April ’24 Love Notes

Each world-build is a transformative journey, building upon the previous one. It’s a non-linear experience that challenges our perceptions of what’s possible.

Ingrid LaFleur

Blessings Beloved Community,

We hope this finds you with a full heart and the warm spring sun kissing your face. We’ve welcomed the season by pouring libations over freshly planted seedlings. As the songs inherited from our ancestors pour from our lips and echo out over the land, we infuse these new seedlings with our collective blessings. They will grow and become nourishment for our community.

With the blossoming of spring we’ve joyfully welcomed folks back on the land for the start of our 2024 program season. We have abundant offerings of in-person and virtual programs to share, including an invitation for our well loved annual SOULstice celebration. 

We’re also thrilled to share with you our 2023 Annual Report! This visual story is a divine testament to what we were able to accomplish through our partnership with the land and each other.

We hope to be in kinship with you soon, together dreaming into the future we wish to create. 

May your breath be your anchor.

With love and solidarity,

Briana, Brooke, Cheryl, Christina, Clara, Crysta, Danielle, Hana’, Hillary, Jonah, Leah, Maya, Naima, O’den, Ria, Shay, and Susuyu

Cheryl was named a Whole Health Hero for 2023 by Anthem Blue Cross in partnership with Albany Business Review. Whole Health Heroes honors Capital Region individuals and businesses that have demonstrated innovation and leadership in building the whole health of the community. The honorees focus on a range of areas including economic development, community programming, mental and emotional health services, physical health services and safety, financial well-being, and more.

The people and organizations honoredas Whole Health Heroes recognize the potential of the Capital Region and its inhabitants. They are committed to energizing the community, investing in its people, and setting the stage for a healthy and prosperous future.

Congratulations Cheryl!

Did you know that our small farm has over 18,000 linear feet of drip irrigation and hoses to run each year? We install mainline, connectors, valves, pressure regulators, and shut offs in all the right places to ensure that our crops and livestock are well hydrated. We find that Mother Nature has jokes though, and usually when the irrigation is installed perfectly and on time, the season is so rainy that we rarely need irrigation outside of the high tunnels. But when we procrastinate on irrigation, we find ourselves in a drought year. Water management is a central part of farming. In addition to irrigation systems, our no-till raised beds, heavy mulches, high organic matter, and contour planting are all part of encouraging water to infiltrate rather than erode. We also constructed underground drainage channels to wick away groundwater in our soggy spots around the orchard and crop fields. We are blessed to collaborate with the abundant water element on this land. 

With all the rain in April, we are grateful to the site team for their diligent work to maintain a roof over our heads and a warm, dry interior. This was the first month we had an INDOOR meal for a program in years. We celebrated the Program Center’s “soft opening” during our community work-and-learn day, enjoying miso soup and conversation in the dining hall. Eating outdoors is delightful, until the rain starts to blow sideways, which it does quite often on this mountainside. We don’t take for granted the gift that it is to gather Beloved Community in the warmth, safety, and protection of these thoughtfully constructed buildings. 

May 7
May 21
June 4
June 18

Big thanks to everyone who came out for our first Community Work and Learn Days in April. With our powers combined we cared for the orchard trees, added manure and tarps to the annual growing beds, prepped the high tunnels, added woodchips  to trees in our orchard, transplanted valerian, and shelled and packaged maize.

Join us for a day-long on-farm volunteer opportunity to learn more about our growing practices and contribute to our mission! We’re hosting a total of 17 Work & Learn Days this year, including some group registration days. Check out our website for more information. Click on the dates below to register. 

We’re excited to kick off our revamped Building Skills series with a Hands on Introduction to Carpentry Workshop on Friday, May 10th.

This daylong deep dive will be an opportunity to learn safe hand and power tool use, layout, measuring, fastening, and some of the basics of working with wood through a beginner building project.

Learn more and register here!

