Farming While Black

And for a long time, when I thought about land, for me, it brought up feelings of anger and discomfort. And in some ways that is still true because for us so called African Americans, displacement and dispossession our stories that come to many of us at a young age, as told through members of our family or via lived experience and at school. The stories of our bondage really diminished the breadth of our experience and knowledge in American agriculture.

But with all things in relationship to nature, there is duality. And the older I got and began to meet other black friends from around the country, I started to adopt a new story that was just as true and just as easy to tell as the traumatic one, and that is the story of black resilience, ingenuity, environmentalism and health. Today we're talking to one of the sharpest minds in the US on matters of food, justice and sovereignty, Leah Pennaman.

Leah is a farmer, author, activist. She is a co founder and co director at Soul Fire Farm and Grafton, New York. Her book Farming While Black, which came out in two thousand eighteen, quickly became an indispensable handbook for all things land reclamation in sovereignty. It is an inspirational guide and endlessly insightful as she is, as you will

soon hear. But first a man I deeply admire and pleased to call a friend, my brother, Eugene Cook, who is an urban farmer and educator of grow where you are here in Atlanta, Georgia, and he is the very worthy first in studio guest of our first season on Point of Origin so today Point of Origin Farming While Black,

Part one of two. First up, Eugene Cook, Welcome back to Point of Origin Today on our special episode Farming While Black, we have one of my favorite black farmers, Eugene Cook, from my hometown of Atlanta, Georgia, who is an agroecologist and also founder of Grow Where you are. Thank you for joining us live in studio. Are first ever in studio guests for Point of Origin. Thanks for coming through Man so great to be here. Thank you brother, definitely.

So we had the opportunity to meet last year and I got a chance to see you in your element on the land, moving through different plants, with ease, with knowledge, with grace. Can you tell us how you began on your journey as a farmer? First, I want to say the title of the show is great Stephen like Point of Origin. Yeah, you didn't mention that on the whole

way up, but this is beautiful. It's poignant too, because my introduction to food, really my introduction to the understanding of where food comes from, was through my parents and my maternal grandparents, my mother's parents, who are farmers in Oklahoma.

We would go to that farm. I was born and raised in California, so we'd go to that farm every couple of years during the summertime, sometimes in other seasons as well, and I would see what it was like to manage large acreage of farms, which was primarily in commodity crops, grains and soybeans and things, but then close to the house where all the farm animals were, all the home garden, and the variety of the food, the freshness of the food, all of that was put into me.

Experientially talked about as well, but mainly experientially put into me. And I was required to keep a garden at my parents home in California on the side of the house. Same thing, just fresh peppers, tomatoes, corn, nothing big, nothing major, but had the clear understanding that, oh, food comes from the soil, and if it's going to be right outside my house, I'm obviously gonna keep it as clean as possible.

So that was just built into me. And then the journey into farming came much later when I was becoming a father for the first time. In and Samantha and I, the mother of my oldest son, We were in a space in Pomona. We were running a house and Pomona that had a small backyard big enough to grow food in for a small family. And right when I knew that she was pregnant, I just went out there and started planting food. Didn't even really think about it. She and I had planted a plum tree and a lemon

tree prior to that. But we're in Pomona, California, and there's just food growing. And people came over for a birthing celebration and they saw all this food and they said, you should teach people how to grow food. I was like, I don't know how to do. I'm not in a position to teach anybody. And they said, well, you got more food than we have growing in our backyard. And that's when it really started to click to me that yeah, we should utilize the land close to us to ensure

that we can eat. Do you remember what your grandparents in Oklahoma, what their relationship to the land was. Oh, yeah, so that's my grandmother and grandfather Patterson. For them, the land was their universe because they were on eighty acres in an area that had been what they call Indian territory. Right. My grandfather has really strong indigenous bloodlines here to the United States, mixed with the African bloodline, and my grandmother has more of the mix of the African bloodline and

the European bloodline. So for me to come through my mother and then with my father's genetics coming from Alabama with all that strong African and indigenous bloodline. The land was just I mean, really it was the universe. That my grandfather explained to me, it was everything that he valued was outside of his house other than his family members. You know, he kept his home clean and he and all of that. But what he actually valued was outside of the house. It was all the experiences that have

but outside it was the sky. Being able to understand what was coming and what had left by looking at the sky, being able to keep track of time, by seeing what was happening in the fields. They had dug a pond, a pretty large sized pond, had fish in there, There were ducks, there were chickens, there were pigs there. You know, there was just life. Yeah, it was just

