Photo by Zachary Barkley
about the farmers
Dirt Rich Farm is run by the the husband and wife team of Ryan Leggio and Laura Colligan. Laura started the farm in 2015, and Ryan started farming with her in 2019. They’re proud first-generation farmers who both grew up in the suburbs of Buffalo.
When Laura’s father decided to mail-order a few baby turkeys to raise after seeing an ad in Mother Earth News, he never imagined that it would lead his then ten-year-old daughter to become a farmer. By the time she was thirteen, though, she was selling the heritage turkeys she’d raised on pasture, and later added chickens for meat and eggs to her line up. After helping out with harvesting vegetables at Thorpes Organic Family Farm in Wales, New York, where the Colligan family got their CSA share, Laura became interested in a future in organic vegetable agriculture. After high school, she spent several years studying the subject by working on organic vegetable farms (Nature’s Pace Organics in Michigan, Evening Song Farm in Vermont, and Four Winds Farm in the Hudson Valley). After that, she returned to Western New York, to start her own farm, which she named Dirt Rich Farm.
Laura is active in the small-scale and organic farming communities. She is currently the president of the Good Farmers Guild of Western New York and is a Land Advocacy Fellow with the National Young Farmers Coalition. She previously served on the board of directors of the Northeast Organic Farming Association of New York and is still a part of NOFA-NY’s Education Committee and Policy Committee.
Ryan got interested in farm-to-table cooking while studying at the Culinary Institute of America, where he received an associate degree and a bachelor’s degree. After graduation, he worked for a couple of years as a cook in Pennsylvania, then returned to his native Western New York. When Ryan and Laura met in 2014, they first connected over a mutual appreciation of kohlrabi, and soon started dating. For the first few years of their relationship, Ryan continued working full-time as a chef, but helped Laura out with the farm in a plethora of ways in his spare time, from hauling endless buckets of rocks out of the farm field to installing a walk-in cooler. Eventually, he quit his off-farm job and started farming full-time, which allowed Laura and Ryan to relocate the farm to Springville and increase their production to make the farm a success.