Why we started Peb Lub Neej
Minnesota is home to many immigrant and refugee small scale farmers who face persistent barriers to land, markets, capital, technical assistance, and long term stability. As Hmong American women farmers, we have lived these barriers ourselves and watched their impact on our farms, families, and communities.
After years of participating in — and even helping design — programs run by mainstream, white and male dominated organizations, we found these systems insufficient, tokenizing, and unable to deliver meaningful results for BIPOC farmers. Despite our efforts as staff, partners, and advisors, the system kept rewarding underperforming programs while BIPOC farmers remained underserved.
We founded Peb Lub Neej to directly address these systemic gaps. Our cooperative is built on the belief that culturally rooted expertise, lived experience, and community trust are essential to effective farmer support — and our results back that belief. As a collective of eight Hmong women, we farm together on shared land, sell fresh produce, and prototype value added products, including a major project to grow and formulate Hmong post partum medicinal herbs into a shelf stable wellness product.
Farmers trust us because we deliver outstanding, culturally responsive services, and because we are farmers ourselves. PLN exists to build what mainstream systems have failed to provide: culturally grounded, effective, community led support that advances food, land, and economic sovereignty for Hmong and other BIPOC farmers.
We are building a future where Hmong and BIPOC farmers have real power.
- Access to land
- Culturally relevant support
- Economic power
- Wellness rooted in ancestral knowledge