“This outbreak reveals the interconnectedness of our world in a very personal way. It is showing, conclusively, that the health and well being of one is intimately bound to the health and well being of all. We must take action to protect the most vulnerable who will be hit hardest: those whose health is already compromised, those who are denied access to medical care, those who bear great risk in asking for help and those on the frontlines of poverty and pollution.”
~ From Partners in Health
Photo from the 2019 Intermediate Building Immersion session.
Everyday most of us are inundated with rapidly developing news about the global coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic and understandably many of us feel overwhelmed with fear and confusion. This pandemic has exposed and magnified the weaknesses of our healthcare, social, and economic systems AND it has also provided an opportunity for the loving kindness of individuals and communities to unfold, augmenting some of our uncertainty and grief with feelings of hope. From witnessing closed school districts brainstorm about ways to still get food to children experiencing food apartheid, to small farmers working with consumers to figure out how to provide food to their communities despite farmers market closures, to watching local efforts arise to make sure families have access to food and supplies – we are awed by the strength and solidarity of community. We can’t do this work alone and we hope that despite financial insecurity and health concerns many of us are and will experience in the coming weeks that many of us can still reground in love and (virtual) connection.
Resources related to COVID-19:
- Check out this Food & Land Sovereignty Resource List for COVID-19 compiled by Soul Fire Farm, Black Farmer Fund, and Northeast Farmers of Color.
- On Sunday, March 15th we hosted our first virtual BIPOC Farmers Community Skillshare on COVID-19, with 170 people registered from across the country. Our goal is to host these meetings twice a week to share skills, ideas, and mutual support during the pandemic. The calls are on Sundays from 7:00-8:30PM EST and Thursdays from 6:00-7:30 PM PST. You can learn more about these skillshares and how to join these calls here.
- Ask a Sista Farmer! Are you ready to grow your own food and medicine for self-reliance and community resilience? Every Friday, beginning March 27th, experienced Black womxn farmers answer your call-in questions about gardening, livestock, agroforestry, plant medicine, and food preservation. This event is FREE! And, if you have capacity, please donate to the farms of the presenters or a Black farmer near you. More info about the event and how to participate here.
- Read more about Soul Fire Farms’s COVID-19 Response here.
Upcoming deadlines:
- March 29th is the deadline for the Young Farmer Grant program!
- Building Immersion applications are now open! Join us for a weeklong, hands-on training at Soul Fire Farm for BIPOC folks and folks in the LQBTQIA community to level up our carpentry and building skills. The priority deadline is April 15th, and applications close May 1st. Learn more here.
- Las solicitudes para La Inmersión Agrícola Soul Fire en Español del 6 al 10 de septiembre (5 días) se han extendido. La fecha límite de prioridad es el 15 de abril y las solicitudes cierran el 1 de mayo. Todas las solicitudes recibidas después del mediodía del 1 de mayo se incluirán automáticamente en la lista de espera. Lea la descripción completa del programa aquí y aplicar al programa aquí.
- The application deadline has been extended for the Soul Fire Farming Immersion en Español. The priority deadline is April 15th, and applications close May 1st. Please help spread the word! Learn more here and apply to the program here.
- Soul Fire In the City: “To Free Ourselves We Must Feed Ourselves!” In light of the COVID-19 outbreak, it is essential that we grow our own food and medicine towards self-reliance and community resilience. Soul Fire Farm is offering materials, labor, and guidance to support folks in the 518 in establishing raised-bed gardens outside of their homes in April and May. If you or someone you know would be interested in having and maintaining a home garden in Albany or Troy, or if you would like to volunteer to help set one up, please reach out at love@soulfirefarm.org before April 1. You can donate here to support this project.
Other announcements:
- 2019 was teeming with inspiration! Read our 2019 Annual Report, beautifully put together by Damaris Miller!
- 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.
- All public gatherings on the farm are cancelled through May 15, 2020. Therefore we are pushing our first monthly community farm day to May 16th. Please watch your email for updates!
- One of our community members is experiencing financial hardship, as many of us are, and she is raising money to save her family’s free community events in the Southeast. Because of the pandemic they’ve had to cancel and postpone events and have lost vital sponsors, saddling them with lots of debt and jeopardizing the future of these events and the financial security of her family. Please share this fundraiser far and wide!
- Soul Fire Farm’s car that has gotten team members to hundreds of trainings is now 14 years old with 212,000 miles on it and repairs we can’t afford. We are seeking a car donation! We are looking for a 2012-2018 Toyota Prius V under 100k miles in very good or better condition with minimal or no need for repairs, but another hybrid in great shape could work. Email us at love@soulfirefarm.org if you can help!
- Liberation on Land – Youth Immersion Rites Of Passage Program: There will be no weeklong program in 2020. Instead we will host a one day reunion for participants and facilitators from our first 3 cohorts at WILDSEED in July. This year the planning team will focus on integrating our learnings towards welcoming a new cohort in 2021, and creating meaningful leadership pathways for alumni of the program
- Learn more about our work by checking out this No Till Growers podcast featuring our partnerships director Larisa; this Sustainable Dish podcast featuring our livestock manager Justin; the Green New Deal Policy Series: Food and Agriculture document Leah co-authored; our features in Food Tank, Rewire.News, and Wicked Leeks; our interview in the Important, Not Important Podcast; Leah’s lectures at MOSES, EcoFarm, and University of Michigan; and her talk on Radio Kingston.
- 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 turn around 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!
Neshima, Kweku, and Emet transplant horseradish.
