Farming While Black

by Leah Penniman

  Muhammad explained the central role that Black farmers played during the civil rights movement, coordinating campaigns for desegregation and voting rights as well as providing food, housing, bail money, and safe haven for other organizers. With his resolute and care-worn eyes, immense white Afro, and hands creased with the wisdom of years, this was a man who inspired us to listen attentively so that we might stand on the shoulders of activists who had gone before.

  “Without Black farmers, there would have been no Freedom Summer—in fact, no civil rights movement,” he said. He asked us, “How are you contributing to today’s movements for racial justice?”

  Even as we continued to provide nourishing food to our people living under food apartheid in six Capital District neighborhoods, we knew we needed to do more. So we started to organize. We expanded our work to include youth empowerment and organizing, specifically working with court-adjudicated, institutionalized, and state-targeted youth. Arguably, the seminal civil rights issue of our time is the systemic racism permeating the criminal “justice” system. The Black Lives Matter movement has brought to national attention the fact that people of color are disproportionately targeted by police stops, arrests, and police violence. And once they’re in the system, they tend to receive subpar legal representation and longer sentences, and are less likely to receive parole. The 2014 police killings of Eric Garner and Michael Brown were not isolated incidents, but part of a larger story of state violence toward people of color.

  Black youth are well aware that the system does not value their lives. “Look, you’re going to die from the gun or you are going to die from bad food,” one young man said while visiting Soul Fire Farm. “So there is really no point.” This fatalism, a form of internalized racism, is common among Black youth. It’s a clear sign that this country needs a united social movement to rip out racism at its roots and dismantle the caste system that makes these young people unable to see that their beautiful Black lives do matter.

  We started the Youth Food Justice program in our third year, aiming to liberate our young people from the criminal punishment system. Through an agreement with the Albany County courts, young people could choose to complete our on-farm training program in lieu of punitive sentencing. It was imperative that we interrupt the school-to-prison pipeline that demonizes and criminalizes our youth. We felt that young people instead needed mentorship from adults with similar backgrounds, connection to land, and full respect for their humanity.

  In the 50-hour training program, young people learned basic farming, cooking, and business skills. More important, they learned that they were necessary, they were valuable, and they belonged. We took our shoes off and placed our bare feet firmly on the warm earth. As we walked past the garlic field, the swallows swooping over the buckwheat flowers, the grandmothers in the ancestor realm whispered their love for us. The most hardened and defended child, who earlier asked, “What’s the point?,” began to weep. His grandmothers reached for him through the earth under his feet and reminded him that there was a point. He and his peers found meaning in tending the crops that would feed their communities back home, and teaching adults the skills they had garnered. They sat in a circle and analyzed the brokenness of the criminal punishment system, compiling necessary policy changes that would be championed by the New York State Prisoner Justice Network. They made bows and arrows in the forest, threw stones in the pond, and allowed themselves some laughter.

  “My original charge was loitering, and then once I was in the system, everything got harder and started getting out of control,” shared one young man on the first day of the program. As others spoke, we learned that his story was not unique—in fact, most of the young men’s first arrests had been for loitering. I shared with the group that loitering laws were part of the vagrancy statutes included in the Black Codes. These were laws written to control and re-enslave the Black population after Reconstruction, a set of policies that followed the Civil War. Some things have not changed.

  Youth program participants at Soul Fire Farm place their bare feet on the soil.

  We agreed with the position of Malcolm X in his “Message to the Grass Roots,” a speech he delivered in 1963. “Revolution is based on land,” he said. “Land is the basis of all independence. Land is the basis of freedom, justice, and equality.” We saw the Youth Food Justice Program as an opportunity for these young men to heal relationships with their communities, the land, and themselves, as well as to recognize their potential to be agents of change in society.

  However, it was not enough for young people to simply feel connected to land. We knew the land and belonged to the land, but the land did not belong to us. Ralph Paige of the Federation of Southern Cooperatives put it simply: “Land is the only real wealth in this country and if we don’t own any then we’re out of the picture.”

  Brutal racism—maiming, lynching, burning, deportation, economic violence, legal violence—ensured that our roots would not spread deeply and securely. In 1910, at the height of Black landownership, 16 million acres of farmland—14 percent of the total—was owned and cultivated by Black families.6 Now less than 1 percent of farms are Black-owned.

  Our Black ancestors were forced, tricked, and scared off land until 6.5 million of them migrated to the urban North in the largest migration in US history. This was no accident. Just as the US government sanctioned the slaughter of buffalo to drive Native Americans off their land, so did the United States Department of Agriculture and the Federal Housing Administration deny access to farm credit and other resources to any Black person who joined the NAACP, registered to vote, or signed any petition pertaining to civil rights. When Carver’s methods helped Black farmers be successful enough to pay off their debts, their white landlords responded by beating them almost to death, burning down their houses, and driving them off their land.7

  Participants in Soul Fire Farm’s Black Latinx Farmers Immersion exchange a fist pump while tending to the onions.

