How Asian American farmers in Michigan are finding success with alternative food systems
On an overcast Sunday this past May, people of all ages lined up next to a lush garden in Ann Arbor, Michigan, to receive steaming bowls of pho. After volunteers ladled the broth, meatballs, and sliced beef into each bowl of noodles, visitors dressed their soup with herbs from a spread of fresh mint, scallions, cilantro, and Thai basil. Nothing could have been more perfect to eat in this place, which was once, remarkably, an unused patch of land behind a church. It is one of the plots run by Refugee Garden Initiatives (RGI), a nonprofit established in 2023 by farmer Phimmasone Kym Owens to provide refugees with land on which they can grow nearly anything they desire. Owens’s goal is not only to offer a means of nourishment but also a place where the act of gardening can be healing for refugees who have faced complex, traumatic experiences.
After lunch, as I walked with Owens through a maze of terracotta pots and grow bags overflowing with fresh herbs, I asked her what she’s proudest to grow. Her face lit up as she said without hesitation, “Fish mint.” The herb serves as a tangy and savory garnish or ingredient in summer rolls, as well as a tangible reminder of her early childhood home in Laos. In the aftermath of the “Secret War” waged by the CIA, her family fled as refugees, eventually arriving in Chicago in 1981 during a blizzard, a far cry from humid Southeast Asia. As they adjusted to their new lives, they began to grow some of the foods they were used to eating at home but were not available or easily accessible in the Midwest. “Back home, my mom’s family were subsistence farmers. We grew and harvested our own food,” says Owens. “That carried with me coming to the U.S., where I would always help my mom and enjoy our little gardens in every apartment we moved to.” The Lao American families in their community found ways to grow food in their homes, no matter how small the space. Inspired by these gardens, Owens and the refugee gardeners RGI helps have used vertical garden systems to grow produce anywhere, even in formerly vacant lots with poor soil.
Owens is one of several Asian American farmers in Michigan whose work fulfills vital and often overlooked niches in our food system. Despite Asian cuisine being perhaps more popular nationwide than ever before, it’s still very rare to see the true breadth of Asian produce represented at mainstream grocery stores in Michigan and the Midwest more broadly, a region with a distinct and sometimes overlooked Asian American community. Farmers like Owens are starting to fill this gap by not only growing Asian produce, but creating spaces for Asian food culture and community to flourish.
If Midwestern Asian Americans are “doubly invisible,” in historian Erika Lee’s words, then Midwestern Asian American farmers might be triply so. Despite making up only 0.8 percent of the country’s producers, the number of Asian-operated farms has increased by 6 percent from 2017 to 2022. In Michigan, the percentage of Asian producers increased from 0.2 percent to 0.3 percent during that period, meaning fifty-one Asian people started a farm or became more involved in running one. So I spoke with a variety of Asian American farmers in Michigan—some immigrants and some born in the U.S., some who have farmed for over a decade and others just beginning—about why and how they farm. Though there isn’t a single story of Asian American farming, they all have faced significant roadblocks to breaking into mainstream food channels and instead have found greater success in alternative food systems. In doing so, these farmers are asserting a sense of autonomy and authenticity over the food they grow and eat.
In seeking to help refugees in Michigan grow the food of home, Owens is addressing a significant and diverse community—the state has one of the highest numbers of refugee resettlement in the country. Before the second Trump administration severely cut the number of refugee admissions in 2025, more than thirty thousand refugees arrived in Michigan between 2012 and 2024, the majority of whom were from Iraq, Syria, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Burma, Somalia, and Bhutan. The need for culturally relevant produce and community across the Asian diaspora and beyond became even greater than before.