Spring is officially here, as the newly thawed land we steward in the northeast reminds us. Spring time – a period of rebirth, re-greening, reemerging, reimagining. In the wake of this public health crisis the land can be a place of refuge and resettling into our bodies because, for many of us, in times of stress we often find ourselves mainly in our heads. Leah has been primarily in the greenhouse, preparing it for the seedlings li is growing to later provide nourishment for our programs. Justin, our livestock manager, is preparing for the pigs, guinea hens, goats, Embden geese, sheep and bees that will soon cohabit with the other beings on the land. That preparation has looked like developing an intensive grazing plan, ordering shelters for the animals, determining a beehive site, and planning to install a secure fence to protect our livestock.
A new project we are excited to unveil soon!
On the infrastructure front, Jonah has been busy managing contractors, ordering construction materials, and working on permits for new and continuing infrastructure projects he has been developing with the help of Kai. With thousands of visitors coming to the farm annually, we knew we needed to update some of our systems and are eager to be able to better accommodate our guests, like our outdoor bathhouse we have been building for immersion program attendees and other exciting projects we will unveil soon!
Alumni Rosa Rivera and Rae Fraiser assemble a raised bed frame as part of Soul Fire in the City.
We deeply believe that “to free ourselves we must feed ourselves” and we have been working on projects and with other farms to ensure that those most impacted by food apartheid have the means to move towards this reality. Kiani has been coordinating our Soul Fire in the City project, in which we are supporting 10 families to build and care for home gardens in Albany and Troy, NY, centering Black, Indigenous, and people of color, folks impacted by food apartheid, and survivors of mass incarceration. Naima has been coordinating programs for the spring and summer including selecting train-the-trainers and facilitators for our weeklong farming and building immersions, and 3D (Daylong Deep Dive) On-Farm Skillshares.
“Improving CSA Access” workshop hosted by Hudson Valley CSA Coalition.
Mutuality is critical right now. For farms with CSA programs, there is a mutual interdependence between the farmers and the CSA members. Farmers can offer dignity, cultural relevance, and connection to how food is grown, which fosters greater agency for CSA members, and CSA members can support the livelihood of farmers and, through sharing their lived experiences, can stretch understandings of what the importance is of lived experiences in defining what food means for thriving. Larisa and Maggie Cheney and D. Rooney of Rock Steady Farm and Flowers co-facilitated a workshop for NY farmers seeking to expand access to and inclusiveness of their farms’ CSA programs and support food justice in their communities. The workshop explored the history of racism in the food system, “parachuting” and the “white savior complex,” the role of Black farmers and Southern cooperatives in creating the fundamental practices of mutual exchange between farmers and communities through community-supported agriculture, and practices for assessing CSA program language justice, barriers to participation, and unintentional biases.
Larisa has also been teaching Advanced Crop Planning at Farm School NYC with Maggie along with guest teachers Renee Keitt of Kelly Street Garden in the Bronx and Yemi Amu of Oko Farms in Brooklyn. The class focused primarily on Black, Indigenous, and other ancestral approaches to crop planning. They talked a lot about Indigenous and African diasporic approaches to interplanting for biodiversity, climate resilience, promoting pollinator habitats, food and medicine, growing in small spaces, and weed, pest, and water management. The class was mainly small scale urban farmers and gardeners (including five Soul Fire Farm immersion alumni) hoping to grow food and medicine for their families and communities, which will be even more prudent during this time.
Students and faculty from the White Mountain School.
The future feels uncertain right now, but youth – who are literally the future – have a magical way of reminding us to be curious, laugh, and play even and especially during challenging times. Questions like “How do you grow strawberries? What do you do if your friends make fun of you for farming while Black? What can I grow in containers? How do we get the land back for people?” were asked by curious youth from Neutral Zone, Ypsilanti public schools, and Growing Hope after Leah’s keynote at the Local Food Summit in Peoria and Anishinaabe land, Ann Arbor, Michigan. According to their teachers, “Today something big opened for them. They can’t stop talking about their farm plans for this year. They are so inspired.” Cheryl recently hosted high school students from White Mountain School in New Hampshire, where they have been working on projects to make their school more sustainable via composting initiatives and encouraging their campus to source food locally. They learned about Afro-Indigenous agricultural practices and how they can be food justice leaders in their school and greater community.
Leah at MOSES with three Soul Fire Farm immersion alumni and three farmers and chefs our alumni collaborate with.
In February, Leah attended MOSES (the Midwest Organic & Sustainable Education Service conference) where she gave a keynote and participated on the “Farmers for Food Justice” panel that included Soul Fire alumni Fresh Roberson of Fresher Together and Chicago Bread Club and Viviana Moreno of Catatumbo Cooperative Farm. Panelists emphasized the importance of building solidarity with BIPOC growers to support their projects and urged white farmers to engage in land rematriation, wealth redistribution, and active listening with BIPOC communities. Leah was also part of a panel with other BIPOC Farmers after her Farming While Black keynote at the Organic Growers School in Asheville, NC; spoke as part of the University of Michigan “Food Literacy for All” course; and was a keynote speaker at the annual Local Food Summit in Ann Arbor. Because of the push to encourage social distancing to slow transmission rates of COVID-19, much of our education going forward will be virtual, such as the incredible U.S. Food Sovereignty Alliance talk Larisa and Shakara Tyler of the Black Dirt Farm Collective gave on resisting patriarchy and resistance in agriculture.
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. Some farmers have already received funding through this project, and we want to provide that opportunity to other Black and Brown farmers. 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.