For The Wild - LEAH PENNIMAN on Land Based Liberation ⧸72

00:00:00.180 Hey there, community. Ayana here, and I wanted to share a few updates before we open up to our conversation with Leah Penniman.

00:00:08.520 First, if you're down in the LA area on April 21st, join us for our Dear Earth event.

00:00:14.960 We'll be screening When Old Growth Ends, our short experimental film about old growth logging in the Tongass National Forest in southeast Alaska.

00:00:22.900 and we'll also be recording a podcast live with Jade Begay from Indigenous Rising on public land

00:00:30.140 protection and what it means to stand for land that isn't one's ancestral birthright. The location

00:00:37.160 of the event is pretty spectacular. It's the Wright Ranch overlooking Mama Pacific, so bring your

00:00:43.360 picnic or there'll be delicious nourishment there as well. Get your tickets at consciouscityguide.com.

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00:01:20.000 Now on to the show.

00:01:50.000 Somebody's crying

00:01:51.800 Somebody wishing for something to happen

00:02:05.100 Wishing to tell, wishing to help

00:02:08.560 Someone was listening, someone who cared

00:02:12.340 Never despaired

00:02:14.200 Someone to lean on and someone to trust

00:02:18.880 Hello and welcome to For the Wild podcast. I'm Ayanna Young. Today we are speaking with Leah

00:02:40.180 Penniman. Leah is an educator, farmer, writer, and food justice activist from Soul Fire Farm

00:02:47.140 in Grafton, New York. She is committed to dismantling racism and injustice in our food

00:02:52.660 system, reconnecting marginalized communities to land, and upholding our responsibility to

00:02:58.540 steward the land that nourishes us. Leah coordinates a subsidized farm share program

00:03:04.360 that provides life-giving food for families in food apartheid neighborhoods. She also runs

00:03:10.040 training programs for aspiring Black and Latinx activist farmers, uprooting racism trainings for

00:03:16.940 intersectional activist, and international solidarity projects with farmers in Haiti

00:03:22.300 and Puerto Rico. Leah holds an MA in science education and BA in environmental science

00:03:29.600 and international development from Clark University. She has been farming since 1996 and

00:03:36.680 teaching since 2002. Leah's work as a farmer and educator has been recognized by the Soros

00:03:44.120 Racial Justice Fellowship, Fulbright Program, Presidential Award for Science Teaching,

00:03:50.940 NYS Health Emerging Innovator Awards, Andrew Goodman Foundation, among others. Leah's passion

00:03:58.220 is to joyfully and reverently connect community to the intricate miracle that is this living planet

00:04:05.020 and to their own power as agents of positive change in the community.

00:04:10.000 well Leah what astonishing work you do and life you lead it is such a gift to have you on the

00:04:18.500 show with us today thank you thank you so much for having me it's really an honor and a pleasure

00:04:24.300 to be here getting to share a little bit of our story with y'all well I want to begin by honoring

00:04:30.500 the immense agricultural heritage of Africa and the resilient courageous people who's held on to

00:04:39.240 their beloved African seeds and spirits despite all that worked to exploit and disfigure them

00:04:46.000 and it's largely obscured story that quote American agriculture both traditional and

00:04:53.680 regenerative actually stemmed from the co-optation and exploitation of ancient African agriculture

00:05:00.800 I've heard you tell of how you flow from a long ancestral line of African earth tenders and

00:05:07.460 I want to ask you if you'd be willing to share with us how your ancestry guides you in your expansive life work and in the world, and also how your ancestry guides you specifically in the regenerative farming practices you are rearing at Soul Fire.

00:05:25.560 Oh, I so appreciate that question, because I would be remiss not to honor ancestors before sharing, you know, the story of my current life and current work.

00:05:36.820 And in particular, I want to call in my grandma's grandma's grandma, whose enslaved name is Susie Boyd, and she was one of 12 million African people who were kidnapped from the shores of West Africa and brought to the quote unquote new worlds to work without pay on the agricultural fields of the West.

00:05:58.880 And what she and other women did before boarding transatlantic slave ships was to braid seeds into their hair.

00:06:07.340 They braided okra and rice and millet and other heritage crops that they had bred over generations and perfected because they believed against odds in a future on soil.

00:06:17.480 And I call that in for many reasons, probably foremost in my mind with what we're up against right now in the current political climate is that, you know, sometimes despair sets in and sometimes it's easy to think about giving up or imagining that we won't win.

00:06:32.540 And I have to remember that if Susie Boyd and the others around her had faith and believed in us and didn't give up on us, the future generations, then sort of who are we to then give up on our children?

00:06:45.620 Because they certainly face conditions that are unimaginable for me in my relatively privileged life compared to what my ancestors had to deal with.

00:06:54.100 And that is just one small piece of the legacy.

00:06:56.400 You know, I think we're often fed the myth that organic agriculture, permaculture is like a white people thing.

00:07:03.560 And I certainly believe that and really struggled with that in my early years of farming.

00:07:09.120 And truth be told, I mean, everything from pick your own and the CSA, which were gifted to us by ancestor Booker T.

00:07:16.900 Whatley, to the idea of rotating through leguminous cover crops instead of having a monoculture, which was very much promoted by George Washington Carver. 0.92

00:07:26.400 So the co-ops and pig banks of Fannie Lou Hamer, the rice cultivation techniques of enslaved Africans in the Carolinas.

00:07:34.220 I mean, these are really our people's heritage, the raised beds and the fallow period and the rotation of animals and crops.

00:07:42.380 All of these techniques that we use at Soul Fire, you know, come out of the black indigenous tradition.

00:07:48.800 And it's been really a privilege over the past year to start to write these things down.

00:07:52.320 I'm working on a book that will come out in November called Farming While Black.

