Farming While Black

by Leah Penniman

  We are also reminded of both past and present forms of trauma and oppressive behavior, from colonialism, to the present day slavery of mass incarceration, and yet, globally as a people, still we rise!

  In the struggle for civil rights and human rights, Black farmers have always been there. We have endured the test of time in our resilience and resolve. Our power is in the soil, the land, the Earth. Our skin hues are a testament to our belonging.

  Farming While Black encourages us to reach for greatest and settle for nothing less. Know your history. Share and tell our stories. Pay respect and honor our elders. Pass on the gift of knowledge and fortitude to our youth. Find strength in family and community, but above all love one another, love the Earth, and be true to one’s self.

  As we move toward alternative ways of farming, living, and being, away from our oppressors, we cannot fall victim to replicating their behavior. Leah has paved the way by addressing our fears, wants, and desires.

  Thank you Leah for giving us this gift. Farming While Black is the book we will turn to when we need to be grounded, reminded of our heritage, our greatest, our resources, our networks, and the reason why as Black people we farm!

  —KAREN WASHINGTON

  Rise & Root Farm, Chester, New York

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  While I sit indoors and pontificate at my computer screen, the Soul Fire Farm team endures cold fingers and sore shoulders to grow food and create habitat. The biggest shout-out goes to Jonah Vitale-Wolff, Larisa Jacobson, Damaris Miller, Amani Olugbala, Lytisha Wyatt, Ceci Pineda, Olive Watkins, Neshima Vitale-Penniman, and Emet Vitale-Penniman for doing the beautiful and often grueling work of stewarding this sacred land. Jonah, Neshima, and Emet, you are the loves of my life and I am so honored to be part of this family.

  Beneath my confident and vivacious exterior dwells an insecure and quiet thinker who wonders, Can I really do this? I thank my dear soul brother Enroue Halfkenny for being the unwavering, loving support that got me through. My powerful sisters Naima Penniman and Taina Asili never doubted my capacity and kept reminding me, “The world needs this book.”

  The entire manuscript came together in just five months, and with only two days per week at that. This was possible thanks to a brilliant behind-the-scenes team of researchers and readers who generously shared their time and knowledge. Thank you Larisa Jacobson for being the lead content editor for this book and to Juliet Tarantino, Myles Lennon, Dara Cooper, Ross Gay, Owen Taylor, Justine Williams, Tagan Engel, Enroue Halfkenny, and Elizabeth Henderson for your research and review of the chapters.

  Farmers and activists are the busiest people I know, yet so many of you took the time to talk with me and share your stories for Farming While Black. A low bow of gratitude to Eugene Cooke, JoVonna Johnson, Dennis Derryck, Matthew Raiford, Demalda Newsome, Rufus Newsome, Forrest Lahens, Terressa Tate, Chris Bolden Newsome, Ben Burkett, Rhyne Cureton, Dijour Carter, Malik Yakini, Mama Hanifa, Karen Washington, Owen Taylor, Chef Njathi Kabui, Mama Isola, Michael Twitty, Yusuf Burgess, Julie Rawson, Wislerson Pierre Louis, Jean Moliere, Mr. Kwabla of Oborpah-Djerkiti, Jun San Yasuda, Xavier Brown, and all the other growers whose work and mentorship inspired the content of this book.

  To all the past, present, and future board members, staff, alumni, and volunteers of Soul Fire Farm, I see you, I honor you, I love you. A special thank-you goes to Adaku Utah, Jalal Sabur, Adele Smith-Penniman, Dan Lyles, Kavitha Rao, Abby Lublin, Tagan Engel, Taina Asili, Kristin Reynolds, Elena Rosenbaum, Naima Penniman, Gabrilla Ballard, Adán Martinez, Gail Myers, and Mama Claudia Ford for the countless hours you put into keeping this project alive and thriving.

  Big ups to my editor at Chelsea Green, Michael Metivier, for surviving the Ashburnham-Westminster public school system with me, waiting patiently until I found the time to write this compendium, and having the courage to publish a book that directly confronts white supremacy and colonialism in the food system.

