We are friends working in the heart of Kansas City, MO, practicing organic gardening and homesteading at the JPII Farm. We’re co-founders of the Maurin Academy for Regenerative Studies. We run Blue Valley Greens and work with the Kansas City Food Hub. We partner with neighbors to create a sturdier local food system in general, and a healthier urban community in particular.
Spencer Hess
Born and mostly raised in Dodge City, Kansas, I’m motivated by a desire to chart a different course for society than the one we seem presently stuck on: a future in which whatever isn’t “developed” into suburb is reduced to desert.
My first experience farming was in 2013 and I found that I loved being outdoors and working with my hands. While getting a horticulture degree at K-State University, I was president of the Willow Lake Student Farm Club. Post-graduation I WWOOFed at various small farms around the South to learn by doing. I spent another year as a garden manager near Selma, AL, before bringing what I’ve learned back to the Midwest with the goal of making a go at urban farming.
Amidst the comprehensive four-year failure that was M:O/R/T Collective, I finally converted to Catholicism, and with my girlfriend Emily re-conceived our homestead as the John Paul II Catholic Worker Farm.
Emily Larner
I grew up living a normal bourgeois American life (and diet) in the St. Louis metro area. I was one of those kids that was involved in arguably too many extracurricular groups at school, everything from drumming in marching band to Latin Club.
I moved to KC to get my Bachelor's degree in environmental sciences at UMKC. Graduating in the midst of peak-covid, I found myself stuck and despairing of where to go and what to do. Where could I find a job that meshed with my hopes of building a better future ecologically, spiritually, and socially?
My experience in farming only started after volunteering with Spencer in the spring of 2020. I fell madly in love with the work and the food (and with Spencer too ;)). There is certainly something to be said about the near-sacred mysteries of farming. What struck me so much was not simply the fruits of our harvests, but the entire process from seed to plant, from birth to death, and trying to incorporate all of our efforts into an integrated, holistic way of life. Put simply: it’s changed my life.
Since then I’ve spent a year working on a small-scale organic farm near Lawrence, Kansas, I’ve worked as a production lead for an aquaponics lettuce system in Kansas City’s Historic Northeast, and spent a year interning at Cherith Brook Catholic Worker where I volunteered with their ministry of serving the neighborhood poor and tending their garden and orchard.
My sights are now set on creating a more Catholic life through our homesteading efforts and in teaching people some of these urban-agrarian practices through The Maurin Academy.
Laurie Johnson
I’m currently living in Manhattan, KS where I work as a professor. I visit the farm monthly and help out on Saturday work days. I’ve made a commitment to help the place thrive as a Catholic Worker farm, and to that end I’m involved in fixing up the house next door on Newton Ave. Our vision is that we can use it to host visiting worker-scholars and others who would like to spend time on the farm and/or in retreat. I teach environmental political thought and other classes in political philosophy. My most recent book was Ideological Possession and the Rise of the New Right, and I’m about to finish up The Gap in God’s Country: A Longer View on Our Culture Wars. I’m currently President of the Maurin Academy, working Spencer, Emily, Jakob Hanschu and others to follow Peter Maurin’s structure of understanding “cult, culture and cultivation” via roundtables and classes for the clarification of thought. I’m a proud warrior against anti-intellectualism, a gardener and uncertified permaculturalist, a grateful mom of one beautiful son, and a daughter of a still crazy-involved and vigorous dad in his late ’90’s.
Nik Gaffron
Growing up outside of Pittsburgh, PA on an apple orchard and spending my days jumping around in the cows’ corn bin on my family's homestead, traditions were just a normal part of life. It wasn’t until I began traveling the country that I realized most people don't can food from their gardens and eat jarred applesauce all year—that it's a dying art to fix what's broken or engineer simple DIY solutions. We live in a society that does not, by and large, concern themselves with the source or quality of their food and goods.
Having spent many years protesting and doing grassroots environmentalism I found that even the people who are interested in change are either not willing or capable of doing so, myself included. After discovering The Urban Farming Guys of KC, MO's YouTube videos, I put on my rose colored classes and crossed the country to come join the movement I was sure was really living a life of DIY and organic local food systems. Long story short, through both good times and decline, my time at UFG ran it's course, however in that community I found Spencer, Emily, and Leland who are motivated and committed to finding the path to community and sustainability.
Even though it can be hard work it's good to be here. Ol’ JPII said “Do not be afraid. Do not be satisfied with mediocrity. Put out into the deep and let down your nets for a catch.” If there's a place here in the Midwest to do that it's right here on Newton Ave.
Leland Fenner
Our resident porter/chauffeur/sherpa moonlights as an amateur engineer and semi-professional cultural critic. Leland yearns for a Pastoral-Punk, off-the-grid, Anarcho-Tory leisure lifestyle where he can realize his agrarian dreams.
A lot of people help us out, most notably including Nik, Leland, and assorted WOOFERs. There’s a lot of work to be done, but we manage to have fun too!
