City Sprouts Farm Intern

In the fall of 2024 and continued in the spring of 2025, I interned through City Sprouts Farm to learn about and experience first-hand practices of regenerative agriculture, nuances of food systems and food access, and community connections here in Whatcom County, Washington. City Sprouts Farm is a one-acre urban farm in the Birchwood neighborhood in Bellingham, Washington, established in 2017 by Ellie Duncan and Annah Young. This farm was created with the goal of providing accessible produce for community members who live in the neighborhood, which has been a food desert since their only grocery store closed in 2016. Through their work in the last seven years, City Sprouts, which started as an acre of solid blackberry bushes, has become a hub of growth for the land and for all who come to work on the farm. The farm produces a large array of vegetables, fruits, flowers, and more, and has operated utilizing values of regenerative agriculture, so soil health, cover cropping, and milpa (intercropping) have been core practices since the beginning. This past year, the farm has been adopted into WWU’s Center for Community Learning and is now an official program within that department, which is one of the big reasons why I learned about this internship and was able to access such a valuable learning opportunity. My work in the fall was centered around three main facets of food systems here in Whatcom County: work on the farm itself during the first half of the quarter, working with Ellie to prepare to conduct a food assessment research project for the Puget neighborhood in Bellingham, and volunteering with food distribution for Birchwood community members through Birchwood Food Desert Fighters. In the spring, nearly all of my internship hours were spent on the farm, preparing the land for planting and experiencing early crop growth.