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On leaving a career, choosing community, and what it means to farm in the city where you belong.
Habari zenu. That's a Swahili greeting. It means: how are you all? I say it because it assumes a group. It assumes you are not alone.
A few years ago, I left a career in tech. It was a comfortable career, the kind people build carefully and protect. I left it because I kept thinking about food — who has it, who grows it, who gets to be part of the system that produces it — and I could not find a way to make that thinking fit inside a desk job.
So together with my brother Misha, I founded Zawadi Farm. We started by converting backyards into growing spaces. We were small, scrappy, and certain we were doing the right thing even when we had no idea what we were doing.
The Name
Zawadi means gift in Swahili. I am Kenyan-born, Canadian by choice and by belonging. The name is intentional. It is not a brand. It is a belief about what farming is.
When you grow food for your community, you are not performing a service. You are offering something. The harvest is a gift from the land, from the labour, from the relationships you've built with the people who show up to help, to buy, to learn. Every CSA share that leaves our farm stand is a piece of that gift moving through the neighbourhood.
I think about the word gift a lot. It implies reciprocity. You give because you are cared for, and you care for others because someone, somewhere, gave to you first. That is the logic of community-supported agriculture: the members invest before the harvest. They take a risk with us. We grow because they believed we would.
What the Land Teaches
We farm regeneratively at Downsview Park. That means we think about what the soil needs, not just what we can pull from it. Cover crops. Composting. Seasonal rest. The soil improves over time, which means the food gets better and the farm becomes more productive with every passing year.
Tech moved fast and rewarded speed. Farming rewards patience. It rewards attention. It rewards the willingness to fail in a given season and return the following spring with better knowledge. I find that humbling in a way that nothing else has been.
The land does not care about your resume. It cares whether you showed up, paid attention, and gave back what you took.
What We're Really Building
Zawadi Farm is not just a farm. It is a café, a gathering space, an education program, a community kitchen, a barn that holds 120 people on a warm evening. All of it is connected by the same argument: that urban land can feed people, that communities can lead that work, and that gathering around food is one of the oldest forms of human dignity there is.
We work with the Toronto District School Board. We host the Harvesting Knowledge Conference with OISE. We are part of the Black School Food Working Group, a national coalition trying to make sure that Black communities have agency in the food systems that serve them. None of this was in the original plan. All of it grew from the same root: show up, do the work, build with the people around you.
For Those Considering the Leap
I am sometimes asked by people in tech or professional careers whether they should make a similar change. I don't give advice about that, because I don't know your situation. What I will say is this: the question of what your skills could build, if you pointed them toward a community need rather than a quarterly target, is worth sitting with.
The Haudenosaunee teach the Seven Generations Principle — that our decisions today should create a better world for those who come after us. That principle was not designed with a product roadmap in mind. It was designed with land in mind. With food. With children.
I left tech to grow food. I have not regretted a single season. Move with eyes of hope. We got this.
Much love and light — Jessey Njau, Founder of Zawadi Farm