00:07:55.200 That's about these Afro-Indigenous ways of knowing and being on land

00:07:59.520 and how we can uplift them and enact them in our farms today.

00:08:04.340 I'm so grateful that you are bringing these untold stories of these heroes to the forefront

00:08:13.120 because as we know, the history that we've been fed and put into our history books

00:08:21.260 and in our education systems tell a very narrow-minded story of the past and that just

00:08:30.100 perpetuates this system of oppression and lies so this work that you're doing with your book that I

00:08:37.880 want to speak about later feels so mandatory for us to actually move forward in a regenerative way

00:08:44.900 that a lot of us want to yeah thank you for that yeah of course and and you know you'd you'd

00:08:51.100 mentioned Soul Fire Farm and your work in general, it confronts food apartheid and injustice in the

00:08:57.700 food system from so many angles. I'd like to steer the conversation towards who has access to the

00:09:05.180 lands of Turtle Island today? As in the words of Malcolm X, quote, land is the basis of all

00:09:11.440 independence. Land is the basis of freedom, justice, and equality, end quote. And I've come across

00:09:19.180 quite a few articles that either you have authored or that reference you, bringing visibility to the

00:09:26.200 dispossession of Black landowners in the past century. And I want to make the audience aware

00:09:31.480 of a few statistics. Almost 100% of the land in the U.S. is owned by white people. In 1920,

00:09:39.620 14% of all land-owning U.S. farmers were Black. Today, Black farmers operate less than 1%

00:09:45.760 of the nation's farms, amounting to a loss of over 14 million acres. Black farmers receive

00:09:53.160 50% less government support in terms of loans, conservation programs, subsidies for crop

00:09:59.740 production and disaster insurance, etc. So would you speak about this great dispossession and

00:10:07.620 the violent discrimination and legal trickery that enabled this to happen?

00:10:13.100 Yeah, I mean, I have such a heaviness in my heart, you know, hearing the statistics come out of your mouth that I'm usually saying, you know, just this past weekend, I was in Atlanta, Georgia with 100 black farmers, mostly elders, mostly folks over 70, who were instrumental in suing the US government in the famous Pigford v. Glickman case, which was settled in 1999, in the largest civil rights settlement in the history of the United States for these decades of discrimination.

00:10:41.760 And this court case in many ways was symbolic because the small payouts that the farmers got were too little too late. As you noted, we've already been dispossessed of our land and a $50,000 check does not get you back your hundreds of acres and the whole life that you've built.

00:10:58.560 But still, with some vindication, nonetheless, that this is true, that the USDA was the principal driver of Black people off of our land. And this was not a historical accident. The South very much relied on sharecropping and tenant farming to maintain a quasi-slavery-like economy. 0.91

00:11:18.100 And when black farmers started to gain land holdings by saving their Sunday money that they had earned on the side and amassed this land, it was seen as a threat to white supremacy.

00:11:29.420 And so the USDA is the arm of the USDA and local communities are what's called these FSA county committees.

00:11:37.240 And local farmers are elected onto the committees and they're the ones who decide who gets what.

00:11:42.160 And so white supremacists filled those committees. 0.90

00:11:44.980 Black people did not sit on the committees, and they systematically denied aid to Black farmers. 0.99

00:11:50.840 But even more than that, they would actively steal land. I mean, go in and burn down people's houses, 1.00

00:11:57.160 lynch people, threaten them. Over 4,000 people were lynched in the early 1900s up to the mid-1900s

00:12:04.740 and driven off of their land, and that land was taken. So it's not a historical accident. Sometimes

00:12:10.380 we think of the Great Migration as just this northward seeking of new opportunity in the

00:12:16.720 factories and so on. But there was also a push factor. People were fleeing terrorism and violence

00:12:21.640 in the South, which is why they left. It's devastating. I mean, the farmers that I was

00:12:26.140 sitting with at the table just this past weekend have been dedicating their entire life to this

00:12:32.520 fight and are aging out and need to pass the mantle to this next generation are really looking

00:12:37.460 to us as to whether we're going to be able to rectify this egregious, egregious act of land

00:12:44.680 theft. You know, and obviously I'm not saying this in any way to minimize the original land

00:12:50.520 theft of Turtle Island from indigenous people. And a lot of folks say, well, how do you, you know,

00:12:55.940 how do we sort of hold both of these things? And if, when you look at the fact that 98% of the

00:12:59.860 land right now is controlled by white people, there's a lot of room for land reform before 0.58

00:13:05.520 we have to think about communities of color being in conflict with each other over that land. And I

00:13:09.560 think we can work together, inspired very much by what's happening in South Africa, where

00:13:14.580 they're just deciding it's time. This land was stolen, and it needs to be given back. And that

00:13:19.540 will be perhaps a disruptive, but also a healing process for the nation. I wonder what the U.S.

00:13:28.800 can learn from South Africa in this time and other areas that are doing this work are doing

00:13:36.600 this work of reparations and you know and also I want to mention what we can learn from what you're

00:13:43.080 doing because from what I gather you and your incredible co-conspirators have created an

00:13:51.340 interactive map to catalyze people-to-people reparations for Black Indigenous farmers.

00:13:58.540 So I'd love if you could first explain the concept of reparations and then expand upon

00:14:03.840 how the grassroots reparations project and map you're working on came to be.

00:14:10.340 So the concept of reparations is a little bit different or really quite different from

00:14:15.660 philanthropy or charity, which comes from the idea that folks with privilege, power, resources

00:14:23.620 have the right to own those resources and can choose to give them away as an act of benevolence

00:14:32.000 from their hearts, for which they're usually rewarded with social status or tax deductions

00:14:36.700 or so on and so forth. The idea with reparations is rooted in a framework that the wealth,

00:14:42.960 the resources, the privilege that people have, by and large, is not come upon honestly.

