The Four Sisters Urban Farm 2025 Interns

The Four Sisters Urban Farm internship is a great opportunity for young people to learn about caring for plants, land stewardship and traditional farming techniques. They experience how local urban and rural growing spaces run, try out new recipes and activities, and get their hands in the dirt every week.

As we wind down the season, we’d like to say a huge thank you, miigwech, pidamaya, and gracias to our wonderful 2025 Interns!

Cadence DuMarce (she/her) is joining us from Sisseton, South Dakota. Hearing about the Internship with Four Sisters Urban Farm from her aunt, Cadence decided to give it ashot and apply. Growing up she loved tagging along with her grandma and mom to get flowers from Lou’s Greenhouse in Big Stone City, SD. In highschool she interned at her local flower shop which furthered her love for flowers and other various plants. Around eight years ago her uncle started a garden on her grandparents farm. Along the lines he began to dabble in canning so when Cadence would visit her grandparents there would be her uncle putting her to work to help with canning or something garden related. Some items that were canned are apple sauce, sweet pickle relish, jams, but Cadence’s favorite canned item has to be pickles. Her biggest inspiration when it comes to gardening is her uncle and his everlasting green thumb. She loves how passionate and driven her uncle is about his plants and flowers. Cadence hopes to go back and share her own tips and tricks from the knowledge she gains from this internship.

Estelle (she/her): What brought Estelle to this internship was her growing interest in soil and plant life, while also trying to figure out why her plants keep dying. In the future Estelle wants to learn more about what diseases and bugs are not plant friendly, but also what types of plants attract or repel certain animals and bugs. In the future Estelle wants to share what she learned over this internship with the people she cares about like family and friends.

Isabella Benjamin-Quintana (she/they) is a recent Macalester Graduate, holding Bachelor’s degree in American Studies. Isabella came to the Four Sisters fellowship with a passion for urban agriculture and food sovereignty work. Growing up, Isabella often visited her family’s farm in Veracruz, Mexico, gaining a deeper appreciation for smallholder and subsistence agriculture. She holds fond memories of picking fruits like papaya, lime, or tamarind from her family’s fruit trees and preparing them in traditional dishes.

Isabella has also worked in foodshare mutual aid groups throughout the Twin Cities, and through this experience, recognizes the vital importance of communities of color having access to healthy, culturally responsive foods. For her family, this involved accessing foods such as tortillas or dried Mexican chiles; staple ancestral foods essential to her family’s diet for generations. For Isabella, strengthening our relationships with foods is also a process of remembrance and healing.

After this Internship, Isabella plans to bring the skills she learned with Four Sisters to deepen her understanding of regenerative food systems in the urban agriculture landscape of the twin cities.

Otto Foster (they/them) is soon to graduate from the University of Minnesota with a bachelor’s degree in mathematics, and seeks to continue building community and cultivating skills in their variety of unique interests. In their spare time, they can be found writing poetry, palindromes, and essays; recording music and composing soundscapes; mending clothing or journaling with friends; selling lyric zines or CD’s of their albums for donations to local organizations; attending local concerts; and finding ways to give back to the beautiful community in Minneapolis. Otto is very passionate about connecting more with the land and with people who honor nature, not only as a form of environmental protection or skill-harnessing, but also as a form of collective political resistance. They have recently been finishing a paper (which they plan to give out at this year’s local zine fest) on unhoused encampment evictions in Minneapolis and how it connects to other national or global social issues, and in the process discovering a broader understanding of climate injustice through the lense of systemic oppression and colonial violence. By developing a close relationship with the environment and like-minded people, they anticipate growing new kinds of hope for the future that reflect the self-reconstructive, mutually-evolving, and truly magical properties of plants and the world we share with them.

My name is Silas, and I am a 23-year-old second-generation immigrant living on the south side of Minneapolis. When I was 16, I read Ishmael by Daniel Quinn. This book is a philosophical novel that explores the relationship between human society and the natural world. The book’s title comes from a telepathic gorilla named Ishamel who teaches Daniel Quinn about taker vs leaver cultures. Takers are our world’s dominant culture, which believes that humans are separate and superior to nature and that we are meant to dominate it. In contrast, the leaver culture is where we live in harmony and with respect for it. It has been seven years since I read this book, and I have still been deeply encouraged by trying to identify ways in which I can live in the best relation to the land and lead a more holistic life. I believe that learning about regenerative farming and integrating it into our personal lives is important. This is so that we can continue to become more self-sufficient and not unconsciously rely on corporations for our food and medicine as we currently do. The four sisters internship is a beautiful opportunity for me and other people of my generation to help cultivate a new culture.