. And women are more likely than men to work on small farms that report less than $50,000 in revenue. In a 2022 Globe and Mail article on celebrating pride in agriculture, a queer farmer in Vermont, U.S., explains “there’s definitely this unspoken understanding that [it’s] going to be a much more compassionate and inclusive environment when it’s women-owned.” The farmers Xtra interviewed agreed with that sentiment, crediting female farm operators for paving the way for queer, trans and non-binary workers in the industry.