00:14:49.980 If you look at the research out of the Pew Center, you know, 80% of wealth is inherited,

00:14:55.700 and most of it is traceable back to times of enslavement and land theft. Really sitting with

00:15:01.600 that fact and asking ourselves, you know, those of us in the community who do have wealth, like how

00:15:07.080 much of that either was inherited directly, or in some way our parents or community or family

00:15:12.720 subsidized our life or that we received sort of unearned access to jobs, education. And through

00:15:20.660 that framework, that resource becomes something that is due, due back to the descendants of those

00:15:27.140 from whom it was stolen. And what's really beautiful about this moment in time is that

00:15:31.680 there's a lot of people born into privilege who are recognizing that reparations are due.

00:15:36.900 And while we must, must, must continue to organize for the government to institute large-scale

00:15:42.520 reparations. This is not to excuse that. In the meantime, there are individuals in resource

00:15:48.760 generation and other collectives who are excited to get involved and just do it, just do that

00:15:54.600 reparations work. I also want to say that ours is certainly not the only reparations project. This is

00:16:00.480 a tiny initiative and the National Black Food and Justice Alliance is working on a comprehensive

00:16:05.820 initiative and also the Federation of Southern Cooperatives and some of the black farming

00:16:10.160 organizations are thinking about that. So I don't want to take away from that. But I will say that

00:16:14.240 we were chatting at our favorite program that we do, which is the Black Latinx Farmers Immersion.

00:16:21.580 And one of the participants named Viviana Moreno said, you know, we should really get a list

00:16:27.040 together of all the things we need to realize our farm food and land dreams, whether it's land,

00:16:33.800 training, money, connections, advice, whatever it is, and put that out there and just see if

00:16:40.480 the community is willing to meet us and engage with us. And so we did it because we're action

00:16:45.380 folks. Put together this map on a really simple Google Maps platform, started with 40 farmers,

00:16:51.380 it's growing slowly. And what's really beautiful is that, you know, three of the people who

00:16:56.920 have been in relationship with Soul Fire have fully funded or fully received their ask for

00:17:03.320 farms. And so if you look at Harmony Farm in New York, Wild Seed Community Farm in New York,

00:17:10.240 and the Harriet Tubman Freedom Farm in North Carolina, these are all Soul Fire fam who've 0.74

00:17:15.040 received land and or money from white folks. And then a lot of people have received smaller

00:17:19.460 donations. And I've heard a buzz about people trying to pool their money to do some of the

00:17:24.860 bigger asks. And so that's really exciting because there is an urgency right now for us to get back

00:17:31.320 on the land. And this is a way that people can engage in the moment and see tangible results

00:17:37.500 immediately. I love hearing these seeds, these dream seeds can blossom. We just need to do it.

00:17:46.740 And I'd love to hear any other celebratory stories that come to mind so that we can,

00:17:53.380 as an audience begin to really understand how grassroots movements can have a domino effect

00:18:03.540 and keep growing. Word. Yeah, I appreciate the domino effect metaphor because we've definitely

00:18:09.920 received some pressure, not from within our community, mostly from the philanthropic community

00:18:15.500 to scale up and to grow and to sort of have what starts to feel like franchising or some kind of

00:18:21.340 empire, which we are so not interested in. And the model that we think about that really makes sense

00:18:27.660 is like the way that mycelium grow, the way that the forest networks, and we call it translocal

00:18:34.140 organizing. The idea is that we do our work right here rooted in our local and regional community

00:18:40.860 that's very responsive and accountable to that community. That example, that model, those

00:18:46.860 trainings that we offer spawn similar projects that are also locally and regionally accountable

00:18:54.160 and responsive. And so to be tangible, what I mean about that, you know, we have this training

00:18:58.880 program and within the training program, there's an advanced track, a train the trainer track for

00:19:03.140 people who are really ready to take their projects to the next level. Keisha Cameron outside of

00:19:09.360 Atlanta, Georgia at High Hog Farm is one of the people who went through this program and got

00:19:14.680 inspired to create a similar training program called Ubuntu that works on racial justice,

00:19:20.560 food justice, and helps farmers transition to organic and sustainable practices, which she's

00:19:25.100 now operating on her farm in her community. Similarly, Finca Consciencia outside of Chicago,

00:19:33.240 this is a group of folks that Viviana, Hereri, and Hasmin that came through Train the Trainer

00:19:39.360 and our BLFI like next level advanced program and use the business planning ideas that we had

00:19:46.280 to go ahead and start a worker owns cooperative that's responsive to their local community, 0.75

00:19:50.820 which is primarily folks without documents and new Americans. And so we're so excited about that. 0.98

00:19:56.560 We don't need to own or control that, but we need to be in community and learning from each other

00:20:01.260 and really uplifting each other's work. And ultimately, when you think about in some ways,

00:20:06.220 our goal should be to make ourselves obsolete. Because once we win, you know, once we have

00:20:10.700 equity in terms of access to land and food and farming and true leadership, we don't necessarily

00:20:15.620 need to be doing the same kind of work. And so we always have our eyes on that. It's not about

00:20:19.740 like consolidating power or control or in some sort of immortality. It's very much about achieving

00:20:24.860 these goals and then making space for whatever needs to come next, as far as what the community

00:20:29.800 defines its needs are. Thank you for saying that. It really grounds me to the work that I want to

00:20:38.980 do in the world and the way in which I want to do it. And I'm sure for so many people who are

00:20:43.600 listening to this that are also tussling with these questions of how do we do this work in the

00:20:50.840 world, especially with the urgency of the Anthropocene and climate change and just all

00:20:57.180 the pressure that I think so many of us feel who are connected to what's happening I know for myself

