On a hot, dry August day, Mohammad Haji and Ricardo Diaz examined their plots at a community farm in Boring, its fields full of tomatoes, amaranth, corn, peppers, onions, squash, beans and sunflowers.
Haji is raising chickens and cultivating different varieties of eggplant and garlic along with other summer plants. In the adjacent lot, Diaz is nursing greens, cabbage, and celery, all winter-season crops, and his summer plants.
They are among the handful of refugee and immigrant growers who, in the last year, have turned their love of farming into a business and a full-time job. They have access to this farm through a farm accelerator program run by Outgrowing Hunger, a Gresham nonprofit that provides land, agriculture training, and business assistance to locals who want to grow and sell fresh foods.
Haji and Diaz grew up farming, feeding their families with foods grown in fields outside their homes, and earning an income selling what they harvested from the land. Today, they count on their plots to do much the same. Dozens of other families count on them, too — particularly other immigrant and refugee families. Both Diaz and Haji grow crops that were staples where they were born but are hard to find in the U.S.
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