This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: The slang term "touch grass" encourages people to step away from the internet or devices and connect with the real world. New research from the University of Kansas has found that a project that helps resettled refugees and immigrants learn sustainable farming has many of the term's same benefits, improving people's mental and physical well-being and training them to run independent agricultural businesses.
New Roots is a four-year training program that helps resettled refugees, immigrants and English-language-learner farmers develop sustainable agriculture-based businesses. Participants lease a quarter-acre (0.1-hectare) plot at the farm's 7.5-acre (3-hectare) site in Kansas City, Missouri. Joonmo Kang, assistant professor, and Cheryl Holmes, research project director in KU's School of Social Welfare, learned about the program in 2022 when Kang took one of his classes to the farm on a field trip.
After that, the research team took part in the group's monthly meetings, attended events and got to know staff, trainees and volunteers. They formed a research group, held focus groups with staff to determine what they wanted to know about the program and interviewed farmers to learn about their experiences. Participants regularly cited the benefits to their mental and physical health that the program provided.
Many work full-time jobs in settings like warehouses, meatpacking plants or the service industry. They frequently compared their full-time jobs with the New Roots experience. At their full-time jobs, which they called "company jobs," farmers often faced a lack of flexibility, including a lack of sick leave for themselves or to care for family members, admonishment for talking to co-workers and requirements to make repetitive motions for hours on end.
In contrast, farmers reported being free to connect with others, set their own hours and feel a sense of value for their labor while learning new skills at the farm. "That sense of flexibility and agency meant so much to them," Kang said. "The independence they feel highlights the importance and value of labor.
Financially, they may make more at their company job, but they still chose to take part in New Roots. The sense of camaraderie was also very important." "New Roots was a place where farmers could work for something of their own, building something as entrepreneurs," Kang said. "As one farmer put it, 'You are your own boss.' One shared that he loves volunteering as an interpreter for newly resettled refugees, something his 'company' job never allowed but that farming does." The study, written with the two organizers of New Roots, Benjamin Carpenter of Cultivate KC and Kristin Selby of Catholic Charities of Northeast Kansas, was published in the Journal of Community Practice.
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