The hot summer months often mean full immersion in the natural world for those who grow their own food. On today’s show, host Douglas Haynes speaks with master gardener and social media star, Toni Farmer, who has made it her life’s work to educate people about the joys of gardening and solutions to the broken food system.

Farmer’s work is deeply personal, and often her videos take place in her own backyard vegetable garden where she shares tips and tricks and invites viewers to commiserate about daily struggles with pests or the weather. Home gardens were once the norm, but went out fashion post WWII when Americans prioritized convenience. “All the skills of growing food went away in a single generation,” says Farmer.

But people want to regain that knowledge, and Farmer showed up at the right time with the right knowledge to feed that hunger. Her social media accounts went viral in January 2025 when the Trump administration first implemented tariffs. Now, her posts educate people about the immediate and long-impacts of policy decisions like tariffs and the war with Iran. Her recent series “The Plan” has garnered hundreds of thousands of views. In it, Farmer prepares her audience for the looming global food crisis and encourages them to work with their neighbors to build food security.

Farmer says she’s alarmed by the possibility of price shocks in the fall and is concerned by a recent social media trend of conflating conventional and organic farming. She also discusses how regenerative agriculture is the antidote to the cruel and extractive aspects of commercial agriculture and how immersion in your home garden is an antidote to the isolation of our digital lives. At the end of the day, it shouldn’t be a privilege to eat healthy food, says Farmer.

Toni Farmer is an adjunct professor at both the University of Pennsylvania and Rowan University in the department of Earth and Environmental Science. At Penn, she teaches Regenerative Agriculture and Integrated Pest Management and at Rowan she teaches The Future of Food, a class about the impact of climate change on agriculture. She holds a Masters of Environmental Science from the University of Pennsylvania and a Master Gardener certification from Rutgers. Toni provides the garden video content for SJMagMedia, winning “best of” for 2021. She appears every Tuesday on Fox29 Philadelphia at 3:30pm helping tri-state regional viewers with garden tips. Learning to grow food is a critical tool for healthy food access. You can find her on Instagram, YouTube, and Facebook as ToniFarmersGarden.

Featured image of a community garden via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0).

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