“May those from under our feet
breathe the warmth of community unto us
so that the peace we seek
mounts our bodies and sits on the chairs of our hearts
sprinkling love and joy around us all.”
Prayer from Kounbaterzié Danbiré Guinian
Last weekend we hosted Harriet’s Apothecary for the fifth year in a row, an intergenerational healing village led by the brilliance and wisdom of Black healers with the intention of continuing the rich healing legacy of abolitionist, community nurse and herbalist Harriet Tubman. Reiki, acupuncture, yoga, card readings, meditation, spiritual baths, doll making, various workshops, and multiple self-led self-determination stations were offered. The healers then spent a beautiful, sunny day together after the healing village ended harvesting hazelnuts to be transformed into homemade nutella over the winter.
Announcements:
- Farming While Black is available for purchase on Powell Books, an independent bookstore in Portland, and Indie Bound, a website that connects consumers to local, independent bookstores in their area. Reserve your practical guide to liberation on land today!
- Read our 2018 Annual Report!
- Applications are open for BIPOC FIRE 2.0! Building off of the momentum of our weeklong BIPOC FIRE, these 2.0 workshops are “deep dives” into specific farming and homesteading practices. We have invited passionate and experienced facilitators to offer daylong workshops throughout the season. Applications are considered on a rolling basis.
- This year at least 14 refugee and immigrant families will receive FREE vegetable delivery with your support. Please pitch in for a Solidarity Share today.
- Please join us for our Community Farm Days – monthly from April-November. We work the land and learn together followed by a potluck lunch and conversation.
- Learn more about our take on the Green New Deal, read Leah’s first fable, and learn more about our work by reading about us in the Heritage Radio Network, Yes Magazine, and the Harvard Gazette.
- And for folks who plan on visiting the farm, please drive slowly on our road. The speed limit on our road is 10 mph, and we request that folks do not turnaround in a neighbor’s driveway out of respect for our neighbors. If you miss the turn, continue down Route 2 until you reach the next actual road from either direction, Josh Hall Pond Rd traveling West to East, or Taconic Lake Road traveling East to West. Thank you!
Before our season began, our farmers set an intention of experiencing joy on a regular basis, including during the height of the season, when stress is high and sense of mental and physical wellbeing can decrease. One way we hoped to manifest this was by re-embodying childhood wonder and silliness. Farm team recently got walkie-talkies, fulfilling Damaris’ childhood dreams and exponentially increasing the amount of laughter and goofiness visitors witness – whether the thundering crackles of Noah and Lytisha’s laughter, the various silly voices of Damaris and Larisa, or Dayo’s chuckles at our antics, a former BIPOC FIRE facilitator whom we had the pleasure of working with for several weeks. Laughing has been a wonderful mechanism to cope with pest issues, the winter squash we lost, our last batch of meat chickens growing slower than expected, and, as Damaris points out, is a wonderful offering to the land.
This month has been busy with programs on and off the farm. August 30th marked Soul Fire Farm’s ninth birthday, which we celebrated during our fourth BIPOC FIRE of the year. That week was so full, from witnessing some participants hold a chicken for the first time, to Larisa’s tractor chisel plow demo, to Noah and participants managing to harvest all our good winter squash. Then, during our September community workday, we dug over dug over 500lbs of potatoes (!), in addition to weeding our sweet potatoes, processing basil for pesto, and much more with the 100+ folks who came to volunteer.
During our Spanish language BIPOC FIRE program we welcomed folks from all over the Latinx diaspora, from Mexico to Puerto Rico. Our friend Eustacio from the Hudson Valley Farm Hub taught us how to make puchero de pollo, an organ-rich dish demonstrating how simple, delicious, and sustainable it can be to use all parts of animals we consume for meat. We also learned about microorganismos de montaña, made and canned chiles en escabeche, and transitioned some of our hens that were no longer laying.
Former farm apprentice Ceci, Damaris, and Larisa facilitated a BIPOC FIRE 2.o workshop on climate resilient farming, where they explored strategies for adapting to the effects of climate change by centering ancestral practices and relationships to land through games, group activities, and storytelling. Then our friend Bellx facilitated a 2.0 workshop on plant medicine, ethical harvesting, and healing rituals. We are currently in day one of our second BIPOC Builders Immersion of the season, once again taught by Jonah and Sandy Nurse and nourished by Ria, Brooke, and Gabriela.
Cheryl recently hosted students from the Redemption Christian Academy for the day, and before that Leah hosted students from Williams College who helped mulch our berries for winter. Amani spoke about about ways we can all contribute to the movement for reparations and racial justice in food system to folks who attended their talk at Epsilon Spires Sanctuary in Brattleboro, Vermont, and Leah discussed the same at Tufts University. At Harvard Divinity School Leah talked about how integral spirituality is to Li’s food justice activism and relationship to land.
Ask for community support:
Respond to Trump Department of Labor Proposal for
Harmful Changes to H-2A Agricultural Guestworker Program
At the end of July, the U.S. Department of Labor released a series of proposed changes to the H-2A program, largely designed to make the program easier and cheaper for employers while the proposed changes would lower many workers’ wages, shift costs onto workers, and weaken enforcement of housing standards. CATA and other farmworker organizations across the country have been discussing how to collect public comments against these proposed changes, and we are asking our community to support these organizations by submitting a public comment by September 24, 2019.
Here are two documents that these organizations are sharing that may used for preparing a public comment:
- A 6 page summary prepared by Farmworker Justice of the extensive changes proposed for the program
- A sample comment prepared by Farmworker Justice and modified by CATA that can be personalized
Please follow the instructions below in order to post a comment. Comments are due to DOL by September 24, 2019.
How to submit a comment:
- Go to http://www.regulations.gov.
- Search for “Temporary Agricultural Employment of H-2A Nonimmigrants in the United States.” The document ID number is ETA-2019-0007 and the RIN (Regulatory Information Number) is RIN 1205-AB89.
- Submit comments by clicking on the “Comment Now” button. Follow the instructions to submit your comments (you will have the option to upload a document from your files).
There is also a mail-in option for submitting comments, at the address provided on the notice: Adele Gagliardi, Administrator, Office of Policy Development and Research, Employment and Training Administration, U.S. Department of Labor, 200 Constitution Avenue NW, Room N-5641, Washington, DC 20210.
The proposed regulatory changes were published in the Federal Register on July 26, 2019 and are available here.
Oppression underwrites our food system, and a tangible action we have taken for addressing food security and food sovereignty issues in our communities is taking reparations into our own hands through the creation of the Reparations Map for Black-Indigenous Farmers. We recognize that the food system was built on the stolen land and stolen labor of Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian and other people of color. We also know that we cannot wait for the government to acknowledge that stolen wealth and land must be returned. If you have resources you want to share contact a farmer directly to share them, or if you have a project you want to include on the map contact us!
This month’s Love Notes was written by Lytisha Wyatt.