By Leah Penniman

 Leah Penniman, the author of Farming While Black: Soul Fire Farm’s Practical Guide to Decolonizing Land, Food, and Agriculture, is a farmer, author, food sovereignty activist and a winner of the prestigious James Beard Leadership Award. As a young mother, Penniman and her family lived in an Albany, NY neighborhood that experienced “food apartheid”—a system that segregates those with access to nutritious food and those denied that access.

 Determined to feed her family with heathy food, Penniman and her husband scrapped together their savings and borrowed money from family and friends and bought land and started to farm. In 2011, Penniman co-founded Soul Fire Farm as part of a mission to work toward ending racism and injustice in the food system. Soul Fire farm annually trains over 1000 Black and brown people to be farmers and seeks to elevate the dignity and working conditions of that profession. This is an edited excerpt of a talk that Leah Penniman gave at a Bioneers Conference.

I’m going to begin with the calling of lineage by inviting in Mary Jane Boyd, my grandma’s grandma and her grandmother, Susie Boyd, who was one of the thousands of women from Dahomey who had the audacious courage to braid seeds of okra, cow pea, millet, black rice, and egusi (squash seeds) into her hair before being forced onto a transatlantic slave ship, believing that we, her ancestors, would exist to inherit those seeds and foods.

I also want to call in my grandmother, who is one of the six million Black folks who were refugees in the Great Migration fleeing the white racial terror that dispossessed them of lands, as well as the discrimination by our own federal government. To hold onto the agrarian tradition that she had learned in Rock Hill, South Carolina, Grandma kept a strawberry patch and a crab apple tree in her yard on the outskirts of Boston. That is where my sister and I first learned to garden and to preserve our own food, and to listen to what the Earth had to tell us. So, a big shout out and much gratitude to our lineage!

When my sister and I were children, we thought that we had invented a religion of Earth reverence. Among our spiritual practices was to go outside and hug Grandmother Pine and imagine that our exhale of CO₂ would be absorbed by her and returned to us as oxygen, and in that embrace, we would have a mutually supportive exchange of life-giving gases. That was 4 and 5-year-old Naima and Leah. While our activism has matured and become more strategic in terms of the way we engage with policy and institution-building and healing from trauma and frontlines work, that fundamental yearning for intimate connection with the Earth remains unabated.

My daily connection to the earth is as a farmer who is working to uproot racism in the food system. People ask me, “What’s wrong with the food system?” My personal hypothesis is that the food system is actually working as it was designed, which is to concentrate wealth, power, and resources in the hands of the few at the expense of most of us. The DNA of the food system is fundamentally stolen land and exploited labor. So, we need a complete redesign.

 A quote that I’ve been meditating a lot on has to do with the intersection between the ecological and the human labor aspects of the food system. It’s a very strong quote from an unlikely source: Wendell Berry. I ask you to receive it with an open heart and mind, because I think it gets at something very fundamental about what needs to be uprooted in the food system. In his latest book, The Need To be Whole, Wendell Berry wrote: “The white man, preoccupied with the abstractions of the economic exploitation and ownership of the land, necessarily has lived on the country as a destructive force, an ecological catastrophe, because he assigned the hand labor, and in that the possibility of intimate knowledge of the land, to a people he considered racially inferior. In thus debasing labor, he destroyed the possibility of meaningful contact with the earth. He was literally blinded by his presuppositions and prejudices. Because he did not know the land, it was inevitable that he would squander its natural bounty, deplete its richness, corrupt and pollute it, or destroy it altogether. The history of the white man’s use of the earth in America is a scandal.”

We can’t divorce the way we treat the Earth and the people of the Earth. This is very alive for us right now. Farm workers – as they’re called – are really agricultural experts: they’re farmers who happen to be employees. They are 85 plus percent people of color, mostly Spanish-speaking and born outside the borders of the so-called United States. Many are Indigenous people. During the COVID pandemic, they were designated as essential workers. Society is saying that the labor and the outputs of the labor are essential, but the lives of those who tend and till the earth are not.

Farm workers suffer high levels of homelessness. Their children miss school to work in the field with their parents. 50% of farm workers are not legally authorized to work, so they can’t receive unemployment benefits between jobs. They didn’t receive the stimulus packages during the pandemic and were excluded from the free COVID testing by the government.

Soul Fire Farm is engaged in farmer training; we’re involved in root cause advocacy and land-back work, as well as working for justice for Black farmers. To truly transform the food system in the ways that we need to, we need a holistic picture. There’s a very powerful metaphor for this in the form of the four wings of transformative social justice depicted as a butterfly.  Butterflies have 4 wings (a hind-wing and forewing on both sides). Without all four wings they cannot fly.