all around. So I would be coming from skateboarding in Cerritos and Compton and Lakewood in California and go on a summer vacation to my grandparents house and just be out where I could stand in the middle of the gravel road, look one direction as far as I could see, the other direction, as far as I can see, there's nothing but the earth, no traffic, no stop signs. So for them, the land was their university, was how where they spent their time, their lifetime was spent on a

piece of land. And is that land still a part of your family? It is, there are parts of it are part of the family still. Yeah, there's still relatives down there living on it, relatives living in the house. Yeah. The fertility of it, I don't know too much about. And because it had been agribusiness farmed for years and years and years towards the end. Yeah, when you had this epiphany. What was your firstborn's name, Cush Cush, So when Cush was born, I mean you mentioned that was

kind of an impetus for you. But did you move into farming like full on right away or was it a gradual process. It was a gradual because still we were I was in southern California. So it went from there to working in partnership with nonprofit organizations doing community work.

And this is around two thousand one at the time, and I was working with a project at the Watts Labor Community Action Coalition, the w l c a C. And we were doing a garden instruction program, but it was really based on wrapped around poetry and art and communication, and gardening was one of the pieces that the youth had to do so working with teenage youth, all black and brown youth, a lot of Latino UM and Latino X youth, and we were planting food in these community gardens.

And then people said they were watching what I was doing, and different residents came and say, you need to meet this brother named a Donna Jaw. He's doing work over at Crenshaw High School. You need to meet him. You need to meet him. And I was like, okay, well, you know how do I meet him? And I ended up ended up going to Crenshaw High School going to the back. That's all people told me. You go to the back of Crenshaw High School and there's a big old garden. Just go back there and look for him.

Went back there, I started yelling his name. He never came out. Finally I got a call on my phone and it was him and he said, people say, you're looking for me. You don't need to see me. You need to see Dana. You don't need to talk to me, You need to talk to Dana. So he said, come out to Crenshaw you can meet Dana. And I met sister Dana out there and I was in a food forest. It's a three quarter acre agricultural space at a high

school in Los Angeles, calip Conia. There was designed to teach agriculture back in the I guess probably the early seventies and then had just gone into not being used. So in two thousand one, there were cherries, figs, chere Maya's bananas, grape vines, avocados, zapotees like stuff I had just never seen tasted. It was primarily a subtropical fruit food forest with vegetable understory, broccolis and charred and spinach. And that was when it really started. I started working

with him there on almost a daily basis. The I was doing a contract work with a nonprofit that ran out. I didn't have any more money. All types of different things happened, evictions, all types of different things happened, and I found myself living and studying with this teacher, and my world has been transformed ever since. Yeah, man, well,

let's uh, let's talk about your world today. I mean, I know we're skipped many years, but it's relevant because the last time we talked, you were also talking about bringing some of these skills and agriculture to high schools here in Atlanta. So is that still part of your your work here. Absolutely, we've had the good fortune of partnering with There's a gentleman named Dr Charles Moore, so

he works with Emery and with Grady. He's an ear nose and throat specialist and he had the experience of seeing all this this hunger and health issues throughout Atlanta and has implemented a sliding scale community clinic on his own time, separate from working as a doctor, and through that he contacted us and had us do some after school programs, some summer camp programs with the youth, and

that helped us to solidify our curriculum. So now Grow where you Are has a curriculum for food system immersion. So it is about urban agriculture and the growing, but it's also about what happens in the restaurants. It's it's about how transportation is a part of the food system,

what happens in the stores, how things are marketed. And since then we have partnered with a musician here in Atlanta named Rory and Rory he has a initiative called the Woods where he's been going around the country doing performances in the woods or at at urban farms or or even suburban farms to bring his fan base, his music base out of the traditional music venues where there's alcohol and violence is being talked about. He said, I wanted people to be able to experience music in a

natural setting and on a farm. And so those are the initiatives that we've been really rolling out because in the school systems, we found that they have to deal with a lot of administrative oversights and x spectations that are not really as conducive to the way that we like to teach. We like to bring in chefs, we like the children to have a very self guided experience inside of safe parameters. It's difficult to do that in

the school systems right now. Yeah, and and so did doctor Moore have some personal experience that led them to want to specifically invest in this education. Yeah, Specifically, what I heard was that he had been driving to work in a particular route normally, and he went a different

direction and found himself. You know, you're from Atlanta, you can make a different turn and literally we're in a whole another class of lifestyle, you know, the intense oppression that is part of our experience as African people here under a colonial tyranny. It's still looks like it looks all over the world. There are aspects of this city, Atlanta that are like third world countries um as far as it is with their facilities and cleanliness and and

