Meet the Ontario student revolutionizing queer agriculture in Canada and abroad

An Ontario university student is shedding light on the importance of queer farming communities both at home and abroad.

Francis Jabile, a 27-year-old student at the University of Guelph’s Ontario Agricultural College, immigrated to Canada from the Philippines in the early 2000s.

While in pursuit of his graduate studies in the Capacity Development and Extension program, Jabile found significant cracks in the provincial foundation of agricultural representation — cracks that hit close to home.

“I was noticing very quickly, even during my undergrad, that there wasn’t a lot of representation for racialized growers or farmers, and especially none for any queer ones. I identify as both, and I wanted to start literature on it,” Jabile, who’s from Mississauga, told INsauga.com.

Jabile then quickly found there wasn’t a single text — academic or otherwise — on queer/racialized farmers and growers in Ontario.

Due to the scarcity of information, he dedicated himself to the subject and helped publish in 2024 the first academic work of its kind in the province, titled An Exploration of Intersectional Farmers in Networks of Care within Ontario Agri-food Systems.

“It’s looking at agriculture through this lens of what I refer to as networks of care, where it is far more than just food production, it’s also about relationality, how we relate to plants, how we relate to other people and how we are in symbiosis with everything when we produce our food,” says Jabile.

Core findings found that queer/racialized farmers in Ontario, out of an inherent sense of community, would band together to ensure that any mechanisms of production were monitored and sustained.

This includes oversight on components of agricultural operations, such as building materials, fertilizers and equipment.

“It can boil down to purchasing power. Say you are in a rural community, and you are friends with six farmers; you could work together to pitch in on a tractor and then share it amongst your fields. Or, you would pitch in to a bulk order and split it,” says Jabile.

Strength in numbers does not only help with cost efficiency but it also functions as a way to combat prejudice, as Jabile notes that because of how queer/racialized farmers present, certain suppliers may not engage with them due to toxic bias.

These issues become less prominent when there is more bargaining power (and protection) coming from a group.

Jabile refers to such maneuvering out of necessity as “navigational capacity” — in essence, the extent of the work one has to do to ensure the safety and sustainability of one’s farm, community and identity.

“It’s common knowledge that, growing up anywhere, farmers were supposed to look a certain way or grow food a certain way — that’s not the case anymore — so, it is all about trying to figure out where you belong,” he says.

With a major academic text now under his belt, Jabile, who is about to embark on his PhD in the fall, is setting his sights on an agricultural community that dwarfs Ontario’s by a wide margin — his native Philippines.

“There’s a different history there. There’s a different history of colonization, different stigma, different communities and, of course, different queer farmers in the Philippines,” says Jabile. “It’s about expanding that research into conceptualizations of care and how those practices are maintained.”

Dr. Helen Hambly Odame, a professor at the Ontario Agricultural College and a mentor and partner to Jabile, is currently helping the University of Guelph facilitate outreach to agricultural and academic institutions in the Philippines.

INsauga.com reached out to Odame to gain insight into the extent of the work taking place and how it correlates to the findings Jabile established in Ontario last year.

“One of the biggest challenges in the Philippines is that half of the country is food insecure, even though they grow and export so many agricultural products to places like Canada. So what we want to do is make sure people are food secure and help them with their export trade,” Odame told INsauga.com.

Odame and Jabile are currently forging stronger relationships with institutions like the University of the Philippines Los Baños to help jump-start research and conversations on local cultivation.

One specific crop, a purple root vegetable known as ube, has caught the eye of both Jabile and Odame as it maintains a substantial presence in local queer history.

“I recently went back home to the Philippines and talked with farmers and they told me that their ancestors would conduct a ritual to the Filipino goddess of fertility, Lakapati, a figure who was both male and female with direct ties to ube. So, there is queer history in the knowledge of how ube is grown,” says Jabile.

Jabile went on to indicate that ube presents as a very high-value crop and that with his experience in researching navigational capacity, he hopes he can help establish an ethical way to export it by working with farmers.

In tandem with Jabile’s knowledge of networks of care, Odame also hopes the new networks being developed between Canada and the Philippines can help nurture the international queer agricultural community.

“People always focus on the ‘agri’ part of agriculture and seldom the ‘culture’ part,” says Odame. “We all need food, and the culture behind those who produce it is important. If we can see past the differences that divide us and make people feel like they belong and are relevant to this industry, I know we can make it better.”

As for what comes next, Jabile hopes his continued work will inspire a new generation of agricultural workers to look at his home country as a viable place to hone their skills — especially if they are maneuvering their own queer/racialized experience.

“What I’m hoping is, when other farmers who identify this way see the work we are doing, they see that there are other people like them and that there are different opportunities for their perspectives.”