00:21:03.280 I do I I fall threat to the urgency a lot and sometimes I can forget about deep time or forget

00:21:12.080 about yeah harmonious way to move forward my mind can get trapped in that that state of scale up and

00:21:19.600 do now and ah so hearing your words are just like okay exhale there are better ways to do this and

00:21:28.840 we need each other we need to learn from each other we need to stay in community and and really

00:21:35.340 listen to the ones that came before us who understood truth and connection and how we can

00:21:44.260 learn and then apply that to this really strange modern time that we're living in now yes that is

00:21:53.120 beautiful and I love the concept of deep time I hadn't heard of that before I love that yeah I've

00:21:59.520 had to bring myself back to it a lot because like I said you know for so many of us especially for

00:22:05.680 all the people who I'm sure are sitting with this conversation our eyes are open we're awakened to

00:22:11.660 what's happening and it's painful I think it's can be really scary so yeah I just had to keep

00:22:19.420 reminding myself of the deep time that yes this work is important and it's important to do it now

00:22:25.300 but the ways in which we do it are also of utmost importance and when you were speaking before you

00:22:33.140 had mentioned the people have come through soul fire farms working with undocumented people and

00:22:39.220 it brings up this other topic that I want to speak about because discussions around injustice 0.92

00:22:46.620 in the food system just wouldn't be whole without speaking to the exploitation of

00:22:52.140 Latinx and migrant farm workers. This is a realm, you know, we've yet to really delve into on the

00:22:58.620 show, but one that I intend to explore more deeply in the future. On Soul Fire's website,

00:23:04.460 It notes that while 85% of the people working the land in the U.S. are Latinx migrant workers, less than 3% of farms are owned and operated by Latinx or Hispanic folks.

00:23:17.700 So the food system and the backwards policies that shape the system lack humanity on so many levels.

00:23:27.560 Not only are workers faced with fractional pay and harmful working conditions, but the voices of undocumented migrant workers are increasingly silenced and shadowed in this fearful political climate.

00:23:43.400 So bringing this up, I know we are really barely going to scratch the surface, but I want to ask you to say anything you feel called to regarding this topics and perhaps direct us towards organizations doing good work in this area or policy reforms that we can really rally behind.

00:24:02.820 Absolutely. No, thank you for calling that in. Something that I've had my eyes open to is the fact that our food system in the United States has always been entirely dependent on exploited labor. In no point in our history have we ever paid fair wages or offered fair working conditions to the people who produce our food, which is profound.

00:24:28.200 I mean, we all are very familiar, I hope, with the history of enslavement, maybe sharecropping and tenant farming. A lot of folks don't know that that was followed up with convict leasing, where Black people were criminalized, put in prison, and then sold back to their former masters on plantations and in the mines.

00:24:50.600 But then as the Great Migration picked up, there was a labor vacuum in the South.

00:24:54.800 And rather than really reassessing the economic model, the United States government decided to figure out import strategies, first preying upon Southeast Asian communities, then on Mexican communities, then on Chinese communities, then on Caribbean communities, and essentially bringing people to this country to do work at wages and under conditions.

00:25:18.680 that white Americans were not willing to do. I think a really powerful sort of modern anecdote

00:25:25.120 about that is I have a friend who's a professor in the Midwest at an ag college, and polled his

00:25:31.620 students and asked them, what wage would it take for you to work in this town's meatpacking plant?

00:25:39.200 And the unanimous answer of those white students was there is no wage at which I would work in 0.88

00:25:47.120 those meatpacking plants because they are so grueling and so dangerous and so disgusting 0.95

00:25:52.240 that there is no amount of money that you could pay me to work there.

00:25:56.540 And to really think about that. And of course, people are making subminimum wage in those

00:26:00.140 meatpacking plants who are quote unquote guest workers under the H-2A program, mostly from 0.57

00:26:05.480 Mexico. So the fact we've set up a food system that requires people to work in these horrid 1.00

00:26:11.280 conditions, and that's what feeds us, is something we really, really need to look at.

00:26:15.920 There is an entirely different set of labor laws for farm workers than there are for other professions. The National Labor Relations Act, which was established in 1935, excludes farm workers and domestic workers from key protections.

00:26:30.240 That has not been changed. That has not been updated. So depending on what state you're in, because some states do have more protections, you may not have overtime pay, the right to unionize, child labor protections, protection from sexual harassment and sexual violence, protection from wage theft, health care.

00:26:49.860 And so this is the reality. And I think that certainly we need to be talking about sovereignty, like certainly we need to be talking about pathways for migrant workers to own land and run their own businesses. But right now, we're not even there yet in the conversation. The conversation is how do folks get paid for their labor and live in buildings that have running water? And how do their children go to school? I mean, that's really the level of the conversation.

00:27:12.760 There was a slavery ring, literally slavery, not even like metaphorical slavery, like people chained and forced to work. That was just broken up in the late 90s by the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, which sort of transitions to your question about who's leading the struggle.

00:27:26.160 Certainly the Coalition of Immokalee Workers are doing some incredible, incredible organizing.

00:27:31.800 We should also support CATA, which is the Farm Workers Support Committee, Centro Campesino, Dignity and Power Now, Familias Unidas por la Justicia, the Farm Workers Association of Florida, and many other organizations.

00:27:48.920 And I'm happy to provide a list or like send you some links later.

00:27:52.380 But organizations that are run by farm workers for farm workers is where we should be putting our trust and our resources right now.