Join textile artist and farmer, Sarah Gotowka of Luna Fiber Studio as she plots out her natural dye farm for the summer. She will take you through her plant selection process, as she considers growing zones, harvest yields, her relationship to the history and culture of the plants, and of course – color!

Sarah will offer an in depth look at the extraction processes for each plant, as well as steps in the dyeing process–preparation of cloth through scouring and mordanting and different modalities of dye application including submersion baths, solar baths, and printing. 

Learn more and register here!

Upcoming 3D Skill Shares:

Beekeeping 3D 
with Hana’ Maaiah of Soul Fire Farm & Olka Forster 
In Person at Soul Fire Farm
June 14, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. ET. 
Learn more and register here!

3D workshops are designed to be culturally relevant and safe spaces that center Black, Indigenous and People of Color (read why here).

Are you ready to get free?! This summer a team of professional chefs, farmers, musicians, artists, activists and healers are welcoming 15 youth to Soul Fire Farm to create art, grow food, make music, learn cooking skills, explore nature, and build relationships of trust, respect and joy. 

Liberation on Land Youth Immersion is for BIPOC youth (Black, indigenous, and other people of color) who are 14-16 years old. Local youth from the 518/Capital Region and regional youth living within 60 miles from Soul Fire Farm will be strongly prioritized. 

Learn more and apply 
Rolling Admission until slots are full

On the cusp of summer, we will celebrate our interdependence with the land and each other. Join us for soul stirring live music, aerial trapeze, food vendors, sacred play, capoeira, camp fire, and the most starLIT dance party of the year!

Reserve your spot: www.bit.ly/soulstice24

We’re also seeking volunteers and sponsors to make this year’s SOULstice party better than ever! Volunteer tasks include set-up, clean-up, registration, and selling SFFI merchandise. Sponsorship opportunities range from $100 to $1,000. To learn more about volunteering, contact volunteer@soulfirefarm.org. For sponsorship inquiries, reach out to love@soulfirefarm.org.

 May 31st

Soul Fire Farm will host 6 tours throughout the 2024 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 31. 
Group registration is available for July 5, August 2, and September 27. 

Learn more and register here

We’re excited to introduce a new building skills opportunity. Join us on May 31st for our first Shop Day. Shop Days are generative co-working spaces for builders to enhance their carpentry skills while working on personal woodworking projects in community. The Soul Fire team will not be facilitating a curriculum but will provide supervision to ensure safety, assistance with tool use, as well as consultation on project design and materials sourcing. Participants should bring their own materials, tools and building projects. 

Learn more and register here

Season 5 of our Instagram Live is LIVE! Every month, experienced Black farmers and food systems experts share their knowledge about agriculture, land tenure, markets, food policy, coops, cultural foods, and more. At the end of the show we have a GIVEAWAY to the person who wins our quiz. To free ourselves we must feed ourselves!

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

Check out the latest episodes with the brilliant Carmen Mouzon and Taylor Pauls from Blacklove Collective Trust here & Black Church Food Security Network / Rev Heber Brown here. See all past episodes at www.soulfirefarm.org/fwb-instalive/ 

Next up:
Thursday, May 2 @ 4 PM ET | Quarter Acre For the People

Find our live on instagram @soulfirefarm

Soul Fire Farm team members Ria and Jonah will lead a playful, exploratory walk through the fields and forests to greet our plant and fungi friends and learn about how they provide food and medicine. Together with Leah, they will include a discussion of sustainable harvest and sacred foraging practices in the Black Diaspora, Jewish Diaspora, and Indigenous Indonesian cultures. We will finish by cooking up some of our harvest together and tasting the bounty. Friends of all ages are welcome!

