Regenerative farmer plants seeds in the community
By Jon Huang
In Peyton, there are some 40-acre plots with tunnel greenhouses and mobile homes. Chances are one belongs to a local farmer. One of these farmers is Yosef Camire.
Camire is 43. A decade ago, he was a successful biomedical engineer, a liaison between engineers and medical clinicians. In his early 30s and earning six figures, he was at the top of his profession, had traveled abroad, was a diplomat in Vietnam and established anesthesia training programs and safety protocols in hospitals in Colorado. He enjoyed his work but was uncomfortable with the tightening regulations and issues he saw in the medical industry. He began searching ways to slow down, work for himself and most importantly, spend more time with his growing family.
He began homesteading and gardening and from this, Ahavah was born.
Today, Ahavah Farms is a several-hundred-member, year-round community supported agriculture. Camire and his wife, Havah, over the last decade, have grown food for their local community. Through their nonprofit, Ahavah Community Initiative, they also provide free CSA memberships for those in need. Since ACI’s inception in 2018 to January 2024, it has donated over $650,000 worth of food.
Ahavah derives its name from the Hebrew word for love. For Camire, love is more than a feeling; it means to give and doing so in a way that demonstrates kindness to others, ourselves, the Earth and the animals in it. Serving God and loving his creation go hand in hand.
Camire never set out to be a farmer, but it was a part of his journey to learn about food and be a good steward of the land.
“Growing up, I ate Star Crunch, and I literally had a refrigerator dedicated to Dr. Pepper. When I first met my wife, she drank water. She actually had water for dinner. I was like, ‘What are you doing?’” he said.
In college, he was a bodybuilder, which created an interest in nutrition. However, Camire’s understanding of nutrition was overly reductionist and quantitative. It focused on counting calories, percentages of cholesterol, measuring protein, carbohydrates and vitamin content, including using supplements in lieu of whole foods. It reduced food to the measurable nutrients they contained.
As his life into farming grew, a more holistic understanding of nutrition and health emerged. Books like Campbell’s “Whole” helped Camire understand that the value of whole foods was not only in their individual nutrients, but in the complex relationships occurring within them and the effects that had on the human body.
“The whole is greater than its sum,” he said.
Through this process, Camire learned about regenerative farming. The National Resources Conservation Service defines regenerative agriculture as farming and grazing practices, like cover crops and managed rotational grazing, that rebuild soil organic matter and restore degraded soil biodiversity. It is an approach to farming that traces back to ancient and indigenous cultures with the aim to increase nature’s productivity by farming through working with its natural processes.
Camire recalled his first several weeks selling at farmers markets.
“People were literally coming up to us crying. They were like, ‘We needed you in our community for so long. Your food is pure and my son is sick, I’m sick and so and so is sick. We’re so grateful for what you do.’ They would hug us with tears in their eyes … I had no idea how big of an impact we would make.”
Yosef Camire
“People were literally coming up to us crying. They were like, ‘We needed you in our community for so long. Your food is pure and my son is sick, I’m sick and so and so is sick. We’re so grateful for what you do.’ They would hug us with tears in their eyes … I had no idea how big of an impact we would make.”
As sales increased, Camire implemented a pay-as-you-can model and was regularly blown away by the generosity of people. Over the years, Ahavah hosted regular educational programs and farm tours, shared their experience with countless volunteers and trained others to farm.
Like many farms, Ahavah has had its share of struggles. In 2019, there was a blizzard. In 2023, there was a tornado. Last year, it was the grasshoppers. With grit and community donations, they pressed on.
Camire has faced public perception around farming and food.
He said when Ahavah hosted a community group with children who, instead of weeds, mistakenly uprooted the eggplant. One woman didn’t get the big deal. “What is it, like 3 cents for the seed?” she asked.
“What she didn’t understand was that the plant was literally planted at the end of January,” Camire said. “We’re in the middle of June. That literally took seven months of work and labor.”
He has seen children look up in trees when it was time to harvest carrots. He has had a nurse ask him, “What sort of farmer uses a computer?” People have told him they’d rather have chemicals on their food than bugs. He has had congressmen attack him for his efforts to promote regenerative farming and local food markets. He has seen local restaurants that haven’t bought from him in years still claim to source from his farm.
Camire considers himself a conservative, and so when it comes to confronting pushback against the environmental and food issues raised by regenerative farming, he believes some of it stems not only from defending old traditions and personal interests but larger societal problems as well.
“It’s the great unsettling of America,” he said, in reference to the agrarian writer Wendell Berry. “It’s leaving the farmland for the city. It’s leaving this connection to our earth and to our land and to our food, and people have no idea.”
On a personal level, Camire has had his own medical issues, including metastatic cancer during which his local community raised over $8,000 for his treatments. He is currently in remission.
Regarding today’s industrialized food system, Camire doesn’t mince words.
“I don’t think they want you to know where your food comes from, how it’s grown, how it’s processed, because if we knew that, 90% of the food industry would be out of business,” he said.
Camire has been passionate about sharing his knowledge. Two of his Peyton neighbors, Dan Zimmerman of Good Steward Farms and Mark Robinson of Green Hill Farms both trained under Camire. Both came from established professions and have been involved in the local, regenerative food community. Others, like Shane Nelson, who leads the community garden at Food to Power, a Colorado Springs food advocacy organization, also trained with Camire. Over the years, he recalls how the many passionate people across ideological, religious and political divides come together to farm, feed others, heal the earth and love their neighbors while supporting local agriculture.
Camire wants others to be more successful than him because of what it would mean for the community. With over 600,000 people in El Paso County, there are more than enough mouths to feed, and to him, the workers are few.
He and his wife, Havah, have seven children. Their youngest, Nedira, is 3, and their oldest, Asher, is 18. While the space in their mobile home is tight, living simply has clarified many other things.
“It’s taught us patience. It’s taught us about the things that are important in life. It’s taught us about God’s creation,” Camire said. “This farm has really transformed my understanding of these things and really revolutionized my life; just really the things (that) are important in life: relationships, people. I never in my life thought I’d live in a mobile home, but you know what? I don’t care.”
Amid the hardships throughout the years, the work has always carried a strong sense of purpose.
“We wake up every day knowing that we’re doing something good for the world. I don’t think there’s anything better than that,” he said. “Wake up every day knowing that you’re making a difference in the world. That’s why we do what we do.”
Of the many seeds the Camire and his family have planted over the years, on the farm and in the community, some have sprouted as planned, while others have grown unexpectedly, like the college student who came back to tell him, “I chose agriculture because of you.”