00:28:18.920 I'm based out of California

00:28:45.620 and so much of this state is modern slave labor in the in the farms in these huge monocropped

00:28:57.020 industrial farms and I think so many of us even just driving the five freeway who pass the whether

00:29:09.320 it's almonds or cattle and the people that are out there working literally being sprayed from

00:29:17.000 planes this poison it's disgusting how the food system and the bigger system of this country

00:29:28.240 treats anybody humans cows the soil so disposable i think speaking about these other organizations

00:29:38.300 that are farm led kind of going back to how you were speaking about really working locally in the

00:29:44.400 communities and listening to the people that have been silenced that are the ones that are actually

00:29:50.380 dealing with the conditions of this horrid system and giving power to the people who are actually

00:30:00.480 doing the work I remember speaking with Bren Smith who has set up this 3d ocean farming for

00:30:10.020 a lot of the fishing communities who have basically you know lost a lot of their economic stability

00:30:18.260 because fish are going extinct and how to create jobs and how to really listen to the people that

00:30:28.160 are actually working with the oceans and how he was explaining that the majority of fishing boats

00:30:34.540 because they've had to become so expensive and high tech just to even find the last fish

00:30:41.100 the fishermen aren't the ones who own the boats it's people who are so far removed

00:30:46.620 that may have never even stepped foot on a fishing boat and the same with a lot of these big farms

00:30:53.320 these corporate farms so many of the people in power have no clue what it's actually like

00:30:59.060 to live to work day in day out or just like how you were talking about the college students

00:31:05.000 there was no amount of money that would pay them to do this work so there's just such this huge

00:31:12.080 disconnect and i i appreciate you you bringing this up and the blatant racism and you know

00:31:20.500 racism in farming isn't restricted to land access and equality or the corporate mega farms but

00:31:27.480 it's also quite apparent in the organic and regenerative farming movements with 95 percent 0.81

00:31:35.420 of farm management being white it's no surprise that young black or latinx indigenous farmers

00:31:42.300 they may find themselves in a work environment that carries legacies of racial trauma not to

00:31:50.160 mention how many farm incubation projects and jobs for budding organic farmers either require

00:31:56.860 a college degree or are unpaid work trades, significantly limiting who actually has access

00:32:03.920 to them. So I'd really love if you could illuminate further some of the struggles that Black and

00:32:10.080 Latinx folks who are yearning to farm face and how Soul Fire's Black Latinx Farmer Immersion

00:32:18.620 program arose in response. Yeah, that's, that's a beautiful framing, and a tragic framing. Also, 0.99

00:32:26.680 you know, I've had folks come to our program and say that they had tried to do the WUF program,

00:32:32.460 you know, worldwide workers on organic farms, or do some apprenticeships. And it's not just,

00:32:36.960 you know, subtle legacy of racism stuff. Some of it is really overt. You know, there's this one

00:32:41.320 young man who was picking beans with a white farmer at one of these WUF farms. And the person

00:32:47.780 said, you know, can I ask you, can I ask you an honest question? I was wondering if you have a

00:32:53.500 sense as to why so many black men abandon their children. And it's just like, what? On so many

00:33:01.060 levels, what? First of all, that's not even true. Statistically, there was just a big study done to

00:33:05.200 debunk that myth of the absent black father, like black fathers are as involved with that more

00:33:09.900 involved than any other race, but also just that audacity, that racist perspective. And then to put

00:33:15.740 that on this person who does not have a car, does not have a way of leaving this place and is now

00:33:20.080 stuck in a really uncomfortable, verbally violent environment. So that's what people

00:33:26.100 are confronting. And then of course, all of the subtle structural stuff that you mentioned,

00:33:29.440 why do I keep getting denied to this farm incubator program? Or, you know, why is it that

00:33:34.500 I'm on this farm working for free and not really getting the instruction that I thought I signed

00:33:38.680 up for? So that definitely happens in training. And another tragedy that I've only recently become

00:33:43.660 aware of but is really significant is there are a number of new americans from caribbean countries

00:33:51.420 especially who have deep farming backgrounds and are very excited to get into ag in this country

00:33:57.920 and want to attend university one of the land grant colleges like the 1890 land grants which

00:34:03.400 are supposed to be you know for these communities but the geographic location of these universities

00:34:09.860 is so far from the immigrant community's family center

00:34:14.280 that there's no way for them to attend.

00:34:16.960 You know, they need to be living with their family members

00:34:19.240 in order to afford survival.

00:34:21.780 They need to be taking care of elders. 0.55

00:34:23.660 And so it's just not possible.

00:34:25.260 And so people end up choosing different career paths.

00:34:27.660 And that's, you know, folks have been telling me,

00:34:29.420 what if we had satellite sites for these universities

00:34:32.580 in the communities where black and brown people actually live?

00:34:35.540 And we could, you know, pay current black and brown farmers

00:34:38.600 as adjunct faculty at these universities to do these remote programs and really expand the land

00:34:45.140 grant system to provide education right where people are. So that's certainly one barrier is

00:34:49.760 training, but I would say even more significant is access to credit capital and land. Black folks, 1.00

00:34:55.620 brown folks, we're not inheriting land and land is hella expensive. Property taxes are so expensive. 0.98

00:35:01.760 And how do you surmount that barrier in order to really get started? Because you know you can't go

00:35:07.900 into some crazy debt because farming isn't going to pay it off. And right now, the credit programs

00:35:14.080 and the grant programs are very limited. And as you mentioned earlier, are still skewed towards

00:35:18.940 supporting white farmers and corporate farmers and large scale farmers. And there's a lot of

00:35:23.520 barriers to accessing those programs for black and brown folks who are just starting out.

