You’ve heard the adage, “Food security is national security.” Few people take that more seriously than veterans in agriculture, such as Matthew and Kara Rutter, who have established Project Victory Gardens in Townville, South Carolina, to bring more former service members onto the farm. Kara says, Project Victory Gardens does this through a number of methods.
“We have an internship program for transitioning service members that are interested in farming and agriculture. We do a program called farmer boot camp that we do five or six times a year, and that’s a great kind of introduction to farming and the business side of things, as well as getting your hands dirty on the farm.”
She says they also introduce veterans to the growing industry of 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.”
Matthew tells us Project Victory Gardens is part of the Department of Defense SkillBridge Program, which helps military members transition into their next career.
“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 of 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 any anything that smells like agriculture, 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.”
Find out more at ProjectVictoryGardens.org.