You have probably heard it said that food security is national security.
Veterans in agriculture know this well, and it is the idea behind Project Victory Gardens, an organization helping bring former service members to the farm.
According to Matthew Rutter, Farmer Veteran Coalition of South Carolina President, “The military allows veterans in their last like four or five months of service to go intern somewhere, and so we wrote the curriculum and designed this internship program, and it’s based off a consortium and we can bring any veteran that’s getting out of the military that gets approval by their chain of command into South Carolina and put them on anything that smells like agriculture. But any farm in South Carolina, any farm business, Farm Bureau, Farm Credit, anything that is associated with agriculture or ag adjacent— we can place them.”
Matthew’s wife Kara says that the unique program connects these veterans to a variety of industries, including agritourism.
“We’re running the first cohort of our agritourism incubator program currently. So, they’ll come up to our farm in June, and that’s been a really great program, and with that, we’ve launched Farms of the Brave, which is a marketing and branding program for veteran-led agritourism farms. And, we’re registering farms in North and South Carolina now, and in 2026 we plan to take that national,” Kara Rutter adds.
She says a great introduction to farming is their Farmer Boot Camp. They run that program five or six times a year.