00:35:29.880 It's heartening to remember that economic models that are not purely individualistic or capitalistic

00:35:37.100 do exist, like indigenous gift economies and cooperatives or the Ujama principle that Soul

00:35:44.160 Fire embodies. And I'd like to hear more about some of the alternative ways of economy that have

00:35:51.800 been working for you and your community and how they can provide a greater network of support

00:35:56.720 for community members in need. Yeah, definitely. So Ujama is the Kwanzaa principle. It's a

00:36:03.760 Swahili word that loosely means cooperative economics. It's this idea that rather than

00:36:09.040 have an exploitative relationship between producer and consumer, where you're both just trying to get

00:36:13.320 as much as you can at the expense of the other, that you think about a cooperative and mutually

00:36:18.460 uplifting relationship. And the way that we've tried to implement this principle in part is

00:36:25.620 through our Ujama Farm Share. It is a weekly doorstep delivery of a box of fresh farm-grown

00:36:33.020 vegetables between June and November. And we focus on communities under food apartheid,

00:36:39.260 food apartheid being that system of segregation that relegates some people to food opulence and

00:36:44.020 others to food scarcity. So these folks in these neighborhoods, you know, don't have access to

00:36:48.920 farmers markets and grocery stores and Whole Foods or anything like that. And so a lot of times the

00:36:54.020 box of vegetables is really that only the only fresh option for them. And people can pay on a

00:36:59.320 sliding scale, whatever they can afford. They can also use government benefits like EBT or the WIC

00:37:04.840 Farmers Market Program. And the way that we make this still financially viable for us as farmers is

00:37:10.580 some people who have more resources pay higher on the sliding scale, effectively subsidizing

00:37:16.980 the food that their neighbors receive. And additionally, we do some grassroots fundraising

00:37:23.480 for what we call our solidarity share program. And the solidarity shares are specifically for

00:37:28.800 refugees, immigrants, and people impacted by incarceration. And these are no-cost shares

00:37:34.720 that are paid for entirely by people's neighbors. And it's important to us to do it this way.

00:37:39.360 We certainly could write grants and try to fundraise in a philanthropic model for the

00:37:45.260 program. But we're trying to show that a farm can be economically viable, relying on its sales and

00:37:52.500 relying on its community because it's a struggle to make it as a small scale farmer. And it would

00:37:59.560 be disingenuous to be training people to go into farming without being able to demonstrate a model

00:38:04.960 of financial sustainability. You're not going to get rich off of farming, but you can take care of

00:38:10.260 your family and take care of your basic needs and also be in integrity in terms of sharing what you

00:38:14.980 have with your community and not only catering to these really upscale markets. That is something

00:38:20.340 I have sat with for a long time in question and I actually want to talk a bit more about it because

00:38:26.960 you know we've spoken a lot together about the challenges of even acquiring land in the first

00:38:35.520 place as a black or brown farmer and then once you by whatever means can acquire the land and

00:38:44.780 farm that it isn't something that's actually valued in our culture real fresh organic food

00:38:55.060 just like so many other things whether it's you know I mean it's it's kind of amazing when I think

00:39:01.360 about how many things are not valued that are actually what give us life whether that's food

00:39:07.940 even trees for oxygen but what is valued are these things that are completely unnecessary and actually

00:39:14.380 destructive to the earth and to our connection with each other and this planet and so not to

00:39:22.040 get too down this tornado of existential questioning but I sit with this you know how

00:39:26.880 can we feed a economic model that actually does value farmers does value the food that is produced

00:39:38.160 by farmers without either like you said receiving grants from foundations and doing all of the leg

00:39:44.920 work of the philanthropic non-profit model or just selling to whole foods or even creating

00:39:55.120 actual products from the produce that is kind of turned into a fancier product like value add value

00:40:03.220 exactly value added because even i mean honestly i'm sure that whole foods gouges the organic

00:40:10.260 produce farmers that they sell their kale and so on and so forth and so there is this um this system

00:40:17.780 is set up to not value the people that are actually creating the life sustaining

00:40:22.700 food and and so on and so forth so yeah i know you had we're touching on it but if there's any

00:40:29.200 other threads you can pull on this topic to show us more of how you're doing it or other models

00:40:37.760 that you really resonate with and maybe this is a really far out question but how do you see this

00:40:46.140 being a better way forward being able to topple over the old system into a way that this could

00:40:53.180 be the new norm like you said like making um some of these uh some of the work that you do even 0.55

00:40:59.760 obsolete because it just is the way that life is right wouldn't that be sweet Wakanda forever

00:41:06.480 um you know I'm not an economist and so I'm probably not the best person to answer this

00:41:12.180 question but I do know that you know in the past there was more support from the federal government

00:41:19.120 for small farmers and the whole big get big, get out, you know, transformation that happened

00:41:24.240 between the 60s and the 80s really shifted the way the subsidies worked. So right now it's not

00:41:29.400 so much that wheat is inherently cheap or corn syrup is inherently cheap. It's just that there's

00:41:34.260 a whole lot of money flowing in for those big commodity crops that artificially depresses the

00:41:40.400 price. Agriculture is not a free market beast in the United States. And so we could really play

00:41:48.560 with that. Costa Rica pays its farmers for providing environmental services, such as

00:41:54.680 protecting pollinator habitats and supporting the recharge of aquifers. And so what if we thought

00:42:01.440 about restructuring the way that huge farm bill works and what it subsidizes? We do have small

00:42:08.460 programs for conservation. We have EQIP and the Conservation Stewardship Program and so on. And so

00:42:13.780 it's not that that doesn't exist, but it's very underfunded. It's a small slice of the pie.

00:42:17.880 And we could completely invert it. We could make those commodity crop subsidies a small piece of the pie and then really expand what farmers get for doing crop rotation, pollinator protection, erosion control, living buffers, all of these practices, if you think about it, really are for public benefit.

00:42:39.840 They're for the public trust and for the future. So why not have our public dollar pay farmers to do those things as their value added product in addition to selling lettuce? And so I think that part of the ultimate answer really has to do with the way that society is regulating and subsidizing farming. But that's really as far as my limited economic understanding goes.

