Yu-Shing Ni

About Yu-Shing

Yu-Shing Ni is a first-generation Chinese American farmer, educator, and community organizer born and raised on unceded Tongva land (Los Angeles). She received her B.S. in Global Food Security and Ecological Agriculture from McGill University, on Kanien’kehà:ka territory (Montréal), where she led student organizations that educated and worked at the intersection of food justice and sustainable agri-food systems. During her studies, she was a research intern at the University of The West Indies in Barbados investigating the soil building potential of biogas effluent to support farmers’ efforts to increase local food production on the island and in turn address the population’s racial disparities in health.   Following university, Yu-Shing apprenticed on organic farms in Northern California and Central Oregon and encountered high demand for culturally appropriate foods that wasn’t being met by local markets and food pantries. This prompted her to begin growing heritage crops for the local Asian & Pacific Islander community and host farm days where they shared seeds, intergenerational knowledge, and foods from across the diaspora.   Yu-Shing returned home to develop curriculum and lead Black Thumb Farm’s Garden Education program in 2022, engaging BIPOC high schoolers around food sovereignty and growing food in LA. She managed the non-profit’s urban farm in Panorama City, creating a safe space for BIPOC youth to engage with food and farming, and provided the multigenerational, multicultural community access to nourishing, culturally relevant produce, and a space to heal relationships with land. As a 2022 California Political Leadership Fellow with the National Young Farmers Coalition, she proposed policy recommendations to increase land and resource access for young BIPOC urban and rural farmers during USDA and CDFA’s 2023 US Farm Bill meetings. She also published a zine sharing stories from California’s API farmers and their cultural foodways and is currently collaborating on a national API farmer network and database.   Yu-Shing will pursue her MS/MPH to continue building cultural responsiveness into agri-food policy and programming. Her commitment to cooperative land stewardship, decolonizing food systems, and seed saving with community drive her research interests in reintegrating indigenous crop species to meet dietary and cultural needs to strengthen community resilience, food sovereignty, and human and ecological health globally.   When not on the farm, you can find Yu-Shing in a kitchen–preferably an outdoor one–sharing meals and stories with friends, family, and neighbors and exploring her surroundings via hiking boots, climbing shoes, two wheels, and her bare feet.