Register

We started at Utē Petit’s (cohort 2) site, Popsie and Vivian’s Lowlands, where construction of the impressive 9’ planting mounds is well underway! Next, we spent time with Kristian Bailey (cohort 2) at Orais Hand Farm where purple kale, fennel, and carrots are coming up with abundance. We even got a lesson with his new hand tractor! Lastly, we headed up to Bailey Hutchison’s project, Tru Culture Community, to spend the day on land with her and her co-founder, Mr. Hutchison, Bailey’s dad! They have such a serene family farm coming together with infrastructure all hand built by Mr. Hutchison. Bailey has a wide array of Afro-Caribbean seedlings coming up which will make for an awesome first planting season on land!  We also got to sneak in time with our alum, Angie Comeaux of Hummingbird Springs Farm who is Louisiana born, Alabama transplant, while she was in town for work!

Farm employees are still not equally protected under the Fair Labor Standards Act and do not have a federally protected right to a weekly day of rest, overtime pay, sick time, collective bargaining rights, or even the right to a federal minimum wage on small farms. Farmers also suffer from some of the highest rates of mental illness and suicidality of any profession. 

As a community encouraging the rising generation to take up the mantle of farm, food, and land work, we need to do our part to make farming a healthy profession. Soul Fire Farm participates in the Food Justice Certified program which audits farms annually to ensure that workers receive time off, benefits, and safe working conditions. We are also working to get Congress to pass the Fairness for Farmworkers Act to legislate basic protections for farm workers. We applaud the “Not Our Farm” team for creating this awesome zine that explores the issues of workers rights on farms – check it out! 

The exploitation of farm labor is so deeply entrenched in the DNA of this nation that it can feel daunting to confront it, and yet we must. As an imperfect, ever-evolving community, our SFF team has been working diligently over the past many years to incorporate feedback and build a healthy work culture. We are excited to learn with and from you as well. What success stories and strategies can you share about dignified working conditions for farmers? 

Josina Calliste co-founded Land in Our Names (LION) in the same year that she traveled to take part in the FIRE Immersion. Months later, LION hosted the first post-Oxford Real Farming Conference caucus for Black people and People of Color, which SFF’s Leah attended having given the keynote at the ORFC.

LION’s are doing farm visits for BPOC & queer farmers in & around SE England, jointly hosted with Farmerama & LandWorkers’ Alliance Out on the Land group.

LION is really excited about taking on a year’s stewardship for some raised beds in Glengall Wharf Garden (a community growing site serving a super diverse area in south-east London) and is also quite happy to be collaborating with long time friend and comrade Dre Ferdinand (a welcomed import from South Carolina) on a series of community care workshops. 

We continue to raise funds for our Land Pot to fund the buying of land as well as all the other infrastructures we will need. Support LION’s land pot here.

Josina is currently doing a herbalism course, benefitting from a deeper connection to the seasons, astrological herbalism, self and health. Since having the first LION cub, she co-wrote a chapter on Land as a site of anti-racist struggle in Britain in a book anthology due to be published in summer 2024. 

“After six years of filming, the documentary “Rooted,” will finally be shared with an international audience in 2024. As lead participant and Co-Producer, Germaine Jenkins, Co-Founder of Fresh Future Farm shares the journey of their urban farming operation, highlighting the resilience and determination of our community in the face of historical injustices. However, revealing this story comes with risks, particularly concerning racism and misogynoir still prevalent in the South. Despite potential backlash, it’s crucial to shed light on these issues to foster understanding and demand positive systemic change.

By amplifying our voices and experiences, we challenge systemic oppression and pave the way for funding a more inclusive and equitable future for Black women and femme farmers in the South. My safety in revealing these common struggles is paramount, but so is the urgency of addressing them openly and courageously.

As a result of what’s in store, I’m purchasing a rural home where I plan to farm and start a food business focused on continuing my work of creating anti-inflammatory and culturally appropriate value-added meals and drinks, inspired by the successful work we’ve done in this area. This cooperative venture connects me back to my great great-grandfather’s farming legacy from the early 1900s.

The challenge for me is that I’ve only been able to raise $19,000 of the $29,000 needed to pay closing costs and expensive renovations on the single family property that will become affordable housing back home.”

