Kei Cripps’s urban farm share program helps families turn dormant yards into micro farm lots governed by sustainable, organic practices.
By Matt Skoufalos | July 7, 2024
Kei Cripps shows off some of the tomatoes Magic Thistle Farms produces. Credit: Matt Skoufalos.
Many folks daydream about leaving their day jobs for careers that are more fulfilling spiritually, emotionally, creatively, or financially.
As good as they are at supporting insurance customers, Kei Cripps of Collingswood doesn’t dream of celebrity, wealth, or stardom — they just want to farm.
“That’s been my mantra for the last ten years,” Cripps said.
“That’s really where my heart is.
“If I found enough people with ideal yards who didn’t care if I put up a temporary greenhouse, if things were perfect, I could feasibly leave my day job,” they said.
With enough buy-in, Cripps might be able to do it.
Described alternatively as urban farming or patchwork gardening, farm sharing is a mechanism whereby farmers who don’t have a concentrated parcel of land to cultivate can tend plots scattered across an area.
In its second season, Cripps’ Magic Thistle Farm is growing leafy greens like lettuce, spinach, chard, and bok choy; seeded fruits like peppers, tomatoes, eggplants, and zucchini; and vegetables like onions, kohlrabi, and radishes in side yards and backyards across South Jersey.
In exchange for cultivating the land, Cripps offers participating landowners $35 of in-season produce as it becomes available.
Magic Thistle was begun as a traditional farm in 2019, when Cripps was offered a portion of an 11-acre plot occupied by Rag and Bone Meadery in Mullica Hill. The novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic derailed the initial season in what they described as “a devastating financial pitfall.
“I was delivering vegetables to people up to 20 miles away because I had all this food, and not selling it seemed like the worst moral option,” Cripps said. “So I was able to sleep at night, but I couldn’t afford another year.”
After a two-year hiatus, Cripps moved into a Collingswood apartment, and sent out a blind message to a community social media group, offering to take away any spare soil or flower pots just to keep their hands in the earth.
Magic Thistle Farm peppers, grown in Haddon Township. Credit: Matt Skoufalos.
Kristen Angelucci of Haddon Township, who previously had participated in a farm share with Julie Pierre’s Our Yards Farm, offered Cripps her lot, and then suggested she put up a sign advertising the project.
“Within hours, my Instagram was lighting up with people sharing,” Cripps said.
“Some found it organically through Haddon Township, and I started a website.”
Other than capital, land access is “the number-one challenge for farmers,” Cripps said, and agricultural real estate can go for about five times the cost of residential or commercial land.
So far, they have fielded offers of interest from a dozen or so households with properties scattered across Camden County, and will use those to support direct-to-consumer sales of their produce.
“In the last decade, there’s been a lot of conversation about small-scale agricultural production, and I think that’s where we’re really going to need to look as we fray further off into the climate crisis,” Cripps said.
“The longer the amount of time it takes for food to come out of the ground and onto your plate, the less nutritious it’s going to be,” they said. “The degradation of nutrition is well documented. It emphasizes making good, nutritional food accessible to the local area.”
Realizing how easy it is to make the most local food choices possible helps influence Cripps’ customers to support other external cultural endeavors. It also shows people how to grow food, the amount of effort it takes, and what the outcome could be.
“People walking past the garden are flabbergasted that someone can produce all this,” Cripps said. “It’s not easy, but it’s not hard. Sometimes it doesn’t even work.
“But ultimately, it’s showing people that you don’t have to have six or seven acres of land to grow your own food,” they said. “You just need some familiarity with when things go in the dirt.”
Cripps harvests crops two or three days a week, cleans and refrigerates them as needed, and then notifies their customers that a new crop is available. They hope to start growing enough to sustain a 10-person community-supported agriculture (CSA) program, and maybe someday farm as many as seven acres.
Production ends with the first frost of November, although Cripps wants to try their hand at winter farming if the forecast looks promising. All the work is guided by organic farming principles and amendments from the nonprofit Organic Materials Review Institute (OMRI) of Eugene, Oregon.
