Fatuma Emmad on the farm
Lecturer • SFS Career Advisor

Office hours are by appointment only.

Fatuma Emmad is the CO-Founder, Executive Director and Head Farmer of Front Line Farming. She is an affiliate professor at Regis University and lecturer in the Masters for Environment Graduate Program at CU Boulder. She is also the owner and operator
of Bountiful By Design, a sustainable high-end landscape company. Fatuma was born in Denver and raised in Denver and Ethiopia. Fatuma has worked farming organic and heirloom vegetables on her own acreage as part of a land co-op, setting up farms for
restaurants, and as farm manager for multi acre community farms in Milwaukee and Denver. Fatuma is currently entering her tenth year as a farm manager or farm operations director. Before becoming a farmer, Fatuma was a political scientist who
engaged in issues affecting marginalized farming communities such as the push for genetically modified seeds across Sub-Saharan Africa. She believes in resistance by the world’s land caretakers to single solutions for crop productivity and seeks to work
on re-framing ideas of food security. Fatuma has been certified and teaching yoga since 2004 and is a graduate of the Center for Agriculture and Ecology at the University of Santa Cruz. She currently serves as a Mayor appointed Member of the Sustainable Food Council for the City of Denver, a co-chair for the City’s Good Food Purchasing Policy Group, is a fellow at Transformational Leaders for Change promoting leaders of color in Colorado, is a 2020 Rocky Mountain Farmers Union Fellow for 2020 and was elected president of Mile High Farmers in 2020. Fatuma is also the recipient of the Kathy Underhill Inaugural scholarship recognizing a community member who is changing hearts and minds in the hunger space with advocacy, policy, and/or community engagement through the lens of health equity.