A White Paper from the Care Farming Network based on research conducted with support from the USDA Northeast SARE Education & Research Grant. Download the PDF here.
What Is Care Farming?
Imagine a workplace where the structure comes from the seasons, where your coworkers cheer when the first tomatoes ripen, and where showing up every day isn’t just a job – it’s an identity. That’s a care farm.
Care farming uses therapeutic agricultural practices to promote health, well-being, and belonging. On a care farm, adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities (I/DD) grow vegetables, tend animals, run greenhouses, and take real ownership of real work. The farm isn’t a simulation or a day program; it’s a working operation, and every person on it matters for its success.
Care farming is well established across Europe, where thousands of farms are integrated into national health and social care systems. The Netherlands alone has more than 1,200 care farms. In the United States, the model is newer but growing fast. Care Farming Network (CFN), launched in 2021 as a program of Maryland’s Red Wiggler Care Farm, now connects more than 380 care farms across the country.
This white paper summarizes findings from a two-year research study examining what makes care farms successful and what they actually do for the adults with I/DD who work on them.
The Problem Care Farming Is Solving
Eighty-five percent of adults with developmental disabilities do not hold a paid job in their community. The reasons are systemic: limited employer awareness, inadequate supports, and a workforce culture that has historically excluded neurodivergent people from meaningful participation.
The consequences are serious. Adults with I/DD who are unemployed face higher rates of social isolation, diminished mental health, and reduced quality of life. Research consistently shows that employment improves self-esteem, independence, and community connection for this population, yet most never get the chance.
Care farms offer a different path.
What the Research Found
Researchers Dr. Paige Jackson and Dr. Deborah Gangluff conducted 41 interviews across six established care farms in the northeastern United States. They spoke with growers, the adults with I/DD employed on the farms, along with their parents, farm staff, volunteers, and founders. Six major themes emerged.
1. People Stay — For Years, Sometimes Decades
In most disability employment programs, job placements are brief. People cycle through roles, rarely building lasting careers.
Care farms are different. Across six farms, growers had been employed for an average of six to eight years. Several had worked at the same farm for fifteen or twenty years. When researchers asked growers about their future plans, fifteen of the sixteen interviewed said the same thing: they wanted to stay.
One grower with twenty years of tenure answered the question about his future in four words: “Right. Twenty years. Farmer.” The emphasis wasn’t on the number. It was on the identity.
Parents described watching their adult children build careers they once thought impossible. One mother said simply: “She identifies as a farmer now. I never thought she would have a regular life. This is who she is.”
This kind of stability, rare in disability employment, matters deeply. Long-term tenure enables skill growth, identity formation, and the kind of belonging that changes a person’s life.
2. Adults with I/DD Keep Developing — Well Into Adulthood
A common and damaging assumption in disability services is that adults with I/DD reach a developmental peak in their twenties. Services are concentrated in the youth transition years, and adult programs often focus on maintenance rather than growth.
The research tells a different story.
Across all 41 interviews, growers demonstrated continued cognitive, social, emotional, and vocational development well into their thirties, forties, and beyond. One grower who had worked on his farm for eighteen years, described by staff as a “creature of habit,” underwent a dramatic transformation at age 39 when COVID-19 forced the farm to adapt quickly and assign new responsibilities. Staff watched him reorganize, problem-solve, and take on complexity he had never attempted. “He’s 2.0 now,” one staff member said.
A grower who had been quiet and hesitant when he started described his trajectory after two years: “When I started, I talked very quiet. Now I give tours to schools and I’m doing a really good job.”
Parents repeatedly described witnessing growth they had been told was impossible. One mother, herself an educator who understood child development, admitted she had assumed her son’s growth had peaked at 21. He started at the farm at 23. He was 34 at the time of the interview. “His growth has been unbelievable,” she said.
The implication is significant: if adults with I/DD continue developing throughout life, then services that stop investing in them after age 22 are not just inadequate. They’re cutting development short.
3. The Farm Environment Itself Is Therapeutic
Something happens on a farm that can’t be replicated in an office, a warehouse, or a sheltered workshop.
Growers described loving the outdoors consistently and viscerally. When one researcher asked a grower why he liked the farm, he answered: “Because outdoors.” Others talked about loving the physical work, the plants, the animals, the fresh air, even on hot days, even in the rain.
But beyond the sensory environment, the farm creates something harder to manufacture: meaningful work with real consequences. Plants die if no one waters them. Customers depend on the harvest. The work is tangible and necessary, and growers know it.
