Farming with Disabilities

Creative farming adaptations allow people of all abilities to work the land.

By Jennifer A. Sheffield
Published on January 10, 2022
article image
courtesy of Jennifer A. Sheffield
Jennifer Sisney feeds chickens, hogs, and goats at Landon Farm.

 This article includes an audio version.  Scroll down just a bit and click on the Audio Article to listen. 

It’s the middle of summer. Still, the barn in which the sheep spend winter needs to be raked out. Three piglets used the space before they were put into the hayfield. Nothing much is different about this raking chore, except that Paul, 51, is doing it using one arm and only enough vision to see through a pinhole.

Paul has cerebral palsy, and he uses a walker. He lives in a life-sharing community called Innisfree Village on 550 acres in Crozet, Virginia, and he can only ride in a rough-terrain vehicle (RTV) to weekly worksites after putting on elbow pads and a full-face helmet. The cows know his voice, though, and after checking water for the sheep, farm managers Nich Traverse and Tim Wool leave Paul to his own devices. Paul explains, “I scrape the hay like this, and I have an orange wheelbarrow to fill up for compost.”

For those living with disabilities, homesteading can seem like another system designed to exclude. However, whether they’re growing produce, making clothing, or raising livestock, Paul and others are proving it can be done, and with benefits. At Innisfree, those with disabilities are designated coworkers. Each helps produce a product at a specific workstation — namely, a weavery, a wood shop, an herb and vegetable garden, and a bakery — in addition to pounding fence posts and collecting eggs.

man in red shirt sifting compost in a greenhouse

“We don’t allow productivity to negatively impact the experience that people have,” says Executive Director Rorie Hutter. “We want things to have value because they are useful or enjoyable, and so we do them in a non-automated way to preserve that. Workstations are not routes by themselves for independence; rather, each step represents skill-building.”

Comments (0) Join others in the discussion!
    Online Store Logo
    Need Help? Call 1-800-234-3368