A Talk with Reynaldo
By Hannah Westheimer, Local Farm & Food Artisan Researcher
On Monday evening Mary Ann and I traveled two hours from Philadelphia into beautiful Lebanon County farmland to visit Landisdale Farm and to hear –in Spanish—the story of Reynaldo, a man from Peru who helps Dan and Rachel Landis work their farm.

Reynaldo is part of a program called MESA (Multinational Exchange for Sustainable Agriculture) that sponsors international farmers to come to the US for training in sustainable and organic agriculture. In exchange, Reynaldo is expected to use his new knowledge for a project to benefit his home village in Chinchero, Peru. He’s looking forward to introducing new varieties of vegetables and organic methods of growing them. Currently, only potatoes and quinoa are grown (with the use of chemicals) there. Reynaldo was excited to learn about what HLF does, as he also wants to open a vegetable market and have classes to teach his villagers how to prepare the vegetables he plans to grow.

After conquering numerous obstacles—hurricanes, flooding, calendar mix-ups—Hannah and I finally made it to this much-anticipated meeting at Rachel and Dan Landis’s farm in Elizabethtown. Hannah, a fluent Spanish speaker, interviewed Reynaldo Levita who comes from Peru and helps Dan and Rachel farm their 200 or so acres. I’ve recently become concerned and interested in how our supplying farmers make decisions about their help, and this was our first face to face meeting with a person from a different country who does farm work on one of “our” farms. Hannah was a natural at interviewing in Spanish. She has written up Reynaldo’s story which you can find on the HLF website.