Growing up in Georgia in the 60s, Collie Graddick was exposed to farming and cooperative organizing in equal measure. His family ran a 200-acre meat farm, and also grew vegetables. After Graddick’s father secured a contract with a local produce broker who helped the family sell their surfeit of vegetables, thereby putting some extra cash in the family’s pockets—“my father used that to help us go to college,” Graddick recalls—Graddick’s father began to see how his low-income, mostly black neighbors could better use their land to raise themselves up: by farming it. He began visiting nearby communities and urging them to grow vegetables, eventually founding the West Georgia Farmers Cooperative in 1968. Under this structure, residents learned how to farm their land and then market their produce to earn a supplemental income and help escape the poverty many of them were born into.