April ’23 Love Notes

How simple a thing it seems to me that to know ourselves as we are, we must know our mothers’ names.
Alice Walker

Welcome Spring! We hope the sun and rain are giving you life.

This month we have been busy germinating new seedlings and tucking our first baby plants into the ground. We’ve hosted our first Work and Learn days to strengthen our soil for the growing season, and we’ve established urban gardens for our neighbors to help nourish our folks right where they’re at.

The Program Center construction is in full swing, and the program team has been busy developing new curriculum and selecting participants for this summer’s immersions.

We are so excited to welcome you to join us in person and virtually for a number of opportunities coming up, including the Alumni Reunion and Campout!

Read on for April updates and May invitations below.

With tender love and care,

Briana, Brooke, Cheryl, Clara, Crysta, Danielle, Hana’, Hillary, Ife, Jonah, Kai, Leah, Maya, Naima, Ria, Shay, and Susuyu

Staff Highlights

Welcome the newest members to our Farm-ily!

Maya Hector – Farm Assistant

My name is Maya (she/her), and I am a first-generation, Caribbean-American born and raised in The Bronx. For as long as I can remember, I’ve had an interest for the Earth and her relationship to all life. I believe that to be born human, comes with an obligation to defend and protect the Earth and her natural resources and to educate others of her value, not only to humans but to all living beings.

“Joining the SFF team has been more fulfilling than I could have imagined. Not only am I a part of the hard-work and sweat it takes to give back to this community that I now call home, I’ve also been able to nurture my spiritual self and deepen my connection with this earth; our only physical home. I’ve learned so much and still have more learning to do but being a part of this welcoming and dynamic team, my enthusiasm and commitment to ending food apartheid remains unwavering”.

Hana’ Maaiah – Interim Farm Manager

My name is Hana’ Maaiah (she/her/all pronouns), and I am serving as the Interim Farm Manager. I am a Palestinian-Jordanian farmer, educator, friend, organizer and nature lover. I believe that regenerative communal food is a way to heal our planet, ourselves, and each other.

“My relationship to the land, and eventually Soul Fire Farm, is a circular story, rooted in my love for Nature and humanity. As a first generation Arab-American, Nature became my home between cultures. While the intersections of food are the intersections of life that I care most about; care for Nature, autonomy of choice, curiosity, freedom of expression, quality of life, and play. As I’ve traveled about this life, I’ve come to dedicate myself to the healing and restoration of our Earth and those of us who reside here”.

We’re Hiring! Temporary Volunteer Coordinator

About the Position: We are seeking a Volunteer Coordinator to support us in creating a memorable and safe experience for our community during Soul Fire Farm’s 2023 SOULstice Party.

The SOULstice party will be a celebration of our interdependence with the land and each other with live music, food vendors, sacred play, camp fire, and the most starlit dance party of the year! It will take place Saturday, June 24th- Sunday, June 25th (with set up for the event taking place Friday, June 23rd).

The Volunteer Coordinator will be responsible for recruiting and managing volunteers to ensure adequate coverage for all of the volunteer assignments on SOULstice weekend.

Click Here for More Details

Hey friends and farmers!

My name is Hana’ Maaiah and I am honored to share this month’s farm update with y’all as the Interim Farm Manager! Having farmed in Alabama for 4 years, and Oregon for 3 years, my first two weeks at Soul Fire Farm have taught me that the mountain side sure is windy! The farm team has definitely had our brains and muscles worked as we re-re-re-secured tarps after two 25 mph storms! Despite the chase, tarps are some of our best friends on the farm! Tarping our beds helps us solarize and kill weeds, warm up the soil and prevent wind and water erosion on our permanent raised beds. To learn how we use pallets and rock bags to secure tarps, check out this video!

In addition to dancing in the wind with the tarps, we applied literal tons of amendments to prepare our spring transplants for their new soil home, we’ve been mourning and rebuilding after the collapse of the high tunnel due to intense snow, and we are enjoying the warmth that the greenhouse, friendship and the land brings to our lives.

Happy growing!

Soul Fire In the City

To free ourselves we must feed ourselves

Yesterday, Naima and Danielle drove around Watervliet, Albany and Schenectady in our big red farm truck to establish 3 new gardens for Soul Fire in the City! After hauling a yard of compost and soil for each one, they tucked in sweet pea, arugula, and cilantro seeds and transplanted early season crops like sage, collards and rainbow chard.

It makes us so happy knowing that these gardens will provide nourishment and joy for these beautiful families, as well as youth in the Boys & Girls Club of Schenectady.