Michigan is environmentally well-suited to meet this need, as one of the most agriculturally diverse states in the country, second only to California, and with a much lower cost of living and land. Made entirely of peninsulas, Michigan is almost completely surrounded by the Great Lakes, which impacts the state’s weather on a daily basis. Because the lakes take longer to change temperature than the land, they temper any hot or cold air that rolls over them before it travels inland, thereby protecting crops from drastic rises and falls in temperature. When spring eases into Michigan, fruit trees are protected from sudden heat spikes; frosts are delayed when fall slides into winter, extending the harvest season. In addition to the thermal regulation the lakes provide, Michigan has a vast variety of soils—sandy and rocky soils in the north, and clay and loamy soils in the south. No one region, let alone field, may have the same dirt composition. Because biodiversity starts with the soil, diverse soil leads to diverse plant life. These soil microregions, combined with four distinct seasons and the thermal protection the lakes provide, makes the state fertile ground for a wide range of fruits and vegetables.
It also enables Asian American farmers to grow an enormous variety of both standard American fare and produce from all over Asia’s many climates, like Asian pears that prefer temperate climates and lemongrass that thrive in tropical, humid conditions. When immigrants and refugees arrive in Michigan, they actually have the right conditions to grow some of the produce that reminds them of home.
With this favorable environment, RGI has helped several families from Southeast Asian, African, SWANA, and Latin American countries start their own gardens. Many also use techniques that were passed down to them from previous generations. A few Afghan refugees, for example, used a method Owens had never seen: They dug out the topsoil to make terraced shelves of dirt in the ground where they would plant seeds. Through an irrigation canal they had dug on the side of the plot, they would water the whole area from the front and let gravity do the work of irrigating each terrace, first reaching the flowers, then the tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, and cucumbers in succession. Though tilling the topsoil is generally frowned upon in modern American farming, Owens took it as a chance to learn rather than to discourage. And the result? “They had some of the largest eggplants I had ever seen grown in the Midwest!” she exclaimed. “We don’t need a master gardener saying, ‘Oh, you guys are doing this wrong. In the United States, we don’t do it that way, we do it this way.’… We want to encourage these indigenous practices.” In preserving such traditions, Owens knows it’s about more than just growing a crop. It’s about carrying on the knowledge and memories of refugees’ home countries—and in doing so, giving them a space of independence and community.
For other farmers, growing specialty produce is not only the most inclusive path forward but also the most economically sound. Taik Fountaine, the co-owner of Two Tracks Acres, grows vegetables and mushrooms in Grass Lake. His specialty mushrooms, which include Asian varieties like shiitake and lion’s mane that appeal to a diverse audience, are some of his best-sellers.
When Fountaine first started out over ten years ago, he wrote down the names of all his regulars inside his cash box, which became futile as his community of customers grew. His stall is most successful at the Farmington Farmers Market in Oakland County, which has the largest Asian American population in the state and is one of the state’s most ethnically diverse counties. Fountaine sells next to Xiong’s Fresh Asian Produce, a stall led by Hmong American farmer Tou Xiong who, like Owens, fled from Laos as a child with his family because of the “Secret War.” After his father had witnessed years of death and destruction as a soldier during the war, when they resettled in the Midwest, he just wanted to farm. For Xiong, who took what he learned from his father and applied it to his land in Emmett, Michigan, farming naturally complemented his day job as an art teacher because, in his words, “farming is about beauty.”
Like Fountaine, he’s attentive to his diverse set of customers. He knows not only what vegetables different regulars like but also which parts of the plant they use and in what stages they like their vegetables harvested. For instance, while most Americans are familiar with using hibiscus flowers for tea, he sells the leaves as well because his Indian customers like using them to make sauces, curries, and chutneys. It also exposes customers and farmers alike to new ways to harvest and cook vegetables; Xiong has even shown Fountaine produce he had never seen before like waxy corn.
Alternative food systems like farmers markets have given Xiong and Fountaine opportunities to intimately know and respond to their community’s desires that a mainstream grocery store never could, which has also proven to be a valuable economic foothold in an often difficult profession. In finding their own paths to sustaining their farms and communities, Fountaine and Xiong are also helping reshape notions of farmworkers. “When you think of an American farmer, you think of corn, soy, amber waves of grain,” Fountaine says. “But there’s a huge umbrella [covering] what a farmer is.”
