With a vision to shift how rural residents live and build wealth, Strengthen ND and a team of small producers and local foods stakeholders have been working to answer this question: How might a modern rural repopulation movement reshape and reignite ND’s local food system by challenging myths/misconceptions about how food can be grown, vertically integrated, and leveraged to enhance the short- and long-term ripple effects of more condensed and robust statewide local food chain?

Strengthen ND has been working to gather current and former farmer input on the past, current, and future statuses of family farms; partner and stakeholder limitations and opportunities; and community and agriculturally-based economic development planning to understand and catalyze progress around local foods and the revitalization of small family farms. The extensive work has culminated in a five-year, multifaceted plan to revitalize the future of family farms across rural North Dakota, with the critical piece of that vision being a rural incubator farm.

A rural incubator farm is a place where people are given temporary, exclusive, and affordable access to small parcels of land, infrastructure, and training, for the purpose of honing skills and launching farm businesses. Strengthen ND is currently raising money in partnership with local foods stakeholders to make the incubator farm dream a reality.