September Love Notes

We agreed to take care of the seeds and the seeds agreed to take care of us.

Rowen White

Beloved Community,

We hope that your transition into autumn has been ripe with sweetness!
Our Solidarity Share bags are bursting at the seams, and so are our hearts.
This is a time of endless abundance from the land, and limitless labor harvesting, distributing and preserving food and herbs, saving seeds, and drying herbs.

We’ve been welcoming folks to the farm for carpentry training and youth programs, and hosting natural dye and preserving the harvest workshops virtually and in the city. As the sunflowers bend over with the weight of their seeds, we give thanks for the generosity of the earth as well as our human community. We are so grateful for the dozens of folks who show up for our work and learn days to help us get the harvest to those who need it most.

Read on for insights into September’s bounty, and invitations to October’s offerings.

With Love,

Azuré, Briana, Brooke, Cheryl, Clara, Danielle, Hillary, Ife, Jonah, Kai, Leah, Naima, Ria, Shay, and Susuyu

Soul Fire Farm is hiring for two positions: Financial Manager and Interim Farm Manager. The priority deadline for both positions is October 1, although we will continue to receive applications until the position has been filled.

More information and applications here.

The Financial Manager is responsible for maintaining financial health of the organization through principled bookkeeping and financial management, as well as contributing to team operations.  Position starts on November 1, 2022.

The Interim Farm Manager will oversee all of the farm’s operations and will be involved in everything from planting and harvesting crops to caring for livestock, purchasing supplies and providing support during educational programs. This position is from April 3 – December 8, 2023.

Do you know a dog who is friendly with strangers, keen to bark and chase herbivores, preferably friendly with felines, suited to an active rural lifestyle, and available for adoption?

Suitable breeds include English Shepherd, Australian Shepherd, Border Collie, Scotch Collie, Pembroke Welsh Corgi, Standard Schnauzers, and mixes thereof. We are hoping for a young adult dog that already has some training and socialization.

Thanks for your suggestions and leads!

We want to uplift the Moyamensing tomato in particular, which was grown by incarcerated workers in the Eastern State Penitentiary, PA, since the mid-1800s. It was also grown in the Moyamensing Prison across town, where abolitionist Passmore Williamson was incarcerated and visited by Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman. We are honored to be part of saving the stories of seeds along with the seeds themselves.

Soul Fire Farm sells our seeds through Truelove Seeds and remits 100% of our proceeds to the Stockbridge Munsee Band of the Mohican Nation.

It is a reverence and inspiration for the community survival programs of the Black Panthers that motivates us to offer our survival programs in farming and building. How do we grow food for our communities? And how do we provide shelter for our people?

It is with this love for our community that we welcomed 20 BIPOC learners from all over the country for a one-day hands on carpentry training. The day was packed with concepts, tools, and abundant hands on practice. Such an honor to hold space for participants as they brimmed with excitement over the problem solving and creativity of woodworking. Possibly most powerful, is hearing people shed fears and inhibitions, while growing confidence to manifest their visions for their families and communities.

We cherish this opportunity to offer these trainings for community. Once our campus is complete in the not too distant future, our site team is thrilled to be expanding our building training programs.

Here’s to much more shop time with our community in the future!

The land has been blessed by the multigenerational footprints of Art Partners, Ujima Journey and Team H.E.R.O, Kites Nest and Mental Health Association of Columbia-Greene, Youth Clubhouses. Together we learned about seed saving, soil health, and the structural inequities in the food system. Here participants are harvesting tomatoes for their lunch before tying ribbons of intention to our tree of hope.

Huge shout out to everyone who joined us for our September Work & Learn Days! Our fall work days are lots of heavy lifting and hard meaningful work done in community. We couldn’t do it without you!

In October we will be working on lots of weeding, mulching, tarping, and prepping our beds for their winter rest. We’ll also be harvesting and garbling medicinal herbs, and packing them up for our online shop. Your hard work contributes to the mission of fighting for food sovereignty for all people. JOIN US!!!

• October 4, 2022, 10:00 AM – 3:30 PM EST Registration Link
• October 18, 2022, 10:00 AM – 3:30 PM EST Registration Link

This month we hosted an event for Soul Fire in the City Gardeners and Solidarity Share Members in Albany to celebrate the abundance of the growing season. We shared a delicious meal made with in-season, farm and home-grown ingredients, hosted a “Preserving the Harvest” demonstration, shared tips about fall garden transitions, and fostered connections.

Special thanks to our friends at the African American Cultural Center where “Heart to Harvest” took place. We built 3 raised beds in the community garden outside as part of Soul Fire in the City this Spring. It was special to return and celebrate this outdoor extension of the South End Grocery store, a Black-owned food hub in the shell of what was once a Mc Donanld’s. We are taking back our food system!

We collaborated with Programa de Justicia de Lenguaje at Hudson Valley Farm Hub to host Escuchando La Tierra / Listening to the Earth. This daylong event brought together members of communities of Spanish-speakers working within the food system to connect and build community, and establish connections in the intersections of Language, Land, Food and Racial Justice. Highlights included.

We just completed a virtual workshop on Natural Dye Plants, an in-depth look at pigment bearing plants that you can cultivate– such as indigo, cosmos, and coreopsis–and plants you can forage, find in a grocery store, and even in a compost bin. Sarah Gotowka of Luna Fiber Studio shared her knowledge and passion about plants, cloth, cloth making, color, and land. If you missed it, stay tuned for the Liberation on Land Natural Dyeing video which presents step-by-step instructions on two natural dye methods!