The concept of growing for your community is not new to southeast Michigan. For over a century, Detroit has had a strong legacy of urban farming, especially in times of economic downturn. One of the country’s first community garden programs was started during the recession of 1893–1897 in Detroit, which turned a number of vacant lots into sites of nourishment. More recently, in the years since the decline of the American automobile industry, the residents of Detroit continued to turn to urban farming and community gardens to fill the gaps created by food deserts. And in 1992, Grace Lee Boggs, one of the country’s most celebrated Chinese American activists, created Detroit Summer with her husband, activist James Boggs. The initiative brought youth and elders together to create community gardens and public murals by day and enjoy communal dinners by night. Many elders were members of the Gardening Angels, who Boggs wrote were “a loose network of mainly African American Southern-born elders who plant[ed] gardens not only to produce healthier food for themselves and their neighbors but to instill respect for nature and process in young people and to stop crime.”
Today, Metro Detroit is home to a variety of farms and cooperatives, including some that are Asian owned and operated. I visited Fisheye Farms in the Core City neighborhood, where I met Andy Chae, a skateboarder and co-owner of the farm. His farm, like RGI’s plot behind the church, started in 2015 as a vacant lot. It has since expanded to multiple lots, for a total of about two acres of land. Like Boggs, Chae and his wife got into urban agriculture in part because they were motivated by its potential for contributing to Detroit’s food sovereignty and reducing the city’s carbon footprint.
As Chae gave me a tour around the farm, he pointed out the rows of scallions, garlic, and other vegetables that were sprouting from the ground. He showed me the Japanese paper pot transplanting technique they use to efficiently deposit hundreds of seedlings into the earth in very little time. He, like nearly all the farmers I spoke to this spring, aims to grow produce in the most sustainable and chemical-free way possible, which means the work is labor-intensive and more costly than industrial farming.
While he likes growing Asian produce like napa cabbage and daikon, he struggles with finding customers. “I think the problem with growing and selling Asian produce in general is that it’s expensive,” he says, noting that Fisheye Farms can’t compete with the large farms that make cheap produce possible. Indeed, it was a common thread among the farmers I spoke to that the true cost of labor and responsible growing methods, along with the difficulty of procuring enough land and labor to farm at scale, seemed to be one of the largest barriers to entering mainstream supermarkets. This systemic barrier is not new: various alien land laws in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries made agricultural landownership for Asian Americans nearly impossible, and the last one was only invalidated by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1952.
For now, Fisheye Farms sells its produce to restaurants and through its cooperative CSA and weekly farmstand. And while the work can be demanding, Chae and his wife remain committed to growing food on their own terms and for their local Detroit community. Chae grew up in Metro Detroit and, after spending time in Chicago, chose to return to his home city when he started his own farm. In doing so, he joins the evolving tradition of food sovereignty in the city that Boggs described nearly thirty years ago in her 1998 autobiography, Living for Change. “All over the city people have been saying for years that we have to bring life back into our neighborhoods by producing for ourselves and creating our own community markets,” she wrote. “Detroit’s revival begins with community gardens.”
Outside of Detroit, several Asian farmers are creating their own food culture, especially in areas with a small Asian population. Kori Kanayama, the farm chef and culinary teacher behind Purslane Commons in Grass Lake, has responded to being one of the few Asian Americans in her rural area by gathering regularly with fellow Asian American farmers like Fountaine. Each month, they use ingredients from their farms to make dishes that are challenging to find for miles, like Lanzhou-style beef noodle soup.
