An interview by Linda Lubi with Elyssa Eull and Courtney Tchida

Linda Lubi is a UMN CURA student working with RTC during the 2025-2026 school year

Elyssa Eull is the owner/operator of California Street Farm, which uses low-till and cover-cropping to grow vegetables on a half an acre in Northeast Minneapolis; she sells via a farm stand, Community Supported Agriculture, and farmers’ market. California Street Farm was awarded a microgrant from Renewing the Countryside in 2025 to rebuild their irrigation system and build a wash and pack station. 

Courtney Tchida is the director of MN SEED Project, which provides native seeds and education about seed saving to farmers and gardeners throughout the Twin Cities and beyond. Formerly an organic farmer, Courtney co-created MN SEED in 2020 as a way to help regrow native plants and bring abundance back to wildlife. MN SEED Project was awarded a microgrant from Renewing the Countryside to collect, process, and distribute native seed through a series of educational workshops.

Linda: Could each of you please describe what you do to practice or support conservation?

Courtney: MN SEED Project works with the seed cycle of native plants. In our workshops, we teach people how to collect seeds, how to process, how to grow them, and then we share them with community members. It’s a lot of education work, teaching people about different plants and how pollinators use them, how wildlife uses them, their ecosystem services that they provide for the environment.

Elyssa: The conservation practices we do are utilizing low and no-till practices, so we are really focused on soil health and building up fungal communities. We also utilize cover cropping whenever we can, and organic practices; we never use any chemicals. Conservation is not the mission of our farm, but it is very baked into why we do things the way that we do. We use entirely drip irrigation so that we are trying to have the least amount of nutrient runoff as possible to protect our local waterways.

Linda: Why are you motivated to do these practices?

Courtney: Our organization started back in 2020 during the pandemic when the seed companies were running out of seeds. We were inspired to teach people how to save seeds at that point. We spent a season doing a lot of virtual workshops. By the end of the season, we got invited to a farm that had a 3-acre restored prairie, and got to do a seed collection, and that experience was really magical. That gave us a little nudge to go down the path we’ve been on ever since. We are really focused on native plants and the abundance that plants can produce and provide. We’re trying to lean into creating a gift economy of native seeds for our community, and make them really accessible to anyone who is interested in having them grow at their farm and their gardens, in their yards, wherever they can grow so that we can increase habitat, and ecosystem services for all.

Elyssa: What inspires us to utilize the conservation practices has a lot to do with seeing industrial, larger scale corn and soy farms around the Midwest, and seeing the impact of that on the soil and the communities locally, and on the water down the line in the Gulf of Mexico. That’s inspired me to do a lot of research over the last several years on what is sustainable for my body, my crew's bodies, as well as our business - conservation practices that we can incorporate in our farm system while still making a profit and running a successful business. We have to be very intentional about how we grow things so that we are building the soil up rather than breaking it down. I think there should be many more small farms where individuals have a relationship with the land so that they feel like it's their responsibility to steward it, rather than it being something that they are just extracting from.

Linda: Do you think about the social side of sustainability throughout your work?

Courtney: Yes, for us, the work that we do is very communal. We are doing it as a group -- every piece of it, from collecting the seeds, the cleaning of seeds, the processing of seeds, and even the packaging and labeling of seeds. Our mission is both to create this locally adapted native free seed economy, but also to create a community of practice around doing this work, and creating the social network of people who are interested in this work and want to do this work.

Elyssa: The social aspect is definitely a big reason why we do what we do. We are trying to take care of the earth, but a big part of that earth is our human population, especially communities in the city that have not been looked out for through history, so it feels good to be bringing something good to folks around here.

Linda: What value or what effect have you seen MN SEED having on the Twin Cities and on urban farming communities, Courtney?

Courtney: Increased accessibility to different native plants and seeds. I've actually been visiting a bunch of other farms for my other job [on staff at Wild Farm Alliance] these last two weeks. When I got to one of these farms, they had seeds from the MN SEED Project that they were growing on their farm - which is totally amazing to me, totally kind of serendipitous. We’d given seeds to someone who had then shared them with this farmer.

There's been a lot of articles and studies in the past few years about the limitations of the seed supply for native plants, and how there aren't enough seeds to do all the projects that want to be done out there. The work we do is expanding that potential. Last year, we created 20,000 seed packets and we gave most of those away. Each seed packet has between 10-50 seeds in it, and each of those seeds can turn into a plant. We’re only collecting 20% of any seeds that are out there, so we’re taking this tiny amount, which is creating all this abundance, and we’re sharing it everywhere we can. People are sharing seeds back that we're sharing out, and it's created a really beautiful community of people who are stewarding land and seeds, which is feeding insects, birds, and wildlife, and keeping our water cleaner.

Linda: Could you tell me more about regenerative farming, Elyssa?

Elyssa: Regenerative farming is a pretty large topic, and there are many people who are experts in their own way. I think that there’s a lot of regenerative farming that stems from Indigenous teachings and communities, which I can’t speak on, but I would say that the way that California Street Farm tries to farm regeneratively is really just with a focus on observation and taking in information from the soil and plants around us.

Linda Lubi (she/her) just received her Master’s in Urban and Regional Planning from the University of Minnesota. Within her studies, she focused on environmental justice and health equity. She worked at Renewing the Countryside as an Urban Agricultural Researcher interviewing urban agriculturists across the Twin Cities to learn more insight about their stories.