We will be establishing more in the coming weeks. Click here to learn more about the program, or volunteer to support the effort.

Community Work & Learn

Each One, Teach One. Many Hands Make Light Work.

Our first Work and Learn Days in April were a blast and we accomplished an immense amount of work with our collective effort: Prepping the east and west field high tunnels, spreading amendments on the soil, adding drop irrigation, weeding and mulching strawberries and blueberries, transplanting elderberries, and leading a goat parade to welcome our beloved Nebula, Bucky and Nova onto fresh pasture.

We are so grateful for the magic that’s possible when our love and labor come together. We have 3 Work and Learn Days in May if you want to get your hands on the land with us! Registration required. Click the date to sign up:

Please note: Group reservation is sold out for the season. Folks can join the waitlist by completing the form or just buy individual tickets

Learn more

We launched our 2023 3D series this month with a dynamic deep dive into Soil Health with Farm Director Leah Penniman and Smarter than Nature’s Angelique Taylor! Leah and Angelique shared their passion for and deep knowledge about the soil ecosystem, including strategies for analyzing and stewarding it. We learned about building no till beds, nourishing soil with compost tea, determining soil texture using the texture by feel and the jar methods, and so much more!

Watch the workshop recording and all past virtual offerings on our 3D program page here!

Farm Tours

Soul Fire Farm will host 6 tours throughout the 2023 farming season so that our beloved community can experience some of the plants, animals and humans that grow here. We will guide you through the growing fields and agroforestry gardens, take you up close to the building projects, share whole-hearted stories, and answer your questions.

Our first tour will be May 26 (tickets available!)

Group registration is still available for July 28 and September 29.

Learn more and register here

Ask A Sista Farmer

Black Earth Wisdom is taking over Ask a Sista Farmer this spring so we can learn from the earth-listening contributors to our new book.

Your hosts are Leah Penniman and Clara AgborTabi of Soul Fire Farm.

Check out the latest episodes with the brilliant Khaliah D. Pitts and Naima Penniman here & LeeAnn Morrissette and B. Anderson here.

Next up & FINAL for the Black Earth Wisdom takeover!

Friday, April 28, 4:00-4:45 PM EST – James Edward Mills, Teresa Baker

Friday, May 12, 4:00-4:45 PM EST – Nicole Jackson and Taina Spicer

Find our live on instagram @soulfirefarm

Learn more and get the book at blackearthwisdom.org and @black.earth.wisdom

The Braiding Seeds Fellowship is currently accepting applications for our 3rd cohort.

Applications close on May 1st at 11:59pm EST. Ten fellows will be selected to join the 18 month long program. Fellows will be awarded a $50,000 stipend, 1:1 mentorship, professional development, individualized coaching, and business planning support.

To help celebrate and honor our 3rd year, we hosted an information session on Apr 20, 2023 over Zoom. Our esteemed selection committee members were in attendance to help provide perspective on what they are looking for, as well as share more information about the critical work that they are doing.

Click Here to Watch

HAPPY EARTH WEEK!

Our commitment to ecological farming practices is so foundational that we sometimes forget to make it visible. We use farming practices like perennial polycultures, minimal tillage, mulch and compost, silvopasture, semi-permanent raised beds, crop rotation, and cover crops that sequester carbon, increase soil biodiversity, and protect the health of humans and other beings.

We do not use chemical fertilizers or pesticides, and we minimize fossil fuel inputs. In order to be more accountable to our community, we participate in the Certified Naturally Grown program and submit to an annual inspection to verify that we farm according to strict environmental standards. We are working with CNG to make the program more accessible to Black, Brown, Indigenous, and other farmers who have not found a home in the USDA Organic program. Learn more about the CNG’s Equity Fund and how to apply here.

We welcome dialogue about farming practices and certifications – what has worked for you?

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.

Shout out to our friend Unchatwa who is working on language reclamation for Mohican descendent folks living in the homelands.

He taught us to say the name of our farm in the Mohican language.

“Oche’chã’kwun thtaw ke’ãakun: Ma’eekunew keek noom”

“Soul Fire Farm: Homeland of the Mohican”

You can hear a recording here. When the campus is complete, we plan to have signage in Mohican, Spanish, and English, as one small way to honor the people upon whose sacred lands we reside.

