About Us

Red Earth Gardens began in 2013 as an enterprise of the Meskwaki Food Sovereignty Initiative. Our motto is, “growing food, farmers, and community.” As part of the the Meswaki tribe’s Workforce Development Department, we are a unique entity that performs a couple key functions. One role is being a production farm, and we grow organic produce for both the Meskwaki community, as well as for surrounding communities in Central and East Central Iowa. We aim to help people get healthier while we also maintain and improve the health of the land, which we strongly believe are interconnected.

Red Earth Gardens also exists as a teaching farm, where we offer on-the-job training for participants of the Promoting Tribal Economies Course. These PTEC participants first go through 3 weeks of classroom time learning about workforce and personal development skills like communication, conflict management, personal resiliency, financial literacy, entrepreneurship, historical trauma, the Clifton’s Strengthsfinder Assessment, and more. After the successful completion of the classroom portion of the course, PTEC participants engage in approximately 8 weeks of on-the-job-training to apply their classroom training in a practical way while at the same time learning several aspects about organic and regenerative farming.