  I thank my parents, Adele Smith-Penniman and Keith Penniman and my siblings Naima and Allen Penniman for loving me unconditionally. I offer gratitude to my ancestors Samuel Cornelius Smith, Brown Lee McCullough, Anne Elizabeth McTurman, Eural Allen McCullough, Sarah Ann Jackson, Merton Allen Penniman, Winifred Ruth Curtis-Penniman, and all others in the Smith, McCullough, Curtis, Penniman, Bordeleau, and Jackson lineages for having my back at all times. I thank the Mohican people for stewarding this sacred land for generations. I pay homage to Mawu-Lisa, the orisa, and all the Forces of Nature for the abundant blessings of this life.

  The Soul Fire Farm staff gather for our winter retreat. Top row from the left: Lytisha Wyatt, Larisa Jacobson, and Damaris Miller. Bottom row from the left: Leah Penniman, Amani Olugbala, Ceci Pineda, Jonah Vitale-Wolff, and Olive Watkins. Photo by King Aswad.

  INTRODUCTION

  Black Land Matters

  Revolution is based on land. Land is the basis of all independence. Land is the basis of freedom, justice, and equality.

  —MALCOLM X

  As a young person, and one of three mixed-race Black children raised in the rural North mostly by our white father, I found it very difficult to understand who I was. Some of the children in our conservative, almost all-white public school taunted, bullied, and assaulted us, and I was confused and terrified by their malice. But while school was often terrifying, I found solace in the forest. When human beings were too much to bear, the earth consistently held firm under my feet and the solid, sticky trunk of the majestic white pine offered me something stable to grasp. I imagined that I was alone in identifying with Earth as Sacred Mother, having no idea that my African ancestors were transmitting their cosmology to me, whispering across time, “Hold on daughter—we won’t let you fall.”

  I never imagined that I would become a farmer. In my teenage years, as my race consciousness evolved, I got the message loud and clear that Black activists were concerned with gun violence, housing discrimination, and education reform, while white folks were concerned with organic farming and environmental conservation. I felt that I had to choose between “my people” and the Earth, that my dual loyalties were pulling me apart and negating my inherent right to belong. Fortunately, my ancestors had other plans. I passed by a flyer advertising a summer job at The Food Project, in Boston, Massachusetts, that promised applicants the opportunity to grow food and serve the urban community. I was blessed to be accepted into the program, and from the first day, when the scent of freshly harvested cilantro nestled into my finger creases and dirty sweat stung my eyes, I was hooked on farming. Something profound and magical happened to me as I learned to plant, tend, and harvest, and later to prepare and serve that produce in Boston’s toughest neighborhoods. I found an anchor in the elegant simplicity of working the earth and sharing her bounty. What I was doing was good, right, and unconfused. Shoulder-to-shoulder with my peers of all hues, feet planted firmly in the earth, stewarding life-giving crops for Black community—I was home.

  Soil-kissed hands at Soul Fire Farm. Photo by Neshima Vitale-Penniman.

  Children lead the opening ceremonies at the 2017 Black Farmers and Urban Gardeners Conference in Atlanta, Georgia. Photo by Warren Cameron.

  As it turned out, The Food Project was relatively unique in terms of integrating a land ethic and a social justice mission. From there I went on to learn and work at several other rural farms across the Northeast. While I cherished the agricultural expertise imparted by my mentors, I was also keenly aware that I was immersed in a white-dominated landscape. At organic agriculture conferences, all of the speakers were white, all of the technical books sold were authored by white people, and conversations about equity were considered irrelevant. I thought that organic farming was invented by white people and worried that my ancestors who fought and died to break away from the land would roll over in their graves to see me stooping. I struggled with the feeling that a life on land would be a betrayal of my people. I could not have been more wrong.