all that kind of thing. And so he started seeing some of these things and was blown away and wanted to deal with the health issues immediately because he's a doctor. And then after that he started doing a program called Walk with the Doc where he would take walks on Saturday morning into some of the nature preserves and show

people different plants that had healing properties. So after doing that, it kind of evolved into writing prescriptions for people that would be green beans instead of a prescription for diabetes medication. So did you fulfill those prescriptions? We did fulfill the

prescriptions if people came to the farmers market. More importantly, we were working with the children of these people who were getting these prescriptions and showing them this is how we plant this, this is where it comes from, this is how we maintain it after we grow it. It can go a couple of different directions. We can take it to this restaurant, or we can take it to this store, or we can take it to the farmer's market.

And they experienced all of those. We took them to farmers markets, had them do a produced tour with a manager at Whole Foods, and of course different black owned farms in the Atlanta area. I'm interested in the curriculum that you've developed around trying to help these young people have a more comprehensive view of the food system outside of just growing food, because the two are very much

related but also quite different as well. Right, one is just about your own personal power and agency on the land. But can you say more about that curriculum why you felt it was so important to bring in a more holistic view of the food system them instead of just how to grow food. Absolutely, our curriculum is called the New Power Generation, and we were working with young people at that time, they were about five years old to

about thirteen years old. So grow where you are as a collective of growers who work in the food system in different ways. So for example, Jovannah Johnson Cook, my partner who helped to really give birth to the organization. She started as a grower and she now is a chef. She has a food delivery business for mothers who have just given birth and the families that are in that space and time, and also for private schools here in Atlanta. Then there's Nicole Blue who started as a grower and

also makes medicines. And then we have people like you're familiar with Chef Mari Sella Vega who comes from a family of growers and then and is focused on doing

her work in the restaurants. So we have all these key people and members in our collective that have these very specific perspectives and are also coming from a place of being young entrepreneurial people, some on their own businesses, some of them just move in a way that is an entrepreneurial spirit and they bring that and add that value to wherever they are, similar to the work that

you do. So we wanted them to see a broad base of people working in the food system, and we wanted them to understand that the reality is for us, as as people who are creating our society, that the reality is that we are going to move in multiple systems almost no matter what kind of work we're gonna do, because to have success, I mean, you may not have thought you were gonna have to be a radio host,

you know what I mean. It might not have been anything you were thinking about, or it maybe was something you were thinking about and you could always see and if it was like that for you, then we wanted to be like that for the youth. We want the youth to see Yet I may really like growing food, but I also may have a really good charismatic way of teaching and passing this on. The curriculum is about

showing people that from the food everything is born. Like all these other industries are born from agriculture, but if we know the growing part, most likely we can shift through a lot of the other parts. The growing really

provides the deepest foundational relationship to the food. I think it's so essential to to organize the curriculum in that way as well, because of the pressures that heavily subsidized and grow industrial food systems put on small farms and growers that to just say, well, if you grow your own then because it's not really that simple. R not that simple. If it's not simple for what young white farmers,

then we can forget it. We have to tap into the place that we're already familiar with, which is our creativity, which is our improvisation, which is our our preference for collaboration. I mean like jazz music was created from the idea that, yeah, man, I may be out of this world on this horn, but I sound really good if I'm next to somebody who's out of this world on piano at the same time.

You know what I mean. And so the collaboration and the creativity is what for food sovereignty to be actualized in the way that we're talking about, and for our communities to come into a place of healing as well as a place of abundance and safety. If we don't know how to grow food, then we're like, we're denying how this country was founded. And not just the black part of the country. The entire country is founded on agriculture. Period.

All the wealth that we're still pushing around is agriculturally based. So then why are farmers the lowest and the most undervalued piece of that chain. It makes no sense. No, the farming know it. No, it good nowhere the food comes from, and then from there while out into the future that you want to create. Welcome back to point of origin. So tell us how you got to Atlanta to begin with. Through my teacher aDNA Jaw from California.

