Growing Practices
Our mission at Dancing Harvest Farm is to grow food that nourishes people, respects our environment, and contributes to a more compassionate and equitable food system. Building healthy soil to support and nourish our crops is our highest priority. We implement this by enhancing our soil fertility with organic composts, mulches, and cover crops. This also allows us to reduce the soil disturbing and compacting use of heavy machinery in the field. We instead rely on hand tools and methods for growing and maintaining our crops. Our produce is free from chemical sprays, GMO seeds, and on and off the field we use as little plastic as possible. We set the organic growing standards as a base minimum in order to grow as ecologically and ethically as possible.
About the Farmer
Daniela began Dancing Harvest Farm in 2021 after a few years working in farming and gardening. She has practiced and studied agriculture in varying contexts, first falling in love with the field work at the Dickinson College Farm in Boiling Springs, Pennsylvania while pursuing her BA in environmental studies. While studying at Dickinson, Daniela spent one year in Brazil where she lived and worked with family farms advancing agroecology in Ceará and with farm and market organizers in Rio de Janeiro. After graduation, Daniela worked on a veggie and livestock farm in central Massachusetts and later continued to hone her production skills on Fenway Park’s rooftop farm, Boston Public School gardens, and lots of urban green spaces in between. She completed the New Entry Sustainable Farming Project’s Farm Business Course in 2020 and broke ground on Dancing Harvest the following spring.
Before her college studies led her to grow vegetables, Daniela was a professional ballet dancer with the New York City Ballet. She was not expecting her former career to resonate with her current one, but to her the connections farming sparks between people and food feel similar to the way a dance performance seeks to impact its audience. She reveres the craft and labor needed for both.