Please consider donating to support this work via paypal at germaine.jenkins@gmail.com

The 2024 emPower Grants are a redistributive fund that exists to strengthen the activities and projects of New York’s emergent Black-led farms, food businesses and food sovereignty efforts. Black farmers and food actors are encouraged to learn more and apply HERE (bit.ly/emPowerGrants). 

This funding opportunity is made possible through a collaborative research opportunity between the Black Farmer Ecosystem and Professor Myles Lennon and will produce a public report on best practices learned from our collaboration. The Black Farmer Ecosystem (Ecosystem) will determine how the public report is disseminated. 

This fund is not intended for emergency situations such as equipment breakdown, weather issues, loss of crops / animals, medical expenses, stolen or damaged supplies, etc.

If you are experiencing an emergency for an existing business (businesses that are making a community impact) and the emergency can be fully solved by funding support, we recommend exploring Black Farmer Fund’s Rapid Response Fund fund at https://blackfarmerfund.org/rapid-response-fund.

Farming While Black Instagram Live – Quarter Acre for the People | May 2, 2024  4:00 pm – 4:45 pm   Farming While Black Instagram Live – NBFJA | May 16, 2024  4:00 pm – 4:45 pm | Tune in via Instagram @soulfirefarm Every month, experienced Black farmers and food systems experts share their knowledge about agriculture, land tenure, markets, food policy, coops, cultural foods, and more.

Community Work & Learn May 7, 2024  10:00 am – 3:30 pm Soul Fire Farm, 1972 NY-2, Petersburgh, NY 12138, USA Registration is required. Registration Link   Community Work & Learn | May 21, 2024  10:00 am – 3:30 pm Soul Fire Farm, 1972 NY-2, Petersburgh, NY 12138, USA Registration is required. Registration Link  Volunteer at Soul Fire Farm to learn about some of our farming practices while supporting our work and getting your hands on the land.

Fossil Fuel Bank Demonstration May 3, 2024  11:45 am – 1:15 pm THE PROCESSION Assemble at SUNY Plaza @ State & Broadway Walk up State Street to three mega-banks Chase Bank – 50 State Street | Bank of America – 69 State Street | TD Bank – 125 State Street Gathering at Academy Park – across from City Hall FAITH LEADERS at the forefront with the message to convey the message of the moral imperative to stop funding new fossil fuel projects. More Information

Foraging and Wildcrafting at Soul Fire Farm | May 8, 2024  5:00 pm – 7:00 pm | Learn about foraging and wildcrafting from BIPOC, queer, and rural perspectives.  Registration and details

Hands On Introduction to Carpentry May 10, 2024  10:00 am – 5:30 pm | Soul Fire Farm, 1972 NY-2, Petersburg, NY 12138, USA Join us for a daylong deep dive into learning safe hand and power tool use, layout, measuring, fastening, and some of the basics of working with wood through a beginner building project.  Registration and details

Growing Color 3D: Natural Dyes Virtual Skill Share | May 16, 2024  3:00 pm – 4:30 pm | Join textile artist and farmer, Sarah Gotowka of Luna Fiber Studio as she plots out her natural dye farm for the summer. She will take you through her plant selection process, as she considers growing zones, harvest yields, her relationship to the history and culture of the plants, and of course – color.  Registration and details

Farm Tour May 31, 2024  3:30 pm – 5:00 pm Soul Fire Farm, 1972 NY-2, Petersburgh, NY 12138, USA | Visit Soul Fire Farm for our monthly seasonal farm tour! You’ll get to experience some of the plants, animals and humans that grow here.   Registration and details

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.

Taking a long breath in and a longer breath out can be deeply settling for the nervous system. Try:

Inhale for a slow count of 4
Exhale for a slow count of 6
Repeat 3 times 

This slow, rhythmic, and intentional breath reminds the body that you’re safe and well loved