Producer

Wild Roots is a small, ecologically-oriented market farm, owned and operated by farmers Mary Colombo and Brian Shipman, growing over 200+ varieties of high-quality vegetables and herbs for our community in the Portland area. When it comes down to it, we got into farming because we love food. We love everything about it: the ways it teaches us through story and tradition, the ways it brings us together, the ways it weaves together the fabric of community. While we really enjoy growing tasty veggies, ultimately, what gets us through many tiring days of farming is the community around us. We farm because we want to help our community reconnect with food.

Our sustainable farming philosophies are constantly adapting as we learn more and as we respond to the evolving realities of place and time. We are committed to growing diverse and unique crops following organic practices, aiming for the most flavorful and nutrient-dense end-product. We prioritize environmental health by using minimal tillage methods to foster living soils, creating thriving habitats for pollinator communities, and strive to strike a balance between human-scale, hand work and some mechanization. Many of the buzzwords used in the ‘sustainable agriculture’ movement do not necessarily feel authentic to us and we do not farm according to any single prescribed set of practices. We, do however, believe in farming in thoughtful, authentic, ecologically-oriented ways by tapping into the intuitive relationships we have formed with land, place, and climate through farming. We are committed to humbly doing our best in a compromised system, knowing that no agricultural system is perfect and that we will always have more to learn. We are excited about experimenting more with dry farming and collectivized farming models because our future requires that we figure out how to grow food in both changing social and ecological climates.