Care Farming

Red Wiggler brings together organic farming and meaningful opportunities for people with and without intellectual and developmental disabilities to promote independence, connection, and well-being.

What is Care Farming?

Care farming promotes health, well-being, and belonging through therapeutic farming.

Care farming is a way of using regular farm activities—like planting, harvesting, and looking after animals—to help people feel healthier, happier, and more connected. Care farms offer hands-on activities like working with plants, animals, and other people in nature as a way to promote well-being.

Our farm primarily focuses on using these therapeutic techniques to help people with intellectual and developmental disabilities, but care farms around the world serve different groups of people — including veterans, seniors with dementia, and people facing substance use and addiction or mental health challenges.

Our roots: More than 25 years of care farming

After working in group homes, our founder Woody Woodroof saw the need for healthier food and more meaningful jobs for adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities. He started Red Wiggler Care Farm  to ensure purposeful and therapeutic work for his staff while connecting the local community with fresh, nutritious food.

Since 1996, Red Wiggler has been using therapeutic farming and employing adults with disabilities, becoming a leader in care farming in the United States.

“Red Wiggler is bringing whole farms together to share resources, practices, and learning, while also encouraging other would-be farmers to engage on a local level.”

- Kate Schmidgall, Editor-in-Chief, BitterSweet Monthly

Care Farming Network

Red Wiggler began an outreach effort in 2018 to unite farms working with adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities. We contacted and visited care farms in the Mid-Atlantic area and began building a comprehensive database of existing care farms.

With the goal of strengthening the care farming movement, ensuring farmers have the support they need to be effective, and helping aspiring care farmers access resources and best practices to start their care farm, we hosted the inaugural Mid-Atlantic Care Farming Summit in October of 2018. The groundbreaking event attracted more than 70 attendees from seven U.S. states and Italy, fostering the beginnings of a vibrant care farm community.

We continued education and outreach during the following two years by organizing workshops and presenting shared lessons and standard practices at the Farm-Based Education Conference and the PASA Sustainable Agriculture Conference.

In 2021, Red Wiggler established Care Farming Network (CFN) as a permanent program and launched a new website featuring the nation’s first online care farm directorySince then, CFN has expanded its impact through hosted member gatherings, a mentorship program, an ever-growing resource library, and the Care Farming Network National Conference, which unites care farmers, researchers, and advocates from across the country. Together, these efforts strengthen a growing movement and build the foundation for a care farm in every county.

Learn about our efforts to connect established and aspiring care farms

Care Farming Network provides expert consultations, opportunities for mentorship, and hosts gatherings for care farms across the U.S.