Kanayama also teaches classes that often center around Japanese cuisine at her and her partner’s farm or in local community kitchens. At one recent workshop, she taught students how to make soba from scratch with hand-milled buckwheat. She has wrestled with teaching traditional Japanese dishes without having access to all the fresh Asian produce she had when she lived in Tokyo, where she was born and lived for much of her childhood and teenage years. Even though she can grow an impressive variety of Asian vegetables, she can’t grow everything she cherished from her childhood. (In fact, some Asian vegetables like water spinach and mugwort are illegal to grow in many U.S. states because they are deemed invasive species.)
Kanayama has come to the conclusion that cultural authenticity originates from what is there and what is local. “In Japan, we just cook what is abundant—fish, vegetables, rice, and whatever wild things are gathered,” she said. “If we just continue to insist on importing Japanese ingredients just to make Japanese food in Michigan, maybe it’s just diverting from the original [purpose] of cultural foods. So why not evolve it according to the locations where we live?” One way in which she does this is by applying Japanese cooking techniques to produce that grows well on her farm—for example, she makes miso soup or goma-ae with local greens rather than the ones that are typically used in Japan. She takes direction from the land. She’s found burdock root growing like a weed around the farm and forages it to make kinpira gobo. By adapting her cooking to local produce, Kanayama is creating her own unique food and idea of authenticity. She says, “It’s a special opportunity for immigrants to evolve the foods of our homelands.”
While the farmers I spoke with are all finding success in alternative food systems, they face many hurdles. In addition to the difficulties of farming responsibly and at scale, many Asian American farmers also must contend with a charged political climate and hypervisibility in largely white spaces. The recent escalation in mass deportations has left many immigrant farmers and gardeners fearing for their lives and increasingly wary. Owens, for example, worries about the safety of the refugee families she works with at RGI, especially in more isolated areas. “We’re concerned about raids and being picked up by ICE,” she says. “We’re afraid of the communities who don’t support refugees.” The political climate along with recent immigration policies is stifling to many. “A lot of individuals are afraid to come out,” notes Owens.
This moment—where the surge in deportations has led to concerns about the absence of workers at farms and slaughterhouses—serves as a reminder of how crucial Asian American farmers have been in growing America’s food for centuries whether or not that produce was “specialty” or “standard” American fare, whether they were the farm owners or the exploited laborers of agricultural corporations, whether they were the visible face of farming in America or not. One needs only to remember the enormous hole left in the West Coast’s food supply when Japanese Americans were forced into incarceration camps or the thousands of Asian immigrants who worked under terrible conditions on Hawai’i’s sugarcane plantations, to recognize how vital Asian Americans and immigrants overall have been to American agriculture. As food studies expert Nina F. Ichikawa notes, Asian Americans have always been “pioneering farmers, literally building soil that to this day forms the fertile foundation of farms that still exist.”
The vital work of Asian American–operated farms reverberates, however imperceptibly, from the margins to more well-known avenues. One of RGI’s missions, for instance, is to use their farms to teach others how to grow crops and make foods that are new to them, including Asian produce and dishes. I attended one such workshop last month, when the community came together to make summer rolls. Working together at long tables, we placed the cilantro and lettuce we had twisted out of the soil into nests of rice noodles and damp rice paper.
The freshness of the herbs straight from the ground brought me back to a day years ago when I visited my college’s campus farm. It was the first time I had met an Asian American farmer, and his work made me feel closer to the foods so vital to my diet. He told us about learning how to brew his own soy sauce, the most basic and necessary ingredient in my pantry, and yet one for which I had no knowledge of its production. And he taught us how to harvest, clean, and grow scallions. When I pulled them from the ground, I was amazed at how perfectly pointy and solid they were. I biked to the nearest grocery store, bought the glossiest fish I could afford, and steamed it, garnishing it with the scallions and some cilantro I wilted with hot oil. Later that night when I fell into a deep and immediate sleep, I thought, This is true nourishment.
Standing in the RGI garden, taking a bite of the summer rolls we had all made together, I felt that same kind of nourishment. That same feeling—that so many of the farmers I spoke with share—that maybe I too could one day grow the things I missed.
This piece is part of the Summer 2026 issue.