  According to the think tank Race Forward, even today, Blacks, Latinx, and Indigenous people working in the food system are more likely than whites to earn lower wages, receive fewer benefits, and live without access to healthy food.8

  Owning our own land, growing our own food, educating our own youth, participating in our own health care and justice systems—this is the source of real power and dignity.

  In our fourth year we started the Black Latinx Farmers Immersion at Soul Fire Farm as a humble attempt to rewrite part of this story, to reclaim our ancestral right to both belong to the land and have the land belong to us. We heard time and again from aspiring Black and Brown farmers that agricultural training programs in their communities were, at best, culturally irrelevant, and often outright racist. One young Black farmer was subjected to the white farm owner asking him over bean picking, “Why is it that Black men abandon their families?” Another sister shared that her application had been denied for several apprenticeships and incubator farms, and she could not afford to leave her family to attend a land grant university. We knew that we had to act.

  The Black Latinx Farmers Immersion was designed as a rigorous introduction to small-scale sustainable farming that balanced the nerdy explication of concepts like “soil cation exchange capacity” with the cultural and historical teachings necessary for our people to heal our relationships to land. On a typical day we woke at dawn and circled up on the dew-covered grass for morning movement. From there we broke up into teams to learn hands-on farming tasks by doing—bed prep, seeding, transplanting, pest control—and then shared that knowledge with other participants through an “each one teach one” popular education model. We took turns cooking the recipes of our ancestors, substituting locally grown vegetables for their tropical equivalents. We learned the songs and prayers used in the process of slaughtering animals. We learned to take life. Then we engaged in herbal healing baths in the African tradition to cleanse that strong energy and lay down our metaphorical “knives.” We used drums and song to enco
urage the seeds to grow, and we filled the moonlit night sky with the sounds of our dancing to Kendrick Lamar and Nicki Minaj. We bathed ourselves in resiliency.

  On the last day of the weeklong program, we sealed our intentions with the words of Assata Shakur: “It is our duty to fight for our freedom. It is our duty to win. We must love each other and support each other. We have nothing to lose but our chains.” We chanted it over and over, growing louder each time until the powerful echoes of our shouts mingled with quiet tears—tears for the struggles of oppressed peoples and tears for the hope of liberation.

  Alumni of the Black Latinx Farmers Immersion have become a force to be reckoned with in the food justice world. Together we have catalyzed a national reparations initiative to return stolen land and resources to our people. We are working on a northeast regional land trust that will upend private ownership of Mama Earth and increase farmland stewardship by people of color. Our alumni collective of speakers and trainers are waking the public up to the pervasive injustice in the food system and providing concrete actionable next steps to restore justice. We have even expanded our solidarity work beyond the imaginary political boundaries of nation state, to include sibling farms in Haiti, Puerto Rico, Mexico, Ghana, and Brazil, with whom we work, organize, and learn through mutual exchange.

  Black Latinx Farmers Immersion was a little peek into what is possible in a mended world. Our people have been traumatized and disoriented. While the land was the “scene of the crime,” she was never the criminal. Our people mistakenly strove to divorce ourselves from her in an effort to get free. But without the land we cannot be free.

  ________

  This book, Farming While Black, is a reverently compiled manual for African-heritage people ready to reclaim our rightful place of dignified agency in the food system. To farm while Black is an act of defiance against white supremacy and a means to honor the agricultural ingenuity of our ancestors. As Toni Morrison is reported to have said, “If there’s a book you really want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.” Farming While Black is the book I needed someone to write for me when I was a teen who incorrectly believed that choosing a life on land would be a betrayal of my ancestors and of my Black community.

  Participants in Soul Fire Farm’s Black Latinx Farmers Immersion look super fly while hanging onions to cure in the barn.

  We have organized and expanded upon the curriculum of the Black Latinx Farmers Immersion to provide readers with a concise how-to for all aspects of small-scale farming, from business planning to preserving the harvest. Throughout the chapters, we include “Uplift” sidebars to elevate the wisdom of the African Diasporic farmers and activists whose work informs the techniques described. For example, in the chapter about accessing funding for your farming venture, you will learn about federal loan programs and also about setting up a susu, a traditional Caribbean form of community lending. In the chapter about soil repair, you will read about techniques used by the Haitian community to restore degraded hillsides that can be adapted for use in your climate. At the end of the book, there is a Resources section with contact information for the organizations referenced in the chapters.

  Each chapter also reveals an honest and transparent portion of the story of Soul Fire Farm. You will cry with us as we hand-dig our foundation through hard clay, hands bloodied with broken calluses and hearts near defeat. You will celebrate with us as we triple the depth of our topsoil using techniques taught to us by Haitian farmers and defy the naysayers who told us that vegetables cannot be grown in these mountains. This book will also be honest about the limitations of its perspective. As a multiracial, light-skinned, raised-rural, northeastern, college-educated, cisgender, able-bodied, Jewish-Vodun-practicing biological mother who grew up working class, this author will invariably introduce bias into the text and invisibilize crucial experiences of members of our Black farming community. This book is mainly told from my life experience as an activist-farmer, recognizing that each member of the 10-person team that is Soul Fire Farm has their own equally rich story of arriving at this work. For the harm that may come from the limitations in my perspective, I apologize, and pledge to do what I can to uplift the voices of the Black farmers who complete and augment the narrative.