We were working and we had hired a man named Rashid Nury to help do some paperwork for some projects that we were working on. And then from that point, Rushi did a short trip in Africa, in West Africa in Ghana, and when he was in Ghana, he met three women from Atlanta, Mary Casey Bay, Jeane Billingsley Brown, and Zena Stucky and they were talking about essentially the idea of creating small, many farms throughout Atlanta that would

help to support a new food system. Because these women were very informed on the toxicities of the current food system and just the lack of access to some of the things that they wanted and had getting them fresh. So they talked and they were willing to invest. They were willing to introduce us to their contacts. So Rashid contacted me and said, Hey, if I go to Atlanta, will you come and help me do this thing. I talked it over with my teacher and I came in

two thousand and six to start truly living. Well. Yeah, let's talk a little bit about that, because you have the right approach to growing in this modern world, given the many constraints that come with land use and all the rights and bureaucracy and so on. How have you managed to grow food in an urban area with all

of that, all those restrictions. It's We're in an interesting place because Atlanta, from what I've come to know from people who don't live here and who are involved in urban agriculture and other cities, Atlanta is very much focused on by other cities as a somewhat of a model for urban agriculture. So there's multiple kind of models that we've had to work with, but it's always comes down

to land ownership. Right now, Atlanta is one of the few cities that has an Urban Agricultural Commissioner, and the idea is to involve urban agriculture more in the planning of the city as well as well. I shouldn't. I don't know for sure, but I know that food access was a major point for the previous mayor. His idea was, I want people to have access to fresh food in every half mile throughout the city of Atlanta. So it could be a community garden, it could be an urban

food forests, it could be a farm. The difference that I'm experiencing because Grower you are is a social enterprise, So we're a business that seeks to do plenty of social good, both ecologically and with the general public. Yet it's different than a community garden. So there's a lot of investment happening in community gardens because community gardens are spaces where the land is still owned most of times by the city, remains in that way, and they're not businesses.

No matter how much food has grown there, you're not really allowed to sell it from there and make a business off of it. So there's a lot of folks who are have other positions in the food movement who will support community gardens, but NOE won't necessarily support urban farms or urban farmers, because one is about creating this kind of public not really consistent food supply because community gardens, when it gets too hot, people stop doing it. When

it gets too cold, people's up doing it. They go away. They get plowed up every spring so they can start new and and it does a good thing for the feeling of the people, but it's not food security and it's definitely not food sovereignty. As urban farmers, we are more inclined to be working towards food sovereignty, and that means business models that function if the current agrib business food business models don't function and are not sustainable without subsidies.

Then when we start to develop a city, a new city that wants to incorporate urban agriculture and urban farming, then we've got to look squarely at that because people will come to us and say, is it a sustainable business model? And oftentimes the people who ask that are working in nonprofits, which you feel what I mean, and they're not business people. They don't have that experience as

business people. And I've heard it said by a lot of different farmers and a lot of different people that farmers are some of the best business people you'll ever want to find, because we're actually dealing with actual numbers. Like we're dealing with projections that are real. We're dealing with real things. It's not ephemeral trading in digits, you

know what I mean. It's a different it's a different reality, which makes us hard to negotiate with when people are looking to have a successful program and not necessarily a

successful food system, you know what I mean. And so that's the place that's been most tricky because many times landowners that we come into contact with have the consciousness and understand how important it is to have a good food system, and there's still layers that they have more awakening for, but they understand that our food system is fundamentally broken and that it's toxic. So the land access

isn't that much of an issue. What really happens is that when people see us functioning as an enterprise, there is a lot of resist tense because you know, capitalism is almost based off the idea that artists, teachers, and farmers are going to be poor. And these are some of the most fundamental actors in the community, you know, but it's almost built on the idea that teachers, artists, and farmers are going to be poor always and with in a capitalist society, the idea of financial poverty is

somehow equated to a lack of intelligence. And so when people have to engage with us directly about these real issues and we have a developed perspective and in an informed perspective, oftentimes people take that personally we're just dealing in reality. They take it personal. That is so deep.

It reminds me of um in South Africa, where there have been on and off but now definitely on calls for reparations and for years, one of the most prevailing things that the government and other white folks in society there would point to is that, well, we can't just turn over this land because their first needs to be education and without the education, So it's actually, you know, been a very prevailing and disempowering narrative about indigenous and

black and brown people's relationships to the land when we very well know that that is our ancestry, right. Yeah. And the fact that I mean, you speak of South Africa and so you have probably witnessed how they respond to Julius Malemma speaking just when he talks, when the e f F, when the Economic Freedom Fighters talk, just to speak so much contention and they're saying, listen, we're speaking in your language already. How much more of that education do we actually need? And if we needed it,

why you didn't start when you first colonized this. You could have started the education process anytime you wanted it, But now you want to start it. When we were asking for the land back when we're saying it's time for you to go, now we're saying, well, we don't want to leave. So we're in that situation here where if we as African people here in the United States can really understand that all of these the issues with the border, all of the issues with healthcare, our land issues.

