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Farm Foundation to Hold Info Session for FarmPath Program
- Bob Benenson
- 24 minutes ago
- 6 min read
And Learn About Manager Jen Rosenthal's Winding Road to FarmPath
Local Food Forum has previously shared information about Farm Foundation's new FarmPath program, which is designed to provide intensive virtual instruction for new and early-stage farmers to help them succeed financially while deploying sustainable and regenerative growing practices.
Applications are open through Monday, March 23 (5 p.m. central) for a selection process that is expected to enroll up to 300 farmers across the United States for up to a three-year curriculum. The program will be offered at no cost to the selected participants.
If you are a farmer or know a farmer who might benefit from this program, you should know that Farm Foundation is presenting an online info session this Thursday (March 12) at 12 p.m. central.
Farm Foundation, headquartered in the north Chicago suburb of Libertyville, is partnering on FarmPath with The Mosaic Company Foundation for Sustainable Food Systems and Pepsico Foundation.
As we reported earlier, Year One of FarmPath will focus on sustainable farming practices and successful farm business management. The cohort will be winnowed to about 75 participants for Year Two, during which the farmers will work with mentors to build and refine their business plans. Farmers who move on to Year 3 will be eligible for grants of up to $10,000.
The FarmPath program is managed by Jen Rosenthal, whose variety of farming experiences is outlined below. She happens to be a longtime friend — who first learned about the new program from Local Food Forum. She was hired for the newly created Farm Programs Manager position in December.
In an interview, Jen emphasized that FarmPath is designed to assist farmers of a wide variety of growing practices and experiences. "Our goal is to have a 300-person cohort from all around the country at different stages of experience, knowledge, farming systems," Jen said. "Anywhere from commodity row crops to market garden, homesteading, urban agriculture, first generation, fifth generation, wherever you fall."
She continued, "What's super cool is that we're trying to reach the next generation of family farm farmers, or a young farmer that maybe doesn't feel aligned growing the way mom and dad or grandma and grandpa did."
While there will be an emphasis on sustainability and regenerative agriculture, this is not a farmer training program focused on how to raise particular items of produce or livestock, but rather about how to build a farm business that is made to last.
"You have to get the business side or you'll lose the business," Jen said. "Land access is a huge barrier, and the capital needed just to get going. There are certain things that are bare minimums. You need to have a certain amount of success to have product, to be able to sell, to sustain your business."
FarmPath is planning to hold live learning webinars about once a month, which will be recorded and made available to all cohort participants to accommodate farmers' often challenging schedules.
And to supplement the course work, FarmPath will be creating a "toolkit" of resources and guides. "It would be worth participating just for that toolkit," Jen said.
Jen’s Journey
Jen’s path to a leadership role in cultivating the next generation of farmers started about 20 years ago. She was working as an artist and freelancing and had never before grown food when she experimented with growing tomatoes on her third-story porch in Chicago’s Logan Square neighborhood. “It was just sort of a hobby that grew and grew until it became a passion,” she said.
Her a-ha moment came in 2009 when she attended a wedding at the Uncommon Ground restaurant on Chicago’s far North Side and discovered that owners Helen and Mike Cameron had created a lush outdoor container garden, which had earned the distinction of being the first certified rooftop organic farm.
The idea that she might be able to make a career of urban food gardening prompted Jen to obtain an internship with Chicago Botanic Garden’s Windy City Harvest program. When she completed that, she reached back out to Helen Cameron to see if there was any work available on the Edgewater rooftop. There wasn’t, but Jen agreed to help on Uncommon Ground’s sidewalk farm at its flagship Lakeview location, a few blocks from Wrigley Field.
At that time, Jen also did an apprenticeship at the fruit and vegetable island at Chicago Botanic Garden, located in north suburban Glencoe. This introduced her to a number of the region’s chefs who participated in cooking demos. This would ultimately lead her to start Planted Chicago, a company that designed and maintained on-premises food gardens for restaurants.
“I did not know any chefs, I did not have this grand vision,” she said. “It just kind of snowballed... A lot of these chefs... they really celebrate farm fresh food, produce, fruits and vegetables in a way that was just really remarkable.”
Meanwhile, Uncommon Ground’s rooftop farmer position became open and Jen grabbed the opportunity (it was during her stint there that I first met Jen), and she held that position until 2015 when she left to explore the potential of larger-scale, in-ground farming. She participated in Windy City Harvest’s apprentice farmer program on the organization’s Legends Farm in the Fuller Park neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side.
Her experiences working with chefs clicked in, and she became a primary hyperlocal produce provider for Chef Matthias Merges’ Folkart Hospitality Group. Her apprenticeship also implanted lessons that she is now putting to work in her role as FarmPath’s Program Manager. “You somehow learned how to plant a carrot and what's the spacing of tomatoes. You know the ins and outs,” she said. “But if you're really serious and you want to do this, there's this whole other side of farming, which is the business side.”
But Jen ultimately had to cycle out of the Windy City Harvest program and immediately was confronted with a challenge faced by many start-up farmers: the high cost of land on which to grow. She came close to a deal to manage an urban farm then under development on Chicago’s South Side, but it fell through.
“It was a blow that just shook me to my core. What I learned there was I had so tightly wound my identity with the business, and you shouldn't do that, because you're a human and you have this part of your life, you are running this business, but it is not you,” Jen said.
Jen in 2019 shifted to a different track, enrolling in an incubator farm program then run by the Prairie Crossing Foundation in the far northern suburb of Grayslake. A month into the program, she and her husband Michael learned she was pregnant: “I farmed my entire pregnancy. It was an experience. I’d farmed on rooftops. I'd farmed on urban raised beds above ground. This was real farming, tractors, walking tillers, the whole shebang, and it was challenging. But I farmed until 32 weeks until I was just like, I can't even move anymore.”
Jen graduated out of the program that October, daughter Ramona was born in November... and before Jen had a chance to decide what was next, the COVID pandemic set in. Her next step was a return to her rooftop growing roots as Farm Operations manager for The Roof Crop, a Chicago-based company, while continuing to do some contract work with restaurants.
Her gig with Roof Crop concluded at the end of 2024, precipitating a protracted job search. But in October 2025, Local Food Forum reported on Farm Foundation’s announcement of the launch of its FarmPath program and Jen learned that the organization was seeking a Farm Programs Manager to guide the sweeping new program.
She applied, and that long, winding road and all of her perseverance worked in her favor. She was hired and started her FarmPath position in December.
“I represent a really unique new farmer,” she said. “And I'm not alone. First-generation farmers that don't come from farm families, they make up one big portion of who we're trying to help. And I know firsthand the challenges, the opportunities and everything in between.”
She summed up why she has shifted her passion into her new position: “In the short time I've been there, I have learned so much about the food and ag world. That is so beyond where I was operating. I think that all of that knowledge and experience has to have some connection to this new next generation of farmers. But let's connect in ways that benefit everyone moving forward. So not excluding commodity [farmers] and not excluding your total newbie, people who have maybe a crazy dream of thinking about farming one day and a passion. It's going to be covering a lot of territory.”