Up next we have our 3D Miso Fermentation with our incredible Kitchen Magician and Farm to Table Manager Ria Ibrahim as she invites us to learn the community miso recipe and traditions shared by her Japanese friends. Learn More & Register

In our last Ask A Sista Farmer (episode #40!) we were joined by the inspiring Juliana Maria Quaresma from Viva Acres who talked to us live from her sheep paddock about shepherding and fiber farming. Listen to that insightful episode here.

Join us on Friday, October 7th, 4:00-4:40 EST for our next episode on instagram live @soulfirefarm with generational healer/grower Mama Amma from Herbaceutikals  in Georgia. She’ll be sharing brilliance mycology, holistic remedies, and organic gardening techniques. Tune in!

Check out past episodes here (IGTV) and here (FB). Full list of past episodes here.

Learn more or apply to present here

Our tours have been a blast, with the goats showing off their balancing skills and beholding Mohican maze, sorghum and sunflowers reaching high up to the sky.

Soul Fire Farm will host 1 final tour October 14 so that our beloved community can experience some of the plants, animals and humans that grow here. Learn more and register here

We are coming to the end of this Shmita, a year of rest and release for the land, honored every seven years in the Jewish tradition. To honor this cycle, we left a portion of our crop land fallow and planted it in regenerating cover crops. Anything that grows wild during Shmita year is released to the commons, and available for everyone to eat for free. The biblical Shmita calls for all land to be rested every seven years, and we have modified this to rest some of the land each year such that every area gets rested at least every seven years.

Shmita also invites us to remember that all beings need rest, including the farmers. This Shmita is also the year we were able to more than double paid time off that Soul Fire employees receive (from 20 days/year in 2021 up to 36-44 days/year in 2022.) Perhaps more importantly, most teammates are using their PTO regularly. This is made possible by building in redundancy, so more than one person knows how to do each task, and also by building a culture of mutual support for rest and time away. Western agriculture is an industry notoriously terrible at encouraging rest, so we are happy to be moving toward practices of balance and wellness.

The Praxis series reflects on how our community can best put our values into action, sharing resources, ideas, and practice toward collective liberation. These will be shared each month in Love Notes and also on social media. 

Soul Fire Farm is located on unceded territory of the Mohican Nation. We remain committed to working in solidarity with the Mohican people and other Indigenous communities in our region.

This thoughtful practice and care extends to their community in many ways, including their current Greens not Grass neighborhood campaign. This campaign offers free support to Black folks in Inglewood and South LA in replacing invasive lawns with life-giving herbs, edible plants, and native plant species.  Dominique also continues to provide Black-centered herbal education, and often facilitates herbal street medicine trainings for communities across Turtle Island. Some of their current offerings include the upcoming workshop Black Kitchen Magic: The Plants that Feed Our Ancestors. This workshop is a continuation of their Hoodoo Herbalism workshop series offered during 2022 Black August, and will be offered at the 2022 Black Urban Growers Conference in October.

You can find dominique on their instagram @black.roots.herbals, and on their website BlackRootsHerbals.com

Our Ancestor Voices Spiritual Bath is made with marigold, silver wormwood, yarrow, and mugwort. It helps with cleansing and allows you to connect deeply to your ancestors, listening intently for their wisdom.

SHOP NOW

Williamstown Rural Lands, a non-profit land conservation trust:
– Educator and Program Coordinator – Williamstown, Massachusetts

North Star Fund – North Star Fund is a social justice fund that supports grassroots organizing.
– Storytelling Associate

Growing Hope – is a non-profit in Ypsilanti, MI whose mission is to foster an equitable and sustainable local food system that empowers all people.
– Development Manager

Our Neighbors’ Table – is a food assistance organization based in Amesbury, MA.
– Market Supervisors: We are hiring 2 Market Supervisors. For more information please email joanne@ourneighborstable.org.

The Cornell Small Farms 
– Small Farms Program Extension Aide

Buffalo Food Equity Network 
– BFEN Director

Sign on Letters:
Soul Fire Farm signed onto a Transformational Farm Bill curated by fellow HEAL Alliance Member organizations, the Union of Concerned Scientists and the Good Food for All Coalition. The statement is addressed to President Biden, urging him to demand a transformational farm bill that center’s racial justice, increases access to nutritious food, and ensures safety and dignity for food and farm workers, among other pertinent asks. You can view the complete statement here.

Soul Fire Farm also signed onto a letter drafted by HEAL Alliance, Rural Coalition, and National Young Farmers Coalition that expresses support of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s proposed Rule 1071. If passed, this rule will enforce lending data collection by commercial agriculture lenders in order to form a foundation for demanding accountability in instances of discrimination against Black, Indiginous, people of color and women-identified farmers in agricultural lending. You can view the letter here.

Inflation-Reduction Act: 
The National Black Food Justice Alliance (NBFJA), an alliance that SFF is a member of, published a statement in response to the Inflation-Reduction Act (IRA) that was signed into law by President Biden on August 16th, 2022. Centering Black Farmers, the statement highlights the ways in which the IRA falls short for Black Farmers, particularly as it relates to unfulfilled promises of debt relief for this particular demographic over the last year and a half. You can read the statement to learn more here.

In this workshop, our Farm-to-Table Manager, Ria Ibrahim, invites us to learn the community miso recipe and traditions shared by her Japanese friends.

Learn More & Register

Oppression underwrites our food system, and a tangible action to address food sovereignty 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 Northeast Farmers of Color!