Photo by Meaghin Kennedy
Oregon Farm Link’s mission is to connect beginning farmers and ranchers with land holders to help Oregon grow the next generation of family farmers. Friends of Family Farmers acknowledges that inequity in our current agricultural system is a direct result of generations of injustice and exploitation. FoFF and OFL understand the importance and necessity of creating a culture of opportunity and pledges to invest in our programs in ways that right historical wrongs and provide equitable access to land. We envision an agricultural system in which farmers, animals, land and communities can thrive, this vision for the land is only going to happen by collaborating with melanated people and honoring the original culture of caring and stewardship.
Oregon Farm Link (a program of Friends of Family Farmers) works to connect farmers and landholders on the traditional lands of the Indigenous communities who have lived and continue to live on the land we now call Oregon. As part of a deliberate attempt to eradicate Native people, they were forcibly removed from their original homeland in areas where we now work, live and farm. We would like to honor and acknowledge Oregon’s nine federally recognized tribes, who have stewarded these lands since time immemorial: the Klamath tribe of the Southern Oregon; the Burns Paiute of the high-desert east; the Coquille of Southern Oregon’s coastal forests; the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde in the northern Coast Range; the Cow Creek Band of Umpqua in the Southern Oregon foothills; the Confederated Tribes of Umatilla in the Blue Mountains; the Confederated Tribes of Siletz in Oregon’s northern rainforests; the Confederated Tribes of Coos, Lower Umpqua, and Siuslaw on the southern coast; and the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs on the eastern slopes of the Oregon Cascades. And we would like to recognize all the other indigenous communities who have not been federally recognized.