  At the annual gathering of the Northeast Org
anic Farming Association, I decided to ask the handful of people of color at the event to gather for a conversation, known as a caucus. In that conversation I learned that my struggles as a Black farmer in a white-dominated agricultural community were not unique, and we decided to create another conference to bring together Black and Brown farmers and urban gardeners. In 2010 the National Black Farmers and Urban Gardeners Conference (BUGS), which continues to meet annually, was convened by Karen Washington. Over 500 aspiring and veteran Black farmers gathered for knowledge exchange and for affirmation of our belonging to the sustainable food movement.

  Through BUGS and my growing network of Black farmers, I began to see how miseducated I had been regarding sustainable agriculture. I learned that “organic farming” was an African-indigenous system developed over millennia and first revived in the United States by a Black farmer, Dr. George Washington Carver, of Tuskegee University in the early 1900s. Carver conducted extensive research and codified the use of crop rotation in combination with the planting of nitrogen-fixing legumes, and detailed how to regenerate soil biology. His system was known as regenerative agriculture and helped move many southern farmers away from monoculture and toward diversified horticultural operations.1

  Dr. Booker T. Whatley, another Tuskegee professor, was one of the inventors of community-supported agriculture (CSA),* which he called a Clientele Membership Club. He advocated for diversified pick-your-own operations that produced an assortment of crops year-round. He developed a system that allowed consumer members to access produce at 40 percent of the supermarket pricing.2

  Further, I learned that community land trusts were first started in 1969 by Black farmers, with the New Communities movement leading the way in Georgia. Land trusts are nonprofit organizations that achieve conservation and affordable housing goals through cooperative ownership of land and restrictive covenants on land use and sale. In addition to catalyzing the community land trusts, Black farmers also demonstrated how cooperatives could provide for the material needs of their members, such as housing, farm equipment, student scholarships and loans, as well as organize for structural change. The 1886 Colored Farmers’ National Alliance and Cooperative Union and Fannie Lou Hamer’s 1972 Freedom Farm were salient examples of Black leadership in the cooperative farming movement.3

  Learning about Carver, Hamer, Whatley, and New Communities, I realized that during all those years of seeing images of only white people as the stewards of the land, only white people as organic farmers, only white people in conversations about sustainability, the only consistent story I’d seen or been told about Black people and the land was about slavery and sharecropping, about coercion and brutality and misery and sorrow. And yet here was an entire history, blooming into our present, in which Black people’s expertise and love of the land and one another was evident. When we as Black people are bombarded with messages that our only place of belonging on land is as slaves, performing dangerous and backbreaking menial labor, to learn of our true and noble history as farmers and ecological stewards is deeply healing.

  Fortified by a more accurate picture of my people’s belonging on land, I knew I was ready to create a mission-driven farm centering on the needs of the Black community. At the time, I was living with my Jewish husband, Jonah, and our two young children, Neshima and Emet, in the South End of Albany, New York, a neighborhood classified as a “food desert” by the federal government. On a personal level this meant that despite our deep commitment to feeding our young children fresh food and despite our extensive farming skills, structural barriers to accessing good food stood in our way. The corner store specialized in Doritos and Coke. We would have needed a car or taxi to get to the nearest grocery store, which served up artificially inflated prices and wrinkled vegetables. There were no available lots where we could garden. Desperate, we signed up for a CSA share, and walked 2.2 miles to the pickup point with the newborn in the backpack and the toddler in the stroller. We paid more than we could afford for these vegetables and literally had to pile them on top of the resting toddler for the long walk back to our apartment.

  When our South End neighbors learned that Jonah and I both had many years of experience working on farms, from Many Hands Organic Farm, in Barre, Massachusetts, to Live Power Farm, in Covelo, California, they began to ask whether we planned to start a farm to feed this community. At first we hesitated. I was a full-time public school science teacher, Jonah had his natural building business, and we were parenting two young children. But we were firmly rooted in our love for our people and for the land, and this passion for justice won out. We cobbled together our modest savings, loans from friends and family, and 40 percent of my teaching salary every year in order to capitalize the project. The land that chose us was relatively affordable, just over $2,000 an acre, but the necessary investments in electricity, septic, water, and dwelling spaces tripled that cost. With the tireless support of hundreds of volunteers, and after four years of building infrastructure and soil, we opened Soul Fire Farm, a project committed to ending racism and injustice in the food system, providing life-giving food to people living in food deserts, and transferring skills and knowledge to the next generation of farmer-activists.

