AURORA, Colo. — Cassie Larimer is the assistant director of Happy Ladybug Early Learning, a child care center and preschool tucked into a one-story brick building in this city east of Denver. But her new business cards, emblazoned with a cheery ladybug logo, just say “owner.”

Larimer isn’t technically an owner — yet. The new business cards reflect the ambitions of the center’s cofounders, Elvan Goksu and Umit Kaya, who hope to turn Happy Ladybug into a worker-owned cooperative — meaning that the center’s 13 staff members would hold shares in the business and help manage it.

The romance of neoliberal peasant farming blinds us to our collective power

Let’s get this out of the way, first:

• I am a small farmer, operating on 40-ish acres in Virginia’s Northern Neck.
• I am not paid by, in-hoc to, in league with, or particularly happy with ‘big agriculture.’ I’m just a guy who’s been in the small-sustainable farming business long enough to understand that the model is fatally flawed, and mature enough to say it out loud.
• To my friends that run and staff far

  Now…