“If people can grow safe, healthy, affordable food, if they have access to land and clean water, this is transformative on every level in a community. I believe we cannot have healthy communities without a healthy food system.”
- Will Allen, urban farmer and founder of Growing Power
How We Started
In partnership with United Way Toledo, Cultivate Toledo began with a simple observation and years of dirt under the fingernails to back it up: Toledo has everything a local food economy needs — land, growers, buyers, and neighborhoods hungry for all three — except the system that connects them. After listening to local farmers, buyers, and community advocates, we incorporated as a nonprofit to build that system deliberately: farm by farm, farmer by farmer, relationship by relationship.
Why?
Three outcomes, one system
The people behind the farms.
Cultivate Toledo is led by people who have spent their careers building things in Toledo — businesses, buildings, food, farms, and the relationships that hold a city together.
Executive Director
Andrew Newby
Founder & Executive Director. Andrew is a Toledo entrepreneur and co-founder of Toledo Spirits Company, where he spent 13 years turning locally sourced ingredients into a craft brand sold well beyond Ohio. His background spans agricultural enterprise development, community economic development, and nonprofit operations — and he brings that same build-the-market discipline to urban farming.
Board Chairman
Tom Waggoner
Tom served as Senior Vice President at The Andersons, Inc. and at Scotts Miracle-Gro, bringing decades of agricultural supply chain and operations leadership. He guides how Cultivate Toledo's farms, processing, and food hub scale as one working system.
Board Member
Nick Razzoug
Nick is an Investment Executive at Fifth Third Securities. He brings financial stewardship and capital strategy to the board, keeping the organization's growth as disciplined as its mission is ambitious.
Board Member
John Schuett
John of Heartland Farms contributes direct commercial greenhouse and specialty horticulture production experience — the practical knowledge of what it takes to grow at commercial scale, season after season.
Cultivate Toledo is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, certified July 2026.
Work With Us
Interested in learning more about the organization and getting involved?
Every farm we build is a business we launch.
A Cultivate Toledo farm is a micro-enterprise: built in 150 days, operated by a trained farmer, and earning income from its first harvest. Your gift funds the build — land preparation, hoop house, irrigation, beds. The farmer's own revenue carries it from there. Give once, or grow with us monthly.
Watch us grow!
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