  Our first order of business was feeding our community back in the South End of Albany. While the government labels this neighborhood a food desert, I prefer the term food apartheid, because it makes clear that we have a human-created system of segregation that relegates certain groups to food opulence and prevents others from accessing life-giving nourishment. About 24 million Americans live under food apartheid, in which it’s difficult to impossible to access affordable, healthy food. This trend is not race-neutral. White neighborhoods have an average of four times as many supermarkets as predominantly Black communities. This lack of access to nutritious food has dire consequences for our communities. Incidences of diabetes, obesity, and heart disease are on the rise in all populations, but the greatest increases have occurred among people of color, especially African Americans and Native Americans. These diet-related illnesses are fueled by diets high in unhealthy fats, cholesterol, and refined sugars, and low in fresh fruits, vegetables, and legumes. In our communities, children are being raised on processed foods, and now over one-third of children are overweight or obese, a fourfold increase over the past 30 years. This puts the next generation at risk for lifelong chronic health conditions, including several types of cancer.4

  At Soul Fire Farm we had to invest in the soil in order for her to yield the food our community needed. Working hard to build up the marginal, rocky, sloped soils using no-till methods, we managed to create about a foot of topsoil. Into this rich, young earth, we were finally ready to plant over 80 varieties of mostly heirloom vegetables and small fruits, centering crops with cultural significance to our peoples. Once per week we harvested the bounty and boxed it up into even shares that contained 8 to 12 vegetables each, plus a dozen eggs, sprouts, and/or poultry for the members of South End Community. The farm share was a subscription program based on the African American Kwanzaa principle of Ujamaa, meaning “cooperative economics.” As Dr. Maulana Karenga once explained, “In a world where greed, resource seizure, and plunder have been globalized with maximum technological and military power, we must uphold the principle and practice of Ujamaa (Cooperative Economics) or shared work and wealth. This principle reaffirms the right to control and benefit from the resources of one’s own lands and to an equitable and just share of the goods of the world.”5

  Desiring to move beyond the casual and exploitative relationship between producer and consumer that capitalism celebrates, we developed long-term relationships of mutual commitment with our members. In early spring members signed up for the program and committed to spend whatever they could afford on our farm’s bounty. We used a sliding-scale model where people contributed depending on their level of income and wealth. In turn we committed to providing members with a weekly delivery of bountiful, high-quality food throughout the harvest season, which las
ts 20 to 22 weeks in our climate. We delivered the boxes directly to the doorsteps of people living under food apartheid and accepted government benefits as payment, such as the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). This reduced the two most pressing barriers to food access: transportation and cost. Using the farm-share model, we can now feed 80 to 100 families, many of whom would not otherwise have access to life-giving food. One member told us that their family “would be eating only boiled pasta if it were not for this veggie box.”

  While it was and continues to be essential for us as farmers to maintain a commitment to food access, that work alone is inadequate to address the systemic issues that led to food apartheid in the first place. Racism is built into the DNA of the US food system. Beginning with the genocidal land theft from Indigenous people, continuing with the kidnapping of our ancestors from the shores of West Africa for forced agricultural labor, morphing into convict leasing, expanding to the migrant guestworker program, and maturing into its current state where farm management is among the whitest professions, farm labor is predominantly Brown and exploited, and people of color disproportionately live in food apartheid neighborhoods and suffer from diet-related illness, this system is built on stolen land and stolen labor, and needs a redesign. We were aware that we could not solve the entire problem on our own, but neither could we cast our silent vote for the status quo through complicit non-action. We needed mentorship from our elders.

  We invited veteran civil rights activist Baba Curtis Hayes Muhammad to our table to discuss the role of farmers in the movement for racial justice. “Recognize that land and food have been used as a weapon to keep Black people oppressed,” he said. “Recognize also that land and food are essential to liberation for Black people.”