We recently connected with Courtney Gonzales and Marcella Sadlowski and have shared our conversation below.

Courtney and Marcella, appreciate you joining us today. Let’s start with a story that highlights an important way in which your brand diverges from the industry standard.

First off, we’re both women in a male dominant industry. We both have roots to farmworkers who received work through the Bracero program; incentivizing migration from Mexico to the US and our ancestors settling in California. Sol Root was created out of the need for healing and reconnection and remembering. Of course abundance is our birthright and we know that sharing the knowledge of plants is our currency. Sol Root was founded in 2018 to create a farmworker-owner cooperative business. Where workers are not exploited and cut out of decision making but part of the company foundation and leadership. We view cooperatives as a great way to transition out of exploitative business practices to a more just world. 

As women with Mexicana and European roots, we are addressing the gap of women of color farmers and business owners who grow, harvest, process, and produce their own products from seed to remedy. By approaching farming as a healing arts practice we are also addressing the lack of reverence for the land and plants as medicine, which is inherent in conventional food and farming systems.

Courtney and Marcella, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

Sol Root is a farming and herbal wellness business that focuses on growing plants for herbal remedies. Where working with land, water, and cosmic energies to cultivate plants is nourishing to our body, mind, and spirit. We weave together farming, astrology, ancestral veneration, ceremony, and ritual to create spaces where people can reconnect with nature and ultimately themselves. People are looking for tangible, positive, uplifting solutions to prevent illness, stay healthy, and have meaningful relationships with the people in their lives. Sol Root cultivates connections between land and people through farming, herbal medicine, and educational experiences. We offer spaces where heavy hearts can transmute pain into beauty through farming, and where helping something grow helps us grow, as people, and as a community. 

We secured our first land lease in 2022 at the Sunol AgPark. Our farm is located on 0.65 acres in Sunol, California where we grow corn, beans, squash, watermelon medicinal herbs and flowers such as chamomile, tulsi, lemon balm, hibiscus, marigold, yarrow, sunflower, pericon, thyme, calendula, among others. We create herbal wellness products like herbal oils, tea blends, balms, agua florida, and dried bulk herbs. We also offer workshops on a variety of topics including farming, herbal medicine, womb wellness, and other self-care and mental health topics.

Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?

While we still have a long journey ahead of us, our story to date demonstrates resilience in the fact that we’ve established ourselves as a farming business and now are in our second year of our land lease at the Sunol AgPark. We began Sol Root as landless farmers; we were building on a vision of cooperative farming but did not have access to our own plot of land for the first four years of creating this business. Some of the barriers we faced in those years include being removed from a plot of land in favor of robotic farming, being told by foundations that our impact was too small to be awarded grants, and people viewing us as a ‘project’ or ‘hobby’ rather than the business that we are. 

It’s taken years of hard work to grow from a concept in 2018 to an operational farming and herbal wellness business. Sol Root is being built from the ground up; we are not backed by venture capitalists or large investments from family members or friends. For the past four years, Sol Root’s farmworker-owners have contributed personal resources. In 2022, we raised $2,495 from an on-going GoFundMe campaign and we received a $10,000 grant that made the operations for our 2022 and 2023 season possible. 

Our work towards food and land sovereignty is a paradigm and cultural shift; it is a way of building relationships and being in relationship with the land. Our work is about reclaiming our humanity and recognizing that we are all part of the land and that the land misses and needs us too.

How’d you meet your business partner?

Courtney and Marcella met through a Bay Area farmer training program. They’ve been brought together by the Earth, their Ancestors, and the Asteroid Goddess Ceres- who is the patron saint of farmers.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sol_root/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@sol_root
• Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/Sol_Root

Image Credits
Brooke Porter for photo of Courtney and Marcella; Courtney Rae for all other photos