So, when we talk about social transformation, the four wings could be summarized as follows: resist, build, heal and reform. Resist refers to that direct confrontation of injustice—our boycotts, civil disobedience, protests, non-cooperation, walkouts, strikes, non-payment—all the non-cooperation with oppression. That is resist. We need that wing.

We have the wing of reform. People working on reform are some of the most courageous folks because they go into the belly of the beast to do policy change, to transform our public schools from the inside out. They campaign for elected office. They work within the published media with all of its complexities and problematic ways. They do equity audits within our own organizations to transform from within.

The builders, which is where we at Soul Fire Farms squarely put ourselves, those are the ones who are creating institutions that strive to represent the world that we want to create. That’s our freedom schools, our land trusts, our seed-saving networks, our co-ops, our churches, our farms, community clinics, sanctuaries. The builders create institutions that reflect how we can best implement our values.

The final wing is healing. There’s no way we can go through centuries, if not millennia, of land-based oppression and not be scarred and carry trauma in our DNA, and to sometimes enact lateral violence among ourselves that impedes our own progress. So, we need our therapy, our ceremonies, our plant medicines, our stories, our art, our vigils, our prayer, all of these aspects of healing.

There is no way that one individual or one organization or one strategy is going to succeed. We really need to figure out how to collectively make our butterfly fly. These four transformative justice strategies – resist, build, heal and reform – are found in many projects in BIPOC communities.

But one of the many obstacles we face is the savior complex, which is rooted in this idea that the folks who are most impacted by these issues of racial injustice in the food system don’t know what we’re doing or how to solve it. The savior complex comes from the idea that someone outside of our communities needs to come educate us, guide us, tell us what to do, and that’s how the problems will be solved. This is confusing to me because I know that if I want to be in allyship and work on issues of Islamophobia, for example, I’m going to lean into the expertise of the Muslim community to tell me what’s going on and what needs to happen. If I want to work on the issues of the deep trauma that our veterans experience, the PTSD and the mental health issues that come from being part of the war machine, I’m going to lean into my comrades and family members who are veterans to ask what is going on and what needs to happen.

People of Color Communities have answers. We have the ancestral knowledge which has mostly been ignored, appropriated, or under-resourced. The solution comes when society is willing to transfer power, dignity, and resources to Black, Indigenous and people-of-color leadership when it comes to solving food issues.

An effort for social transformation that we are part of is the emerging network of the Northeast Farmers of Color Land Trusts. It started in 2017, as a collaboration between Indigenous and Black Earth stewards, farmers, and seed-keepers who are deeply committed to the “rematriation” of lands in the spirit of “land-back” movements to permanently secure land tenure for folks of all backgrounds who’ve been dispossessed. That is a lot harder than it sounds. One of the strategies of settler colonialism has been to sow divisions between our communities to try to convince us to that we are each other’s enemies. So, there is a lot of relationship-building at the speed of trust and consultation required. Learning one another’s histories, traumas and pains is part of that. That organization is looking to move acres into our collective stewardship.

Also, there is the Black Farmer Fund, which is a finance vehicle finding ways to make capital available in the form of non-exploitative loans and grants to farm and food workers in the Northeast who are trying to be entrepreneurs and establish themselves on land. There are farmer training programs, a rural one at Soul Fire Farm and an urban one at Farm School NYC that are supporting thousands of returning generations of Black and brown people to scale up and be good stewards of the land.

The Corbin Hill Food Project feeds 80,000 people every single year in the most vulnerable communities in New York City through a food-hub model. They’re able to purchase food from our farmers, aggregate it and distribute it to folks who need it. And Black Farmers United New York, which is the policy branch of that project, works tirelessly to make sure that the conditions are right for all of this to sprout and grow.

This is a very nascent network, but what’s so powerful is that it’s pushing beyond the idea that any one individual or organization needs to have it all figured out. It’s starting to ask how we can all collaborate and put our puzzle pieces together to build a healthy and just food system, from sunshine to plate, with institutions that are coming from a land and food sovereignty frame and are trying to hold those services for our community.

Sometimes people ask me: “Do you really believe that we’re going to win?” They ask mostly in the context of climate chaos. And, you know, the honest answer is that I don’t know, but I believe that we’re all going to live much more honorably on this great blue Earth if we behave as if we will win. To keep that hope alive, even knowing that we might not get to the mountain or see beyond it in our lifetimes, we need to think in generational returns rather than quarterly returns.