This is about land. And if it's about land, then just a step up from the land are the people who care for that. And if we don't see the people who care for the land, we have to understand why we don't. Why are they invisible? Eras is the

word we use for that. How do you think about your work in a longer view of time, um in terms of building legacy and assuming legacy and with your own seeds and all the many youth year in Atlanta and beyond that you're dealing with and are being inspired by your work, how do you, as a black farmer hold that idea, that notion of of legacy and your work.

One of the most important pieces of the legacy and the work is the seeds literally, So we have a seed bank that Jovannah really keeps organized and we do a lot of collecting for and that that seed gets shared and it also gets stored, labeled, cataloged, and then regrown.

The other thing is the skills, because when I look back at the only reason I'm in a position to even be interviewed by you is not because we went to school together, or our parents knew each other, or we bank at the same bank, but because my grandfather, my mother and my father passed on certain skills to me, kind of knowing intuitively that they may or may not be able to pass on the land, but they can pass on these skills. So when you when I look

at legacy, I look at it in the seeds. I look at it in the skills, and then really I focus on the creatives in society. Mari Sella Vega is a great example of that. Um a brother named Lelo Jones here in Atlanta International. Lelo is another great example of that. Rory is a great example of that. My

my own son Cush is an example of that. And what I mean is we find the creatives that are in our communities that automatically have the attention of other people simply because of the vibration that they're on, encourage it, refine it, and then showed them how the food system is part of their home, their reality because sometimes they know it, sometimes they don't, but when they find out, there's nothing as creative as nature. So nature is bound to be an inspiration to the people that we look

towards for inspiration. Do you feel what I mean? Yeah? So that's really where it is. It's like looking at the creative people and saying, you're already doing your thing to the max. Come out here and see what this place looks like you Gene Cook, Yeah, yeah, grow where you are. I appreciate your brother. Thank you so much for coming through Stephen a pleasure and mutual respect. Thanks. Good morning. This is Leah. Good morning, Leah. This is

Steven Saderfield calling from Whetstone. How you doing doing well? How are you doing? Doing pretty good? I can't complain. The garlic harvest is good. The peach harvest is good, all right, garlic and peaches. Love them both, but not usually not together. But in the harvesting them in the same day it's pleasurable. Definitely, eating them in the same fights it's not pleasurable, truly. Um. Welcome back to the

point of origin today. Leah Penniment, the co founder and co director of Soul Fire Farm, which is in Grafton, New York, is our guest. Leah is also the author of Farming While Black, which is quickly become an indispensable handbook for all things land reclamation. Sovereignty. It is a handbook and inspirational guide, a historical artifact, and we are so glad to have you join us today on point of origin. Thank you so much. It's my honor and pleasure.

So Leah, you have a long history in farming, not only in the US but all over the world, and as someone who is familiar with your work, I know that it's really important for you to ground many of your conversations in a spirit of ancestral acknowledgement. So I will honor that by giving you the opportunity to discuss what it is that brought you to this work. Thank you.

I so appreciate that. Yeah, there's a story that I tell myself every day and tell anyone who will listen, which is about my grandma's grandma's grandma and the other elders in the Homy region, West Africa in the seventeen and eighteen hundreds who were watching their family members get snatched up and be forced to board transatlantic slave ships. And in the face of that terror that they would

be next, they gathered up their seed. You know, they're oprah, how pete millet, black rice, a goosy melon, moloka, and they braided it in their hair and in the hair of their children, so that they would have the seed wherever they were going. They really believed against odds in in a future on the land and that their descendants would need to inherit the legacy of these precious seeds.

So that is the story that keeps me going because you know, we're up against a lot of forces that are not life affirming, you know, capitals and racism and patriarchy and the current administration, all the things, And so I always have to think, you know, if my ancestors didn't give up on me, then who am I then to give up on my descendants? And really being a carrier of that seed is ultimately what inspires me to get up in the morning and keep going. Absolutely, and

let's just go ahead and name it right. We are talking about a circumstance in which black folks who are living in this country, who have worked the land and built this country, have been dispossessed from the land and now own virtually none of it. What is a message that you bring forth in your work that helps black

folks recalibrate our imagination in relationship to the land. I mean, you put that so well, I mean, I really I think there's this myth that I know, there's a myth that black folks were rounded up and kidnapped for strong biceps and so called endurance and such, when in fact it was expert agriculturalists who were taken. You know, the climate in northern Europe is colds. It's conducive to potatoes

