Farm Credit helps Farmer Veteran Coalition provide grants and resources for veterans building careers ranging from alternative farming to orchards to therapeutic gardens
Kellen LeMasters wants to help diversify farming in the Napa Valley. Joshua Donecker spends his off hours tending 2,500 pomegranate trees near Hemet. And Lavelle Lemonier, builds mobile raised garden beds that help veterans and others with disabilities discover the therapeutic value of gardening.
Their operations may look very different, but they share one thing in common: All three are veterans who recently received grants through the Farmer Veteran Coalition’s Farmer Veteran Fellowship Fund, supported in California by seven Farm Credit organizations.
They are among 122 veterans and active-duty military nationwide who recently received small grants from the National Farmer Veteran Coalition, which helps veterans build post-service careers in agriculture.
LeMasters had always been interested in a career in agriculture, but only after first fulfilling his first passion — becoming a military pilot. After graduating from Fresno State in 2013, the Napa native joined the Army and spent almost nine years as an Apache helicopter pilot, including tours in Iraq and Syria.
After leaving the military as a captain, he spent two years earning an MBA from Notre Dame. While learning a lot, he also found he wasn’t cut out to follow traditional career pathways.
“You kind of get wrapped up into the standard MBA pathways — you can go into corporate financing, you can go into investment banking, you can go into consulting at the big firms,” he said. “I tried some of that and realized that just wasn’t for me.”
But the MBA program took him to a two-week consulting opportunity in Uganda, where he consulted with the owners of a 500-acre regenerative farm. That experience sparked a new passion.
“I got first-hand experience into a local’s perspective on their farm, why they’re doing what they’re doing and the impact they’re having locally on their communities. And that just kind of reinvigorated my interest (in agriculture). It was always there but I thought, ‘wow, I absolutely do not want to leave because I love being out on the farm.’”
Now he’s working on ways that might lead to a partnership with the Napa Valley Land Trust to utilize conserved land for alternative farming, both to begin diversifying the ag economy from its near-total reliance on wine and to provide opportunities for first-generation farmers.
“What I’m most passionate about here is creating avenues and pathways for underserved communities and for first-generation farmers, which will have to be the case if we want to build a local food supply,” he said. “Long-term, this is a building block in carrying Robert Egger’s torch forward about how to get better food to more people for less money,” referring to the founder of the DC Central Kitchen and the L.A. Kitchen.
LeMasters, envisions working with the land trust and landowners to first introduce rotational grazing on some marginal ag land and eventually to provide space for row crops and specialty crops. He plans to use his grant to purchase a portable electric net fencing kit and a soil test kit to provide proof of concept for reduction in wildfire fuel loads on a defined area while generating baseline soil data to measure ecological improvement over time.
Farm Credit has supported the Farmer Veteran program for almost a decade, helping provide grants and educational resources to veterans entering agriculture.
“Farm Credit is proud to be able to help individuals who have served in our armed forces build a new life in agriculture,” said AgWest Farm Credit California President Kevin Ralph. “The grants – given directly to third-party vendors for items the veteran has identified – helps set a veteran on the path for success.”
Bradley Eader, Learning and Development Lead for American AgCredit, said as valuable as the grants are, other program benefits are important as well.
“Besides the grants, the Farmer Veteran program also offers invaluable educational workshops, legal consultations and business and financial planning to help give the veterans a firm foundation,” he said.
Grant recipients must have an agricultural business in operation and a business plan.
Farm Credit associations supporting the program are AgWest Farm Credit, American AgCredit, CoBank, Colusa-Glenn Farm Credit, Fresno Madera Farm Credit, Golden State Farm Credit and Yosemite Farm Credit. These organizations are part of the nationwide Farm Credit System – the largest provider of credit to U.S. agriculture.
Also receiving the Farm Credit grants were Derek Weese with the Bar Down Ranch in Petaluma and Zachary Paschall with Deuteronomy 6 Ranch in Marysville.
LeMasters’ path to farming really began overseas in Uganda, but for Joshua Donecker, agriculture became a family affair.
His wife, Kimberly’s family, began growing pomegranates on its 40-acre property now known as Owl Creek Farms in 2014. The farm also produces lavender and blackberries, and the couple raise horses as well.
A career soldier, he enlisted in the Army in 1998 and was assigned to the military police. He eventually became an officer and currently is a lieutenant colonel serving as the head of security and emergency services at Fort Irwin, up I-15 in Barstow.
The family moved to the farm while he was stationed in Arizona and soon found he enjoyed farming.
“It was a family thing, but then I just kind of fell in love with it,” he said. “My favorite part is propagating – making new trees from clippings. I think it’s the most efficient, cool thing you can do – and pomegranates propagate very easily.”
The Doneckers sell large pomegranates to grocery stores in San Diego County and juice many of the rest. Ultimately, he’d love to expand to 10,000 trees but knows they would have to tackle logistical issues like storage and also establish a relationship with large-scale processors to avoid having large amounts of fruit they couldn’t sell.
Donecker is planning to use his grant for small equipment and storage.
While Donecker is expanding a traditional farming operation, Lavelle Lemonier, is using agriculture in a different way — as a form of therapy and accessibility.
Lemonier’s family farmed cotton and later rice in southeast Texas, so he’d always had an interest in farming and found gardening to be therapeutic. It became more so after he served with the 82nd Airborne in Iraq and suffered a career-ending injury.
“After serving, you have to find ways to cope with things that you faced and realities that you come home to, and gardening was always therapeutic for me. It gave me a safe space. The problem I have is because of some knee and back issues I couldn’t garden bending over. That’s what led me to the product that I have and that I’m using the grant funds for,” he said.
The base product is a sturdy, wooden raised garden container with wheels, while the adaptive veterans model includes adjustable-height support legs. The Garden to Go units are 48 inches long, 24 inches wide and 18 inches deep.
At this point, Lemonier builds each unit by hand and even delivers them within a reasonable distance from his Los Angeles-area home. Others are shipped. He used his grant to pay for power tools to make construction easier and added that the resources the Farmer Veteran program provide are at least as valuable as the grants themselves.
“Maybe even more important than the amount are the resources that are available through the coalition — the training resources, the seminars that they have, the networking opportunities, those are all very valuable,” he said.
About Farm Credit:
AgWest Farm Credit, American AgCredit, CoBank, Colusa-Glenn Farm Credit, Fresno Madera Farm Credit, Golden State Farm Credit and Yosemite Farm Credit are cooperatively owned lending institutions providing agriculture and rural communities with a dependable source of credit. For more than 100 years, the Farm Credit System has specialized in financing farmers, ranchers, farmer-owned cooperatives, rural utilities and agribusinesses. Farm Credit offers a broad range of loan products and financial services, including long-term real estate loans, operating lines of credit, equipment and facility loans, cash management and appraisal and leasing services…everything a “growing” business needs. For more information, visit www.farmcreditalliance.com
About the Farmer Veteran Coalition:
The mission of the Farmer Veteran Coalition is to serve, empower, and connect military veterans and active-duty service members with the resources, education, training, and partnerships necessary to cultivate successful careers in agriculture. The Farmer Veteran Fellowship Fund is a small grant program that provides direct assistance to veterans who are in their beginning years of farming or ranching. The Fellowship Fund does not give money directly to the veteran, but rather to third-party vendors for items the veteran has identified will make a crucial difference in the launch of their farm business. Awards range from $1,000 to $5,000, and nearly $4 million has been awarded to more than 930 veterans since 2011.