October 3, 2019 • 54 mins
On matters of African Americans and farming, many narratives have centered the ways in which enslavement, and an assumed progress “off the plantation” have contributed to the apathy or absence of black folks on the land. In this episode we hear from black farmers and scholars who are challenging those narratives, instead centering resilience, survival and activism at the core of historical narratives around African Americans and agriculture.
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Um um, Welcome back to Point of Origin, the podcast
about the world of food from around the World. I'm
your host, Stephen Sadderfield. Okay, so this is a podcast
(00:24):
and you might not know that the voice emanating from
your speakers is that of a black man, and that
means many things. That has many implications, but one of
the big ones that I think about a lot is
the internal and external generational trauma of our relationship to land.
And for a long time, when I thought about land,
for me, it brought up feelings of anger and discomfort.
(00:47):
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.
(01:11):
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.
(01:35):
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
(01:58):
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
(02:19):
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
(02:44):
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
(03:04):
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
(03:28):
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
(03:50):
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
(04:11):
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.
(04:31):
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.
(04:53):
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
(05:15):
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
(05:37):
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,
(06:00):
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
(06:23):
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
(06:44):
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
(07:05):
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
(07:28):
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
(07:51):
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
(08:14):
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
(08:36):
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,
(09:01):
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
(09:21):
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
(09:42):
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
(10:05):
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
(10:26):
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
(10:47):
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
(11:07):
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
(11:28):
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
(11:50):
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,
(12:13):
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
(12:38):
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
(13:02):
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
(13:22):
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
(13:43):
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,
(14:04):
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
(14:26):
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,
(14:49):
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
(15:12):
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
(15:34):
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
(15:55):
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
(16:17):
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.
(16:39):
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
(17:03):
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,
(17:26):
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
(17:47):
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
(18:12):
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
(18:36):
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.
(19:00):
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
(19:20):
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.
(19:42):
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
(20:40):
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
(21:02):
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
(21:23):
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,
(21:45):
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
(22:10):
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
(22:33):
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
(22:54):
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
(23:17):
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
(23:37):
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
(23:58):
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
(24:21):
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
(24:42):
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.
(25:03):
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
(25:26):
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
(25:48):
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
(26:09):
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
(26:30):
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
(26:51):
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
(27:15):
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.
(27:35):
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
(27:56):
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
(28:21):
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
(28:41):
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
(29:04):
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
(29:27):
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,
(29:48):
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
(30:09):
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,
(30:30):
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?
(30:51):
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.
(31:53):
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
(32:14):
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
(32:38):
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
(33:01):
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.
(33:24):
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.
(33:48):
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
(34:10):
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
(34:30):
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
(34:51):
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
(35:12):
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
(35:33):
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
(35:56):
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
(36:17):
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
(36:38):
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
(37:00):
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
(37:21):
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
(37:44):
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
(38:04):
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
(38:26):
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
(38:48):
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
(39:09):
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
(39:30):
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,
(39:51):
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
(40:12):
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
(40:34):
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
(40:54):
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
(41:14):
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
(41:36):
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
(41:56):
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,
(42:19):
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
(42:42):
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
(43:03):
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
(43:24):
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
(43:47):
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
(44:08):
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
(44:29):
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
(44:50):
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
(45:13):
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
(45:34):
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
(45:54):
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
(46:15):
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
(46:37):
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,
(46:58):
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
(47:18):
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
(47:40):
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
(48:00):
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
(48:21):
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
(48:44):
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
(49:06):
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
(49:30):
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
(49:51):
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
(50:14):
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
(50:36):
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
(50:58):
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
(51:20):
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.
(51:40):
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
(52:03):
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.
(52:25):
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,
(52:47):
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
(53:11):
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
(53:45):
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
(54:06):
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
(54:30):
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.
Um um, Welcome back to Point of Origin, the podcast
about the world of food from around the World. I'm
your host, Stephen Sadderfield. Okay, so this is a podcast
(00:24):
and you might not know that the voice emanating from
your speakers is that of a black man, and that
means many things. That has many implications, but one of
the big ones that I think about a lot is
the internal and external generational trauma of our relationship to land.
And for a long time, when I thought about land,
for me, it brought up feelings of anger and discomfort.
(00:47):
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.
(01:11):
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.
(01:35):
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
(01:58):
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
(02:19):
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
(02:44):
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
(03:04):
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
(03:28):
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
(03:50):
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
(04:11):
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.
(04:31):
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.
(04:53):
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
(05:15):
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
(05:37):
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,
(06:00):
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
(06:23):
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
(06:44):
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
(07:05):
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
(07:28):
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
(07:51):
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
(08:14):
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
(08:36):
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,
(09:01):
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
(09:21):
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
(09:42):
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
(10:05):
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
(10:26):
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
(10:47):
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
(11:07):
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
(11:28):
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
(11:50):
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,
(12:13):
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
(12:38):
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
(13:02):
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
(13:22):
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
(13:43):
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,
(14:04):
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
(14:26):
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,
(14:49):
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
(15:12):
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
(15:34):
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
(15:55):
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
(16:17):
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.
(16:39):
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
(17:03):
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,
(17:26):
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
(17:47):
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
(18:12):
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
(18:36):
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.
(19:00):
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
(19:20):
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.
(19:42):
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
(20:40):
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
(21:02):
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
(21:23):
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,
(21:45):
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
(22:10):
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
(22:33):
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
(22:54):
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
(23:17):
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
(23:37):
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
(23:58):
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
(24:21):
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
(24:42):
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.
(25:03):
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
(25:26):
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
(25:48):
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
(26:09):
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
(26:30):
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
(26:51):
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
(27:15):
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.
(27:35):
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
(27:56):
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
(28:21):
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
(28:41):
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
(29:04):
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
(29:27):
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,
(29:48):
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
(30:09):
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,
(30:30):
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?
(30:51):
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.
(31:53):
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
(32:14):
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
(32:38):
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
(33:01):
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.
(33:24):
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.
(33:48):
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
(34:10):
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
(34:30):
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
(34:51):
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
(35:12):
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
(35:33):
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
(35:56):
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
(36:17):
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
(36:38):
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
(37:00):
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
(37:21):
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
(37:44):
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
(38:04):
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
(38:26):
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
(38:48):
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
(39:09):
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
(39:30):
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,
(39:51):
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
(40:12):
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
(40:34):
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
(40:54):
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
(41:14):
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
(41:36):
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
(41:56):
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,
(42:19):
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
(42:42):
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
(43:03):
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
(43:24):
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
(43:47):
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
(44:08):
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
(44:29):
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
(44:50):
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
(45:13):
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
(45:34):
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
(45:54):
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
(46:15):
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
(46:37):
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,
(46:58):
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
(47:18):
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
(47:40):
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
(48:00):
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
(48:21):
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
(48:44):
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
(49:06):
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
(49:30):
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
(49:51):
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
(50:14):
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
(50:36):
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
(50:58):
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
(51:20):
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.
(51:40):
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
(52:03):
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.
(52:25):
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,
(52:47):
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
(53:11):
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
(53:45):
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
(54:06):
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
(54:30):
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.
Host
Stephen Satterfield
Show Links
AboutPopular Podcasts
United States of Kennedy
United States of Kennedy is a podcast about our cultural fascination with the Kennedy dynasty. Every week, hosts Lyra Smith and George Civeris go into one aspect of the Kennedy story.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.