Hinata Farms is Chicago’s first Japanese heritage farm
“It just feels right to be connected to the land and be connected to nature,” Kimura said.
By Zach Ben-Amots
ABC 7
Aug 27, 2020
Excerpt:
Kimura is the founder of Hinata Farms, a Japanese heritage farm located in Chicago’s South Side neighborhood of Bronzeville. Hinata is the first farm of its kind in Chicago, and it has introduced East Asian vegetables into Chicago’s urban growing community.
Along with offering unique produce locally, Kimura built the farm based on the “natural farming” teachings of Masanobu Fukuoka, who practiced a more observational style of farming with less human intervention.
“It’s an approach where you use what nature already does on its own because nature’s already perfected a lot of these (growing) processes,” Kimura said.
Hinata is one of six incubator farms in the Chicago Botanic Garden’s Windy City Harvest program.
“Our mission is food, health and jobs,” said Windy City Harvest coordinator Kelly Larsen. “We do that through seven agricultural programs that we look at as a continuum of opportunity.”