Magic Thistle Farm tomatoes. Credit: Matt Skoufalos.
Magic Thistle Farm takes its name and tetrahedral logo from Cripps’ love of tabletop gaming: it’s a pun on the Dungeons and Dragons spell “Magic Missile,” the impact of which is calculated by rolling a four-sided die.
Its sign-up form also identifies Magic Thistle as “a queer + trans-owned business,” which is described as “a non-negotiable element of the farm project.”
For Cripps, embracing their queerness and love of nerd culture is fundamental to the business.
“I’ve been queer forever, and it wasn’t until maybe 2017 that I became aware of how disjointed to me personally it felt when people refer to me as a woman,” they said.
“I’ve been a non-binary, frog-loving farmer this whole time.
“Learning to accept that my biological assignment doesn’t have to be consistent with the gender that goes along with it has been very freeing,” Cripps said. ”I’ve been very fortunate to be supported by people who helped me come to that conclusion.”
On Friday, Cripps met with Nancy Leggoe to speak about farming her backyard in Hi-Nella. A retired Camden County librarian, she, like Angelucci, had participated with Julie Pierre’s Our Yards Farm for two seasons, and was eager to rejoin a farm share.
Leggoe doesn’t have pets or children, but loves spending time with her “critters” — the songbirds and wildlife that frolic on her lot.
“I loved it,” she said. “It’s nothing I could’ve done. I was thinking about starting a small patch and then I saw [Magic Thistle], and it was kismet.
“It gets air, it gets sun; it’s not getting used,” Leggoe said. “I love farms and I love to support local.”
A nature lover who recalled visiting area farms from Cherry Hill to Hammonton throughout her upbringing, Leggoe said she loves the idea of her property being returned to active use. After her stint with farm sharing, she observed that her neighbor began farming his own lot consistently, too.
“I think it’s great that we’re doing more and more farms,” Leggoe said.
Kei Cripps of Magic Thistle Farms plans a future farm plot. Credit: Matt Skoufalos.
In her second season of Magic Thistle Farms, Angelucci said that Cripps has made far better use of her yard than as a grassy patch of earth.
“I am part of that mindset that lawns are such a waste of resources and space, and have always wanted to move away from that,” Angelucci said.
“I feel smarter, I feel like what I understand about plants is increasing so much, and I no longer have as much lawn space to feel guilty about.”
Today, Angelucci’s backyard not only supports the crops Cripps grows there, but also cutting gardens from Lesley Sico of Larkspur Row.
“They didn’t know each other, and I didn’t know them, and it was just great vibes from the start,” she said. “It just feels like it’s brought everybody together in a really interesting way.”
Like Cripps, Sico’s interest in locally grown flowers is as an alternative to a global industry that turns on international shipping and preservative chemicals. The two frequently bond over their shared interest in organic cultivation and sustainable practices, and Sico described Angelucci as her biggest cheerleader.
“Local flowers is a whole movement that not many people know about, and I think what Kei is trying to do and get more people involved is awesome.” Sico said. “We’re always swapping stories and sharing our tools.”
Kei Cripps with a carrot from Magic Thistle Farms. Credit: Matt Skoufalos.
In addition to supporting the small businesses that Sico and Cripps are growing, Angelucci said the agricultural education her daughter has gotten from the experience is more meaningful than anything else.
Seven-year-old Verbena is “the biggest supporter of their farm,” Angelucci said, and beyond enjoying its vibrant, fresh flavors, her daughter will have a wholly different outlook on agriculture because of those intimate childhood connections with the land.
“This is one of the most exciting things going on in my life for two years running,” Angelucci said. “The way all of the pieces come together is magical.
“It has been so wonderful, and the quality of what Kei grows is so much better than what is available even at a nice organic grocery store,” she said. “You become spoiled.”
For more information about Magic Thistle Farm, visit the business website or its social media channels.