and wheat and cabbage. You know. The climate in Georgia and Florida and Cuba, Brazil is tropical, and it is conducive to rice and cattle herding and cotton, you know, and that those weren't agricultural skills that Europeans had, so the labors went and got folks who knew how to do it and built that ten trillion dollar agricultural industry on the backs of unwilling people. So we we've never recovered from the legacy of that. You know, farm labor

has always been explained. Did in this country, even after the end of slavery, morphed into sharecrafting and convict leasing, which twist of brutal irty is on the rise again

because of the immigration crackdown. You know, it morphed into the guessworker programs, and now we have eight percent of the labor that's being done on farms being done by people of color, yet, as you mentioned, between one and two percent of all the farms in the country being owned and managed by people's color, which is a really

a really gross disparity. And you know, as Malcolm X said, you know, land is the basis of revolution, of freedom and equality and dignity, and so ultimately, if we don't have some kind of control over the land, we don't have this necessary foundation for our dignity as a people. And so you have given us a lot out of historical context and grounding context. But what are some of your methodologies for ways that black people and other marginalized

groups can be a part of this reclamation. Yeah, I mean, we certainly don't pretend to have the answer, because, as my daughter in Issima says, the food system is everything it takes to get sunshine onto your plate, and that's a lot of complexity in there, you know. But at

so Fire, we focus on three main things. One is growing food using Afro indigenous methods and getting that food to our people right, and so we are blessed to be able to steward eighty acres of Stockbridge Munty, Mohicans territory up in these mountains, cold mountains, and then we cultivate that in vegetables, fruits, eggs, meat, herbs, you know, and and box that up and bring that to folks in the community out affordable prices down to free right.

So that's that's one thing is really survival program like walking the walk, do with the do every day out there in the mud, pulling garlic and whatever needs to

be done. And then the second major thing we're trying to do is to educate, inspire and support that returning generation of black and brown farmers, you know, the folks whose grandparents led the Red clades of Georgia and the Great migration and now' saying we left something behind, you know, a piece of our culture and our autonomy, and we want it back. So we have people coming through for training programs. In the wintertime, we go travel and offer trainings.

And then you know, once folks graduate, we we try to hook people up with land and jobs and the things they need. And then the final, the third and final kind of area we work on is around reparations, and reparations is repair. You know. Reparations is to look at what's been taken, the stolen labor, the stolen land, and to figure out ways to give back what was lost.

Because history is alive today. You know the fact that of the royal land is own white people becaust the land is passed down and it was taken originally, So there has to be some redistribution, and we work on that and the policy level as well as people to people level on a regional scale. In terms of like the three points that you all are focusing on, a soul fire, the R word reparations may be challenging for some listeners who feel they were not complicit in the

stolen land, they themselves weren't there. Maybe they feel they haven't directly benefited from that. Can you say what it is in the reparations framework that makes that work so essential that might not be so readily available for everyone? Sure, I mean, and the amazing thing is right now, contrary to all my expectations, this is part of a national conversation. So there's a lot out there that folks can read,

which is good. But I'll share a quick story. So this is a story that one of my mentors, Ed Whitfield, likes to tell. He said, So, imagine that your neighbor came over and still your cow, and everybody saw them do it. And then after a couple of weeks and Abri comes over with tears in their eyes, just the morse on their lips and I'm so sorry I took your cow. That wasn't right and sort of see the light. But don't worry. I want to make it up to you.

You know, every single week, for the rest of this cow's life, I would bring you half a pound of butter. And of course you'd be like, I would like my

cow back. But like unfortunately, a lot of the policies that we have right now in the United States to deal with this long legacy of the time to deem a find of in the business people, of the enslavement of the population of you know, redlining and other types of white affirmative action, it's just say, oh, well, we'll throw a couple of like token scholarships or after script programs here and there, which is like the butter, you know, when fundamentally you can't run your firm if you don't

have your cow. And so it's not that we need to figure out used to blame and whatnot. This isn't This isn't all of issues like how do we take the collective wealth of this nation, which we know was built on the backs of storm land and stolen over and work together to redistribute. Um. I think if folks can, you know, step outside of the shame and blame and ego and finger pointing and just say, you know, whether

