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Milestones, partnerships, and what a growing season actually looks like when a community shows up.
There is a particular quiet that arrives at the end of a growing season. The beds are cleared. The light changes. The work slows just enough that you can finally stop moving and look at what you built.
2025 was a full year. I want to document it honestly, not as a highlight reel, but as a record of what this kind of work actually looks like: the partnerships forged, the programmes delivered, the moments of uncertainty that preceded the moments of clarity.
The Land We Now Call Home
This year, Zawadi Farm signed a long-term lease with Canada Lands Company at Downsview Park. This is a milestone I want to name plainly, because land tenure is one of the most significant barriers facing urban farms and Black-led agricultural enterprises across this country. A long-term lease changes the calculus. It allows us to plan across seasons rather than year to year, to invest in the soil with confidence that we will be here to see the return.
160 Downsview Park Boulevard has been a military base, an airport, and now — slowly, purposefully — a place where food is grown and community gathers. We are part of that transformation. We do not take that lightly.
Learning Together
Our partnership with the Toronto District School Board deepened this year through our Soil Stewardship program. Students from schools across the city came to the farm to learn about regenerative practices — composting, cover crops, the relationship between soil health and food quality. These are not abstract lessons. They happen in the beds, with their hands in the earth.
The Harvesting Knowledge Conference with OISE is confirmed for October 27, 2026 at Evergreen Brickworks. This gathering brings together educators, researchers, farmers, and community leaders to think collectively about food, land, and learning. We are proud to be part of that table.
Education is one of the oldest forms of food sovereignty. Knowing how to grow is knowledge that cannot be imported or outsourced.
Community We Didn't Build Alone
This year we formalised our partnership with the Harambee Collective, which includes Ubuntu Farms. The principle behind that collaboration is simple: Black-led food producers in this region are stronger together than in isolation. We share knowledge, coordinate on programming, and are building toward a model of collective economic resilience that individual farms cannot achieve on their own.
We also finalised our industrial kitchen licensing through Richview Residence. This opens up new programming possibilities — workshops on food preservation, value-added production, community cooking. The kitchen extends our capacity to teach and to feed in ways that the farm stand alone cannot.
The Barn
The Barn at Zawadi Farm — 1,900 square feet, capacity for up to 210+ guests — continued to grow as an event and programming space this year. We hosted community gatherings, workshops, farm dinners, and celebrations. The Barn is not separate from the farm. It is the place where the harvest becomes a meal, where the work becomes a gathering, where the soil's gift becomes visible to people who may never have picked a vegetable in their lives.
What We Carry Into the Next Season
Every season teaches something the last one didn't. In 2025, I learned again that the work is the relationship. The relationship to the land, to the team, to the members who trust us with their food dollar, to the institutions that partner with us, to the community that shows up.
We are a regenerative farm. That means we believe in returning more than we take. The land improves. The community builds. The knowledge deepens. Season after season, that is the only model that makes sense to me.
Thank you for being part of what Zawadi is growing.
Much love and light — Jessey Njau, Founder of Zawadi Farm
