What is Rhiannon Farms?
Greetings, everyone! Welcome to our blog. Here, we'll be keeping you up-to-date about where we're at on our adventure to a better world, one small step at a time. To start, we at Rhiannon Farms thought you'd like to hear a little bit more about how we got started and what exactly we are trying to accomplish.
In order to completely understand how each member of the team got into the idea of being sustainable, go check out our bio page to learn more about each of us individually! We're a pretty good looking group of people, and our stories are all very inspiring, as well!
Who is part of the team?
For the sake of the blog, the abridged version of each of the stories is that we all have very different backgrounds, but we all have a love of the environment and making sure that we have a future for generations to come. There are three Kenyans: Maureen, Roni, and Silas; and three Americans: Krys (the expat in the Netherlands), Krista, and Ryan.
Krys, our CLO, and Maureen, our CFO, both have teaching backgrounds. They will be helping to write curriculum for our educational seminars. Silas, our CTO, has been in charge of land acquisition and has teamed up with Maureen to help connect with vendors to get the great variety of produce we offer to the local Nairobi market. Ryan, our CEO, has an engineering background and works with Silas on building design for the living quarters and the greenhouses. Roni, our CSO, is an environmental scientist and keeps us on track with the best sustainability practices available in the local area. Finally, Krista, our CCO, is an artist, and is in charge of social media, website design, and blog maintenance.
How did you connect from across the world?
As insane as 2020 has been, it has really opened up people's worlds. No longer are we limited by actual physical proximity to those "around" us. Krista and Ryan are a legally bound, romantically-dynamic couple that claim Northern Indiana as home. Krista and Ryan desperately still wanted to have safe interactions with people during the quarantine, so they went to the internet to find people with whom to play D&D. Krys was one of the first people they played with, and the bond was started.
Around the same time, Krista quit her full-time job out of health concerns. She decided to start a blog about sustainability and some of her other hobbies. While discussing personal goals, Krys and Krista found that they both had a passion to teach people about sustainability and empowering people. Lots of long conversations later about lots of possibilities, the idea behind Rhiannon Farms was conceived.
Krys has a lot of professional connections through her work with transcription in the past. She reached out to all of her friends to find an area where we could have the best impact, and Silas just happened to have this land we could use. It all fell together so well, and the team is so creative and gifted with the ability to come up with great solutions to problems that come. Slowly, through a lot of meetings on Discord since the fall of 2020, we've established where we're at now.
What's your goal?
Education – We believe that education is the basic foundation to ensure environmental change and socio-economic empowerment. We plan to have a variety of options of seminars for corporate groups, family vacations, or group party events – the possibilities are endless. Once our final building phase is complete, we will have living quarters onsite, in which we will have comfortable, sustainably built and maintained rooms, bed and breakfast style.
Sustainability – This will include the basics: responsible practices with water recycling, crop rotation, composting, and making sure to limit our waste in our everyday lives. We also have an amazing opportunity to lessen our footprint by having the land that we are going to use only during the time the company is operating. Once Rhiannon Farms is no longer operating on the farm/operational, the land will go back to the community so that it can be used again for another purpose.
Socio-Economic Empowerment – Even before the historic events transpiring in the United States, all of the members of the team have had a passion for empowering their fellow humans. There has been a glaring light shown on how differently groups of people are treated, all based on the color of their skin. Our team is determined to set examples about how to run a business in a way that takes care of the community we serve, the members of the co-op, and our employees. We commit to paying an actual living wage to our employees. We also pledge to be transparent about our business practices to ensure an ethically run cooperative.