I directly did it or not. You know, for example, I am a Taino and black woman and I live on Stockbridge Mount, Mohican land. I didn't personally kick the Mohican people off their land. Am I still obligated to be in solidarity with them and to make sure they have access to this land that I benefit from as a settler of course, right, And so there's ways that we benefit from this wealth that's been created at the expense of others, and that that makes it part of

our obligations and to be as solutionary. Does it complicate the work at all? For you give in the fact that the whole premise of land in this country is so arbitrary and yet it is so fundamental to our own sovereignty. Yeah, I mean it's certainly complicated because since the fourteen hundreds, when Europeans introduced the idea of enclosure, the idea of private property, and the erasure of the commons. We've just had a real struggle to be able to

decolonize and reindigenize our relationship to land. So you know, even here at so Fire, we're trying, you know, we created this co op and nonprofit structure and all of these legal structures to try to fit the square peg of white man's law into you know, the round expanse of the way that indigenous folks understand shared land. You know, when Northeast Indigenous communities were so called selling their land to European settlers, their idea wasn't all you fence it

and you're excluded. It's a use right. The land can't be owned. The land is stewarded by us on half of generations to come. And so there's a fundamental mismatch between the comments that I aspire to and some of the legal tools that we have to use to to get there. What has the response been, as you will have deep in your relationship to the indigenous communities in

your area. Yeah, I mean it's been a big lesson for me in humility, because I think as a person of color as a non binary person, there's ways that I am more accustomed to helping folks with privilege understand the ways they can be in solidarity and be good allies or complices. And so it's really important to be in a space where I've got to do the listening

and practice when I've preached. And you know, there's so much generations of hurt and mistrust that the dividing conquer strategies of the colonizers have been quite effective, and dividing Black communities from Indigenous communities from Latin X communities and so forth. So all that to say, I feel really really honored that anybody, any the original people here would take the time to build a relationship with us, And I really want to thank Warren and Molly and Bonnie

of the Mohican community for building a friendship. We do some seed exchange, we work on some campaigns, and China draft a cultural Respect Easement which would guarantee when he can folks for generations to come be ability to gather

medicines here in the land. And I'm just grateful that, you know, I was welcomed out to the reservation to visit with people and to learn about the history, and we keep part of our farm as a Mohican style three Sisters garden and incorporate a lot of the traditional varieties in an attempt to make sure this land is continually used in the way that it was intended. And collective farming is actually very much a part of the Black tradition. Absolutely, yeah. Can you can you talk about

the relationship between our African American ancestry and cooperative for me? Sure? I mean there's so many different kinds of co ops and to full non exploitative economic relationships that have come out of the Black community, like the CSA, in particular with the idea of book Or T. Watley, professor at Tuskegee University in the mid nineteen hundreds, who noticed that wholesale just was not making ends meet for black farmers. They were excluded from the best markets and so forth.

So he said, you know, forget all that, We're going to do direct consumer marketing. People will be members of your farm, switched to diversified horticulture at a pick your own operation, and create newsletters and other things to make people feel connected to the farm. Right, So that all sounds really familiar to us. So the cis a pick your own farm to the table, know your farm or all that stuff really came out of the innovation of black farmers in Alabama. And you know, of course it's

just one kind of coop. You know, food hubs, which are started out as church sheds in the black community back in the early nineteen hundreds, or places where farmers would aggregate their produce, put in a truck and bring it up to Chicago. You know coops themselves, where farmers share tools and resources. There's a whole Federation of Southern

Cooperatives that has hundreds of black led co ops. So we've kind of figured out the working together thing in our community for a long time, and it's good that society is just starting to catch on definitely, and you all have, i mean, are hugely impactful in your local community. And one of the great things about your text. For instance, I was just in Amsterdam last month and met a sister there who was checking out our magazine and she was like, Oh my god, it's so fire Farm. They're

so amazing. I'm obsessed with everything they're doing. She had your book too, So it's really cool that in your text your ideas have spread not just in the country, but are spreading all over the world in practice. How are you all thinking about transferable elements to underserved communities, especially in these food apartheid areas that you might not be able to directly reach or impact through something like a C s A. That is such a good question.

We've been thinking hard about that because what capitalism would say is, you know, grow bigger, franchise, have a national office, you know all of this, and it isn't right. That's not the right model for us. I think one of the beauties of sulfire is that it is such an intimate, family sized organization. So we get to be humans together and we all have our relationship with this land in a tangible, not theoretical way. So we look to the forest, We look to nature anytime we don't know what to do.

