She left a career in government auditing to advocate for farmers like her parents
Go Deeper.
Create an account or log in to save stories.
Like this?
Thanks for liking this story! We have added it to a list of your favorite stories.
This year marks 50 years of Hmong refugee resettlement and immigration to Minnesota. MPR News will feature Hmong Minnesotans in a variety of careers through the month of May as part of our “ChangeMakers” series. This series highlights Minnesotans from diverse and often underrepresented backgrounds who are making an impact.
Friendly Vang-Johnson’s parents were some of the first Hmong refugees to farm in Minnesota. Her father, Xang Vang, was a lieutenant in the Special Guerrilla Units, a secret army recruited by the CIA to fight for U.S. interests in Southeast Asia.
He fled to Thailand with Vang-Johnson’s mother, Xia Lor Vang, and their son in 1975 and landed in the U.S. not long after. By the time Vang-Johnson was born in 1978, the family was building a life in Minnesota and supporting others in the state’s growing Hmong community.
Vang-Johnson grew up in St. Paul’s Frogtown neighborhood, commuting to a piece of land in the suburbs where she helped tend the family’s vegetables and waking up early to help interpret at farmers markets. She wasn’t planning to follow her parents into farming and instead had a two-decade career in government auditing. But that changed when she was living in Seattle during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Turn Up Your Support
MPR News helps you turn down the noise and build shared understanding. Turn up your support for this public resource and keep trusted journalism accessible to all.
With markets closed, Hmong flower farmers were struggling to find customers. Vang-Johnson started a delivery program that eventually became Friendly Hmong Farms, a wider effort to support farmers in Washington and Minnesota.
She has since moved back to the state and switched to full-time farming-related work as the Minnesota Farmers’ Market Association’s government affairs director. MPR News producer Alanna Elder met up with Vang-Johnson at her parents’ farm to talk about her journey back to local agriculture and her hopes for the future.
You went away from farming for a long time. What does it mean to you to now be a farmer advocate?
I am shocked. Mind you, I don’t consider myself a farmer, at least not yet. I tell people I’m farmer-adjacent. I truly consider myself a farmer advocate, an activist. I do value chain coordination, meaning I help farmers who might have too much for, say, their farmers market, break into farm-to-school sales or farm-to-food bank sales — a lot of that work in Washington more so than here, but in the future it will also start here.
In 2022, after I had moved back to Minnesota, that’s when things really coalesced, and I came to understand why I’m doing this work. I started having unexplained seizures, which landed me in the ER. We couldn’t figure out what was going on.
And I eventually found my own path to a cultural healer and shaman in the Hmong community here in Minnesota. She said, “Oh, yeah, you’re supposed to be a shaman, like your grandmother and your grandfather before you.”
That started me on this path of getting, I will say, messages about, what is my work? Part of the work is safeguarding this tradition of farming for Hmong people that's over millennia old. Part of it is safeguarding land and water, trying to help move people towards a more localized foodshed.
Because, as I understand it, Mother Earth is basically saying, y’all need to eat more locally and seasonally. Because when you do, you will notice when I am being mistreated. And we need to make a pact that I will take care of you if you take care of me.
It sounds like you’ve had an incredible few years of change. How does it feel to be in a place where you know more of what you are doing?
That gives me great patience, because I know that I’m not going to finish it in this lifetime. There’s no way that we’re going to be able to, as a society, really appreciate what local agriculture is.
In the next you know, 40 years, 50 years that I have on this planet, we’re going to get somewhere. We’re going to make some progress, but it’s not going to be what it truly needs to be yet.
And I’m not going to do it alone. Part of my work has to be telling this story of how I’ve come to understand it, and then asking other people, you might not be a shaman. You might not be somebody who believes in an afterlife or a rebirth, or that the things that happened to your ancestors 100 years ago still matter to you, but you also need to do the deep work within yourself.
What do you want for Hmong farmers in the future?
For Hmong farmers in particular, I want them to be able to steward their land for as long as they want. That might mean very long-term leases through a coop or nonprofit structure. That might mean they own or have title to the land. I want them to have that security, because I trust them as stewards of the land.
I also want them to be able to farm in such a way that they are not up against so many challenges that makes farming a frantic or frenzied practice. We need to be able to farm in the way that does keep us healthy. That means that we have secure markets, and we are paid a decent price for the things that we grow. I want there to be a pathway for the next generation.