00:43:01.520 Well, I love being able to flip the subsidies on its head and instead of subsidizing high fructose corn syrup and things that are really unhealthy for all living creatures, but instead subsidize farmers to create these buffer zones to protect pollinators.

00:43:27.200 that's brilliant and and it is beneficial to everyone to be able to steward land in that way

00:43:35.360 i'm sure it even affects the water that runs through the farms um you know i think absolutely

00:43:41.840 yeah i'm it's so it's so funny just it's not funny it's disturbing honestly in california how

00:43:51.520 the state wants to raise Shasta Dam yet again, which would wipe out the salmon, wipe out the

00:44:00.620 Winnem Wintu's cultural sacred sites just to funnel more water through the Delta tunnels

00:44:06.740 to feed the Central Valley. Instead of actually looking at the Central Valley that's been

00:44:11.920 completely wiped out of all of their topsoil, laser leveled, you know, the water runoff goes

00:44:20.260 into these cemented quote-unquote rivers or creeks and what if we instead of taking the

00:44:27.580 money to do this massive dam project what if we took the money to pay you know people and well

00:44:36.460 I mean the farmers that's a whole other story because it's probably mostly corporate farms

00:44:40.260 but actually use that money to regenerate this land in a way that was regenerative to people

00:44:48.460 that work on this land and and I think about that all the time like where money goes and how much

00:44:54.140 money is actually being spent in our government on really strange programs instead of actually

00:44:59.780 using the money for ways that we know will protect and clean water and land and is healthier for the

00:45:06.040 people it's just mind-boggling and so I think these other ways of supporting people that you've

00:45:14.160 mentioned, it's such a clear way forward. And I think if enough of us awaken to these ideas and

00:45:21.140 get on board, it's not unsurmountable. It just takes organization and I think faith that we can

00:45:31.320 band together and do this. So thank you. Even though I know you say you're not an economist,

00:45:37.180 These ideas are potent, and I think more and more of us need to understand that there's already programs in place that are regenerative and how we can get behind those.

00:45:53.460 Yeah, my good friend Tegan Engel actually had a cool idea for flipping the script, like you mentioned, because right now you have to get certified to be organic, to use that label.

00:46:04.140 but what if you had to get certified to use pesticides and synthetic fertilizers and you

00:46:11.240 had to really justify why that was necessary and submit to that scrutiny and monitoring to make

00:46:17.000 sure that you're not doing and you know undo damage to the environment and have the status

00:46:22.480 quo be that you would have a chemical free farm and so I think it's one one thing I love about

00:46:27.020 that is it really encourages us to think outside the box and question our presuppositions about

00:46:31.400 the way the system works. It doesn't have to keep working like that. I read that Soul Fire Farm

00:46:37.640 has sister farms in Haiti and Puerto Rico. And I was both fascinated and unnerved when listening

00:46:46.480 to your speech at the 2017 Holyoke Food Justice Conference, where you brought up the sector of

00:46:53.560 the farm bill regarding food aid, and how the US government strategically uses such neocolonial

00:47:00.060 forces to rupture local food economies. So kind of getting back into these systems that need to be

00:47:06.520 taken down, could you explain what ensued in Haiti's rice economy following the 2010 earthquake

00:47:13.480 and what resistance has been transpiring from the Haitian peasant movement?

00:47:20.180 Sure, absolutely. So most of my knowledge of what's going on in Haiti is very personal. Again,

00:47:25.940 And I'm not a movement expert, but my mother is from Haiti.

00:47:30.180 And since 2010, I've been going there to Leogon area where the was the epicenter of the earthquake with a group called Haiti Resurrect, which is mostly Haitian, American, Caribbean, black folks doing solidarity work with this community.

00:47:46.900 And so what I learned from them is that, you know, after the 2010 earthquake, the U.S. did what it often does now in so-called developing countries, which is it sent food aid.

00:47:58.820 And under the Farm Bill, we have a policy called Tide Aid that says that anytime we give food aid internationally, it has to be grown by U.S. farmers and packaged and shipped by U.S. corporations.

00:48:09.740 And this policy, while it sounds benign, is actually sort of brilliant in its evilness because it makes imperialism look like philanthropy.

00:48:20.960 They timed the donation of the rice to the moment when the harvest was ready in Aitse.

00:48:28.860 And as you can imagine, if you flood a community with free rice at the time that farmers are trying to sell their rice, the results are devastating because that economy is then undermined.

00:48:40.760 Farmers go out of business. It forces migration to the urban areas. It forces desperation.

00:48:45.700 People start working more for the U.S. companies like United Fruit and Disney.

00:48:49.460 t-shirt factories, because there's not reserves, there's not savings. And Monsanto has even tried

00:48:55.100 to wipe out the indigenous seed of Aitzi by, again, giving donations of their hybrid seed

00:49:01.820 to the farmers and along with free chemicals at first. But after a couple of years of that,

00:49:07.360 when the native seed supply is depleted, those farmers then become dependent on Monsanto.

00:49:13.060 So the then president of Haiti, you know, asked for the donations to be turned around.

00:49:18.400 They still came in with the donations. And then the farmers in the Haitian peasant movement actually burned the seed in an act of resistance, saying, we want our seed sovereignty, we want our food sovereignty, we don't want these donations.

00:49:32.680 We would rather have the international support actually go to Haitian farmers to grow food for our own community in these times of need, but not to supplant our local economy.

00:49:43.340 So they're powerful.

00:49:45.240 And something I love about working with the farmers in Haiti,

00:49:47.300 it's not just demonstrations and chanting and burning stuff.

00:49:50.300 I mean, they are doing the on-the-ground organizing.

00:49:52.480 They have their own seed keepers exchange.

00:49:55.340 They are irrigating one another's farms and setting up compost projects

00:49:58.880 and planting trees on the degraded hillsides.

