Caroline Radice was evacuated from her farm in northern California one October morning in 2017 as wildfires closed roads and knocked out power across the region. Instead of waiting for help to arrive, she did what she knew: cooked. For a week, she and her team fed more than 100 people stranded without electricity, using vegetables and meat from her 5,000-acre property, Ridgewood Ranch. The kitchen became a pocket of normalcy in the chaos.
That act of feeding her community during crisis taught her something harder to accept than any wildfire: she couldn't do it alone. "I used to think that if I worked really hard and really got organized, I could be a relatively successful small farmer and be self-sufficient," Radice says now. "One of the humbling things that I've realized as an adult and a farmer is that I don't think it's possible to be self-sufficient."
Building What Communities Actually Want
Radice had been farming in California for two decades, juggling work as a chef and catering business owner alongside her land. She'd watched farmers she admired lose their leases, watched them fail at crowdfunding campaigns to buy land, watched the system grind small operations down. What struck her wasn't that individual farms were struggling—it was that they were struggling alone, competing against each other for scraps while the community around them actually wanted what they grew.
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Start Your News Detox"People really like small farms and farmers' markets," Radice realized. "People want to live in a community where you can get your CSA box. Those kinds of things exist and are abundant. We just needed to create a way to connect the community supporters with those farms."
In 2015, what started as plans for a Christmas party became something larger: the Good Farm Fund. It's a nonprofit that works like mutual aid—community members donate money that goes directly to farm grants for infrastructure, capacity building, and food access programs. The fund isn't trying to save individual farms through charity. It's trying to make the economics of small farming actually work.
"A lot of farms have trouble getting the investment money to scale their business to a space where it's actually sustainable," Radice explains. "The battle to compete with large-scale agriculture is set up for small farms to fail. But we're building the infrastructure of the food system that we want to have."
Since its founding, the Good Farm Fund has awarded more than $500,000 in grants to small farmers in the region. Radice now co-owns Black Dog Farm & Catering and directs the School of Adaptive Agriculture, an intensive vocational farming program on Ridgewood Ranch. The model is spreading—proof that when a community decides it wants something different from its food system, it can build the support structures to make it real.