And so what does nature do If one tree have a whole bunch of sugars that it's making because it's got extra sun, extra strength, right, it doesn't just grow three times as tall as the other trees. It actually puts those sugars and minerals into a network of fungi in the forest floor to distributes to the other trees. So that they can grow big together. And in a similar way, we have a train the Trainer a program for folks who want to start similar educational models to

Soul Fire. We created a manual for farmers about how to do a low income c s A like hours and we go around and do workshops. And so the idea is not that like everyone says the same thing as soul Fire, right, but that we share all the tools as best we can. I mean that's what the book is about, right, Like just share whatever we figured out and then people adapt that to the needs of

their local community. Have you had a chance to connect with people who have not maybe formerly been a part of your programs and and here like I did from a stranger about how your work has rippled out. It's been really powerful and surprising because I tell you, when I started farming in the nineties, there was nothing cool about it, and nobody in Amsterdam would be telling you

we're about your farm, you know. So it's just I just laughed at myself every day, but I'm Probably the most exciting stuff prize feedback that I got was when Taj Mahal, the you know, world's famous blues musicians, sent me a little video of him holding up the book and saying what a treasure it was. And I hadn't known that he was a farmer before he was a musician, and so he was saying how important it was, like food and music are the things that are going to

save our world. And so I get to spend some time with him when I was out in California and visit him, and and that was just super affirming to

have this elder say that it meant something. That's one of the things that I think about so often is in this dispossession, you know, these even though the story began for us hundreds of years ago, Like and it's not even just in the red lining or in urban areas, which I feel like we know a little bit more about, but black farmers in rural areas, you know, who are our grandparents who themselves fought so hard to sustain not only their families, but the generations of their families who

never got to benefit from the land. Can you talk about the legacy, specifically the Pickford versus Glickman versus the U. S d A, and the aging legacy of black farmers here in the US that maybe didn't have an opportunity to see the interest that you are now getting to

experience with your book. For instance, that's so real. I mean, at the peak of black farmland ownership, are folks had acquired accumulated approximately sixteen million acres of land, and almost all of that has gone, not because black folks don't want to farm anymore, but really because of the government discrimination as you mentioned, in terms of access to loans

and insurance and crop allotments. And this was exacerbated during the Civil Rights movement when you know, these U s d A programs are really sharpened into a weapon to punish any type of voter rights activity. As a farmer, you'd just be denied if you were an ub A CP member whatnot. So we had that as well as as outright racist violence. You know, the klu Klux Klan would burn people's houses and lynch them for being too up, you know, trying to stop the sharecropper life and having

their own farm. There's four thousand people who fell victims to that. So that great migration to the North was really a refugee crisis, not a search for opportunity as it's often portrayed. And and now black farmers are dealing with another big challenge. Mama Savvy Horn explained to me so well. She said that when a black elder doesn't leave a will, in many ways, what they're doing is thinking about their land as a family commons, which is

how it's always been ancestrally. It's not about choosing a certain air or trying to mess with any legal paperwork. Land just stays in the family. But that doesn't match with white Man's law in most states, because what happens is that one air, even if there's a hundred airs, one air can essentially force a partition sale of the entire land, and the land can be lost. And that's the number one driver black land lost right now. And people know how to take advantage of that, the developers

and so forth. You know. So there's a lot, there's a lot. And I'm so proud of the folks who beat the government in the Pigford case and one the largest civil rights settlement in the history of the US. I know it was too little, too late. I know it's mostly a symbolic victory, but they really gave our generation the inspiration to say they were holding on to that agrarian tradition just long enough for us to see their example and to pick up the mantle so we have.

We're deeply indebted to them. Okay, well, I will let you get back to the business of farming and liberation on the land. It was really such a pleasure to talk to you, and the next time in New York, I'm gonna hit you up. We gotta break bread so we can go all the way in. I would love to have you on the land and share some of this bounty with you. Um and if any listeners want to get involved with soul Fire, contribute to the repper rations map or rock with us in any way. Our

website is super dense with all the info. It's soulfire Farm dot org, soulfire Farm dot org and also on the gram two right, Yes, we're on the ground, soul Fire Farm. All one word, all one word, all right. That was Leah Pennament of soul Fire Farm. Thank you so much for joining us on Point of Origin. Thank you, take care all right you too. H m h h h h h h h h h h h h h h h h. And that's it for this episode.

Point of Origin is a podcast from my Heart Media and wet Stone magazine executive produced by Christopher Hasiotis and hosted by me Steven Saderfield. Special thanks to Cat Hong for editing, supervising producer Gabrielle Collins, and a very special thanks to my business partner, wet Stone co founder Melissa she who helped produce this podcast. Thanks mel and thanks to all of you for supporting wet Stone and listening to the Point of Origin podcast for all of the

latest on all things point of Origin. You can follow us on Instagram at wet Stone Magazine or online at wet Stone magazine dot com. We'll see you next week at the Point of Origin.