As one parent put it: “This is a real farm, not a play farm. He would know if it wasn’t real work.”
Research confirmed that growers who had previously disengaged in sheltered workshops, where tasks were sometimes invented to keep people occupied, thrived in farm settings where every task had a purpose. Authenticity of work, researchers found, matters more than task difficulty.
The farm also provides natural structure. Seasonal rhythms create predictable routines — planting in spring, harvesting in fall — without requiring staff to artificially impose schedules. One farm director noted that the plants themselves create accountability: “The plants tell you what needs doing and when.”
4. “Where They Shine” Matters More Than What They Can Do
Traditional disability employment approaches assess individual capabilities and match people to jobs they can competently perform. This study found that capability alone doesn’t predict success.
Growers with significant limitations sometimes thrived for decades. More capable growers sometimes struggled or left. What made the difference wasn’t skill level. It was the fit – how appropriate the placement was for the grower.
One manager described watching growers who had seemed unlikely candidates discover work they were made for: “Not only did they own their job, they are now diamonds shining in this position.”
The opposite was equally instructive. One grower was moved from the farm to a thrift store, not because she couldn’t do farm work, but because the environment was wrong. She was uncomfortable with the sun, the heat, the sensory experience of being outside. At the thrift store, “she just absolutely took off.” Same capabilities, different environment, completely different outcome.
For practice and policy, the implication is clear. Care farms don’t ask ‘Can this person do the job?’ They ask a better question: ‘Where does this person shine?’
5. Care Farms Benefit Whole Communities
Disability employment programs are typically framed as services flowing one direction: from providers to people with disabilities. This research found that care farms don’t work that way.
The benefits flow in every direction.
At one farm, elderly widows on fixed incomes, many using SNAP benefits, had become regular visitors. They weren’t just coming for the vegetables. They were coming for the growers, who greeted them with warmth that exceeded anything in typical retail. “Our cashiers are the most aggressively friendly people,” one manager said. “There are hugs and tears on a daily basis.”
Volunteers found purpose and meaning through the physical work and community the farm created. One volunteer described the experience: “The joy, the satisfaction of working with your hands, the beautiful produce, the interactions with staff with and without disabilities — it’s a really joyful experience.”
Business owners who visited care farms reconsidered their own hiring practices. One retired bookstore owner said: “We could have hired somebody with a disability. We just didn’t know. I’d never considered that.”
Care farms don’t just serve individuals. They transform the communities around them.
6. The Model Faces Real Sustainability Challenges
The research was honest about what doesn’t work yet.
Staff burnout appeared across every farm, regardless of size or funding level. Farm employees described doing “two jobs in one,” combining agricultural work and therapeutic support without adequate training or compensation for either. Directors described feeling like they were constantly “winging it.” The phrase appeared so often across so many farms that researchers identified it as a field-wide phenomenon, not individual insecurity.
Funding is genuinely hard. Three models emerged: state contract funding, earned revenue, and partnership arrangements, each with its own trade-offs. Farms with stable funding sometimes grew too fast and lost quality. Farms dependent on product sales faced constant pressure that pitted therapeutic mission against business survival.
The troubling finding: the best-funded farm received the most critical parent feedback. The poorly-funded farms produced the most enthusiastic testimonials. Resource abundance didn’t guarantee quality experience.
What did guarantee it, in farm after farm, was staff who believed in the mission deeply enough to work through difficult conditions. That kind of commitment is unsustainable without better structural support.
What This Means
The evidence from this study is clear and consistent across six farms, three stakeholder groups, and 41 interviews: care farming works.
It produces employment retention that other disability programs cannot match. It supports development across the entire lifespan, not just through age 22. It creates belonging, identity, and community in ways that change lives — not just for growers with I/DD, but for families, volunteers, neighbors, and the broader communities care farms serve.
The United States has the model. It has the farms. What it needs now is the recognition, funding infrastructure, and policy support that allows care farming to scale, so that every adult with I/DD who wants to be a farmer has the chance to say, simply and proudly: “Farmer.”
About This Research
This study was conducted by Dr. Paige Jackson, OTR/L, OTD, and Dr. Deborah Gangluff, Sc.D., OTR, with support from the USDA Northeast SARE Education & Research Grant (Project LNE23-467) and Red Wiggler Care Farm. Research was conducted in accordance with IRB approval through the University of Central Arkansas. Forty-one interviews were completed across six care farms in the northeastern United States with growers, parents, staff, volunteers, and founders.
Learn more about CFN’s three-year Research and Education grant to build the care farming movement in this CFN Update.