  The technical information presented is designed for farmers and gardeners with zero to five years of experience. For those with more experience, we hope that this book provides a fresh lens on practices you may have taken for granted as ahistorical or strictly European. Our Black ancestors and contemporaries have always been leaders in the sustainable agriculture and food justice movements, and continue to lead. It is time for us all to listen.

  As Toni Morrison wrote in her 1977 novel Song of Solomon:

  “See? See what you can do? Never mind you can’t tell one letter from another, never mind you born a slave, never mind you lose your name, never mind your daddy dead, never mind nothing. Here, this here, is what a man can do if he puts his mind to it and his back in it. Stop sniveling,” [the land] said. “Stop picking around the edges of the world. Take advantage, and if you can’t take advantage, take disadvantage. We live here. On this planet, in this nation, in this county right here. Nowhere else! We got a home in this rock, don’t you see! Nobody starving in my home; nobody crying in my home, and if I got a home you got one too! Grab it. Grab this land! Take it, hold it, my brothers, make it, my brothers, shake it, squeeze it, turn it, twist it, beat it, kick it, kiss it, whip it, stomp it, dig it, plow it, seed it, reap it, rent it, buy it, sell it, own it, build it, multiply it, and pass it on—can you hear me? Pass it on!”9

  This book is an honoring of that directive—to pass it on.

  * * *

  *Community-supported agriculture (CSA) is a food production and distribution system that directly connects farmers and consumers. In short: People buy “shares” of a farm’s harvest in advance and then receive a portion of the crops as they’re harvested.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Finding Land and Resources

  Land is the only real wealth in this country and if we don’t own any then we’re out of the picture.

  —RALPH PAIGE, Federation of Southern Cooperatives

  In our early 20s my partner and I convened a group of land-starved friends to pool resources and find a piece of ground to which we could belong. We failed. Our “100-plus acres with a stream running through it” dream turned out to be a fantasy beyond the combined financial means and persistence of our collective. We had saved a portion of our public school teaching and community garden organizing wages by squeezing our family of four into a low-cost single bedroom in a collective house where we heated water for baths on a woodstove and subsisted on black beans and rice. We had endured interminable consensus-based meetings on Monday evenings and rejected car ownership in favor of four-season bicycling. Still, the market realities negated the pride we felt in our thrift.

  A few years later we moved from central Massachusetts to Albany, New York, and learned that the logged, thin-soiled mountainside slopes nearby were within our financial means. So excited were we, the first time we stepped foot on the overgrown, south-facing pastures of what would be Soul Fire Farm, that we blinded ourselves to practical pitfalls of wedding to this piece of land. First, there was no road access. We would have to negotiate an easement with a couple of neighbors who were deeply invested in the Second Amendment and had signs like ANYONE FOUND HERE TONIGHT, WILL BE FOUND HERE IN THE MORNING. Also, the cost of the land would completely deplete our savings, and we had no plan for the hundreds of thousands of dollars required to install a road, electricity, septic system, barn, home, and other infrastructure. We didn’t think carefully about where our children would attend school. While we were deeply invested in the public school system, an all-white, conservative district was not going to be the right fit for our multiracial Jewish children.

  In some ways I am grateful for our eager naïveté. If we had known the road ahead, we might have turned back without
trying. Instead we walked reverently across these 72 acres and allowed the land to spool its invisible tendrils of connection around our eager feet. We inhaled possibility and exhaled commitment. We wrestled with the acknowledgment of the Land’s original theft from the Mohican people and also the right of the Black and Brown laborers whose blood had mixed with the soil to claim belonging here. With consent of the Land herself we chose to sign the white man’s title papers and bound our life to this place.

  Aspiring farmers need three essential ingredients to begin: training, land, and material resources. This chapter outlines conventional and unconventional ways to access farmer training, including a specific list of justice-oriented and people-of-color-led educational programs. It explores ways of accessing land, from squatting and informal lease agreements to buying and owning rural land. The chapter explains the state, federal, and private sources of funding for new farmers and discusses ways to tap into our communities and networks for alternative funding. Because our people were often excluded from mainstream farmer programs, we have had to create our own systems of mutual support. We uplift and learn from the examples of New Communities Land Trust, Caribbean susu, Combahee River Colony, and the Rapp Road community.

  The author walks the forested land that will become Soul Fire Farm (2006). Photo by Jonah Vitale-Wolff.

  Accessing Land

  We begin this chapter with the most daunting prerequisite for farming: access to land. As a result of decades of discrimination by the USDA, white supremacist violence, and legal exploitation of heir property, Black people have been almost entirely dispossessed of our land. In 1920, 14 percent of all landowning US farmers were Black, and today around 1 percent of farms are controlled by Black people, a loss of over 14 million acres.1 What our community fundamentally needs is large-scale reparations and land redistribution, and we are organizing for this change through the HEAL Food Alliance and the National Black Food & Justice Alliance. While we advocate for a long-term shift to the structural root causes of unequal land distribution, there are several strategies we can use in the near term to work within and outside of the system to access land.