David Chen grows more than 600 varieties of fruits, vegetables, and herbs at Zoe’s Garden in Layton, Utah. For him, farming is as much about cultivating resilience and community as it is about producing food.
“To me, the concept of sustainability always has been how to sustain myself,” says Chen.
This idea has guided Chen since he was a child, when his family emigrated to the United States from China in 1982. They came to Utah with little money, support, or English language skills. Chen remembers the conversations that followed: “We came together as a family and talked. How can we sustain ourselves?”
The family soon relocated to California. Chen decided to stay behind and live with an American family while working restaurant jobs. When his younger brother struggled, Chen took him in, and the question of how to sustain emerged again. Chen was still a teenager himself, and he says the experience of being responsible for family became his education.
“I did not get a college education,” Chen says. “I got my education from how to survive, how to sustain myself.”
Eventually, Chen started his own landscaping and nursery businesses. He grew poinsettias, which are popular tropical shrubs that are prone to pests, says Chen. He was spraying pesticides to keep pests at bay, but the heavy use of agricultural chemicals began to affect his health. When Chen and his wife decided to grow their family, he was forced to change practices.
“I was spraying harmful chemicals, and they made me sick all the time,” says Chen. “My wife told me, ‘Are we going to start a family?’ … ‘Well, only if you stop killing yourself.’”
That meant rethinking how he grew plants. Chen completely stopped using chemicals and instead began farming vegetables in greenhouses. When his first daughter, Zoe, was born, he named the farm after her—a customer had told him that the name means “abundant life” in Greek.
Through Zoe’s Garden, Chen was among a small group helping build Utah’s local food movement and community-supported agriculture (CSA) network. Today, the farm supplies grown fruits, vegetables, and herbs to CSA members, farmers’ markets, and local restaurants.
Chen has involved his daughters in every aspect of the farm: planting seeds, harvesting crops, speaking with customers, and bringing food to market. And his daughters have picked up education of their own through the work.
Once, a farmers’ market customer offered Chen’s six-year-old daughter US$0.50 for a US$4 cantaloupe. She told the customer, “If you can’t afford it, I’m more than happy to give it to you.” She then explained the labor behind the food: how early she woke, how much work went into bringing produce to market.
“I didn’t teach her that,” Chen says. He was proud.
Last fall, his daughters organized a farm day, inviting customers to visit Zoe’s Garden, harvest produce, and experience farm life firsthand. Chen recalls one older visitor navigating muddy fields with a walker and a puppy, eventually picking flowers to assemble into a bouquet: “Everyone was really, really happy.”
For Chen, those moments reinforce how farming is about relationships: between people and food, growers and consumers, communities and the systems that sustain them.
“Part of our concept is how to maximize our ability to sustain ourselves,” says Chen. “We, as Zoe’s Garden, try to share this idea with the local community in every way that we can.”
Watch Chen’s story below and find others from our farmer storytelling events on Food Tank’s YouTube channel.
This article is part of Food Tank’s ongoing Farmer Friday series, produced in partnership with Niman Ranch, a champion for independent U.S. family farmers. The series highlights the stories of farmers working toward a more sustainable, equitable food system. Niman Ranch partners with over 500 small-scale U.S. family farmers and is committed to preserving rural agricultural communities and their way of life.
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