00:50:01.780 They are doing that hands-on grassroots work.

00:50:04.660 And these protests are an outward expression of their political priorities

00:50:08.140 that are very much rooted in knowing their land and knowing their community.

00:50:12.440 Oh, we so many of us have so much to learn from these courageous people who are taking their power back and not feeling the smallness that these big corporations try to just cover people up with.

00:50:36.280 And I think when we hear stories about people in Haiti or in countries that are so much less privileged than the United States, I think it can be this really beautiful wake-up call to so many of us here that shows us, look at these incredible people that are dealing with disasters and extreme poverty and lack of access to so many just

00:51:06.280 basic human needs and they are powerful and they're doing it and i think it also um kind of

00:51:16.640 shatters this idea of the united states and the quote aid that's sent all over the world and how

00:51:24.140 we can start to understand how it's disrupting so many countries globally and um it's a wormhole

00:51:32.440 to jump into how the United States continues to force their imperialistic colonial ideals and

00:51:43.020 just so oh my goodness the United States is has not stopped this forceful grip on so many people

00:51:54.000 so anyways but I'm really I want to open up the floor at this point as you've just shared so much

00:52:01.260 in this last hour with us but I would love to hear about your new book Farming While Black

00:52:08.680 Soul Fire's Definitive Guide to Liberation on Land which is going to be released this fall

00:52:15.000 so please if you would share with us the inspiration for this book your process while

00:52:24.760 working through it and anything else that you'd like us to know about this body of work that

00:52:30.760 you'll be releasing soon. Well, thank you. You know, it really feels like such a labor of love

00:52:36.480 and an important child essentially to bring into the world. So the idea of the book Farming While

00:52:41.680 Black is to take all of this curriculum that we've built over the years for our Black Latinx

00:52:46.560 farmers immersion training, the content of our talks and lectures and research, and as well as 0.99

00:52:52.240 the farming practices that we've honed over the years and put them into almost an encyclopedic

00:52:58.780 manual for reclaiming our right to dignity and belonging on lands. It's both practical and

00:53:04.960 historical and poetic. It's pretty long. It's got beautiful photographs, but just some examples of

00:53:10.700 the types of things that you can find in the book are ideas for accessing land when you don't have

00:53:16.040 a lot of resources, how you can leverage certain networks and programs to get that resource that

00:53:21.720 you need, setting up your own cooperative credit entities to support one another in initial costs,

00:53:29.940 organizing communal labor work parties, getting in touch with the spirits of the lands and making

00:53:35.400 sure that you have their consent and support so things go well. So there's that foundational

00:53:39.780 stuff. And then it moves into how have our ancestors tended the land, selected their seed,

00:53:47.340 cared for their crops? How have they turned those harvests into preserved foods and cooked foods?

00:53:55.260 And with every single suggestion that we offer about how to do the thing, we're also uplifting

00:54:00.820 that ancestral root. So when we talk about raised beds, we're talking about the Avambo people

00:54:07.020 in Central Africa. When we talk about terraces, we're talking about fenyaju practices in Kenya, 0.58

00:54:12.280 Right. And agroforestry, we refer to the Haden Laku of Haiti, which is the Haitian agroforest.

00:54:18.420 So all of these practices are rooted in where they came from, which is so, so important because, you know, in the so-called permaculture movement, a lot of times these very ways of knowing land are divorced from their context, repackaged, rebranded and really honestly used to profit college educated white folks in offering these permaculture certifications.

00:54:42.100 And that's just that's just not ethical. And it's also misleading. So this was the book that I needed when I was 16 years old and starting to farm and going to these farming conferences, looking at the tables and seeing that everything was written by Elliot Coleman or the Nearing's, you know, or John Jevons.

00:54:58.780 I really needed to see that my people were reflected in this sustainable agricultural

00:55:04.460 tradition, which we are.

00:55:06.520 And so I hope that this will be a gift to my contemporaries and to future generations

00:55:10.640 to help us reclaim that proud place and the legacy of regenerative farming.

00:55:17.220 I cannot wait for this book to come out and just sit with every page.

00:55:22.980 And thank you so much for debunking the myths of permaculture and all of these well-meaning, perhaps, ways of teaching and how they're not really getting to the root of how to move forward in the way that we need to right now.

00:55:43.840 And I really appreciate all of your tireless work because I can only imagine how much you dedicate your life force and your energy to all the different pieces of this very full pie that you work with from farming and food and intersectionality and ancestry and seed and soil and on and on and on.

00:56:10.560 it's just so inspiring to see and to learn about you and your devotion so I appreciate you I'm so

00:56:22.640 grateful for you coming on the show today I'm sure everybody listening has many many bits and

00:56:30.000 pieces that they want to explore more from this seed of a conversation so I hope that we meet

00:56:37.340 sometime in the future in person and keep the conversation growing.

00:56:43.840 Ashe. Absolutely. And thank you for your really thoughtful questions. It's such a blessing to,

00:56:50.240 you know, be in conversation with someone who clearly has the reverence for earth and for

00:56:54.260 justice that we do here at Soul Fire Farm. So thank you for that commitment.

00:57:07.340 thank you for listening to for the wild podcast i'm ayanna young the music you heard today was

00:57:19.960 hannah shin with night glide i'd like to thank our incredible team our producer and editor andrew

00:57:27.100 stores our research director madison migulski and media director molly libov

00:57:32.920 head over to the website to check out our entire archive of podcasts and while you're there you

00:57:40.320 can look into our other projects including our one million redwoods project the tongas national

00:57:45.860 forest campaign and our new online education platform launching may one thanks so much and

00:57:54.260 until next time

For The Wild - April 12, 2018

LEAH PENNIMAN on Land Based Liberation ⧸72

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