Delma Kaiga

Delma Kaiga is a first-year farmer at Sharing Our Roots and lives in the Twin Cities. She inherited her love for farming from her parents and grandparents – her mother is a cereal grains farmer and businesswoman.

After moving to the US in 2016, she found it hard to find organic food and the African nightshades that she was used to eating. She decided to start growing her own food at the Burnsville Community Garden, and then moved to the Smith Community Garden in Bloomington, where she has been growing for four years. 

This year, she is farming ¼ acre of chinsaga, managu, garlic, spider plant, and pumpkins at Sharing Our Roots Farm. The shared irrigation, infrastructure, and resource support at Sharing Our Roots Farm was a big draw to her to start farming on a larger scale. 

Delma owns and runs her own online accounting firm, Delk Financial, where she helps with bookkeeping, payroll, and tax services. She hopes to help emerging farmers understand how to deal with finances and file their Schedule F forms so they can purchase a farm in the future. Loans, finances, and documentation of business is so important to help these farmers succeed. She hopes to continue to help other organizations support emerging farmers on education on bookkeeping and getting themselves into the position to be approved for a loan. 

This season, Delma will be selling her cultural crops within her community and her pumpkins will be sold at the SOR farmers market later in the season. In the future, she hopes to purchase her own farm and to move out of the city, where she can connect with nature and be able to grow her farming business.