In the months since my FIRE Immersion experience, life has gifted me with many blessings and challenges. One of those many blessings was the ability to return home to West Africa and to build community with farmers in the Gambia and Ghana. In my short time working on farms in West Africa, I was able to learn about and appreciate the deep challenges faced by African farmers and the resilience they endure with. These hard-working, collectively-minded farmers were deeply underpaid, regularly under-fed, and sincerely under-resourced. My Mandinka agro-teacher in Gambia was an older, kindly man who showed me how he trimmed mango trees to give the branches more aeration that would allow for more fruit. The shoes he wore were ripped in many places and the soles were separating. In those shoes, he went out everyday through several acres, climbing trees and working his body to exhaustion for crops that he did not get to eat, on land that he does not own, and for pay that wouldn’t even allow him to buy himself new shoes.

In this love note, I ask and invite all of you to go to Africa and to build community with the farmers there. Use resources like WWOOF or Workaway to find farms in Africa or the Caribbean and lend your hands, your energy, and your resources to those who are there. When you are there; ask questions, listen, witness the conditions, collaborate, get contact information, give money or resources, and, when you return, tell as many people as you can. African farmers need us and we need them. Please consider them in your work, your politics, and whenever you decide to travel next.

Click here to read more of Olka’s profound experience working alongside farmers in West Africa

“Listening to the Earth” painting by Naima Penniman now available in our online shop!

6.8″ x 9″ print on textured watercolor paper | Artist Statement:

“Listening to the Earth” is a visual love song attuning to the voices of nature.

We are listening to the Earth as we would our beloved, to her uncontainable joy and her unimaginable wailing.

On this full moon, this human being who is all of us, is dissolving into the landscape. As she holds her ear on the rim of the horizon, her hair becomes roots reaching deep into the soil, her crown becomes water descending into tributaries, her chest opens to the midnight sky.

At this crossroads of peril and promise, the Earth is our beacon and compass, offering models for metamorphosis, blueprints for symbiosis, and frameworks for evolution.

The creation of this piece was a meditation, crafted at the base of a tree, on the top of a mountain, by candle light and sunlight. May it inspire deeper listening.

Made of acrylic, wildflower seeds, spring sapling roots, pollen and clay.

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COMMUNITY SOLIDARITY

We are so blessed to have some of the most inspiring hearts and minds sitting on our Board of Directors!

We are so proud and overjoyed to congratulate our board president, Karen Washington and former board member, alumna, and former staff member Olivia Watkins for being named James Beard Foundation’s Humanitarians of the Year! ⁠

Their work with Black Farmer Fund has been recognized for its commitment to nurturing Black community wealth and health through investment in Black agricultural systems in the Northeast.

Black Farmer Fund is a close partner of Soul Fire Farm in our “ecosystem” of Northeast Black farming organizations. We are so proud of all they’ve accomplished including $10M of non-extractive, patient notes matched with $10M of grant funding going directly to support Black farmers and entrepreneurs in the Northeast!

Soul Fire Farm, along with 131 organizations, signed on to the Opportunities for Fairness in Farming Act letter drafted by Farm Action.

The letter, which was delivered to House and Senate Agriculture Committee leaders, requested their support in enacting meaningful reforms to our nation’s checkoff programs. You can learn more about checkoff programs here.

On March 30, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau released a new rule that will require small business lenders to collect and report demographic information on the applications they receive. Soul Fire Farm, in solidarity with allies at HEAL Food Alliance, advocated for the passage of a rule that increases lender transparency and accountability in 2022 through sign-on letters and story collection efforts and we are joyful to see the passage of this new rule, which will increase lender transparency and help to track discrimination in agricultural lending.

Afro-Indigenous healing on Soul Fire Farm with Briana Alfaro – Womens Magazine
Black Earth Wisdom Book Talk with Leah Penniman – Glynwood and the Hudson Valley CSA Coalition
2023 Visionary Leadership Award Honoring Leah Penniman – International Festival of Arts and Ideas
Meet the Solutionists: Soul Fire Farm’s Leah Penniman – The Solutionists: How Businesses Can Fix the Future
5 Black Environmental Groups You Should Know – San Diego Voice and Viewpoint
Black People Don’t Use Measuring Spoons Rewriting the Rule SPYS Podcast with Leah Penniman

The food system was built on the stolen land and stolen labor of Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian and people of color. Our ecosystem partners, Northeast Farmers of Color Network and National Black Food and Justice Alliance are claiming our sovereignty and calling for reparations of land and resources so that we can grow nourishing food and distribute it in our communities. The specific projects and resource needs of BIPOC land-based projects are listed on Northeast Farmers of Color Network and National Black Food and Justice Alliance’s respective maps linked above. We are so excited about these powerful opportunities for people to people solidarity.

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