July Love Notes

I have learned over the years that when one’s mind is made up, this diminishes fear; knowing what must be done does away with fear.

Rosa Parks

Beloved Community,

The requisite labor of mid-summer has a certain sacred quality. There is a relentless beauty in surrendering to the needs of crops, soil, weather patterns, and the steady stream of aspiring land workers attending our farm programs. Our faces are plastered with mud, sweat, and smiles. Our sleep is well earned and decorated with satisfying aches. 

In Mali, they say, “Those who work in the sun make it possible for those who work in the shade.” Under that generous sun we grow food and medicine, pack Solidarity Shares, facilitate FIRE (Farming in Relationship with Earth) immersion programs, host volunteers, lead tours, and drink in the wonder of this land, happy to do our part to sustain the ecosystem of all beings. We welcome you to read on for insights into July’s abundance, and invitations to August’s offerings. 

With Love,

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

You can learn more about the technique here. This method resonates with the farm team so much because our agricultural philosophy is based entirely on biomimicry. We reverently study the forest to learn what to do in the fields. That is why we plant trees all over the place, use heavy mulches, and encourage fungal dominance with wood chips. Why not take it a step further and actually innovate the fields with forest juice? It makes the plants much healthier and it’s fun in that nerdy kitchen concoction way. We are thrilled to blur the lines between wild and cultivated space!

The FIRE Immersions have been LIT! We welcomed our first two cohorts of aspiring BIPOC farmers to the land in July for FIRE = Farming in Relationship to Earth. Folks came from as far as Louisiana and London to learn and grow together in a space that uplifts Afro-Indigenous brilliance. We skilled up on topics from seed keeping to sovereignty to soil, enjoyed delicious farm-to-table meals and danced free under the stars. 

We are excited to welcome 2 more cohorts in August! Check out the dream facilitation team that is holding the container for all the magic to pour through.

The land has been blessed by the multigenerational footprints of Ubuntu from Brooklyn, the Darrow School from New Lebanon, and Williams College ROOT from Williamston. Together we’ve learned about seed saving, soil health and the structural inequities in the food system. Here participants are harvesting lettuce for their lunch before tying ribbons of intention to our tree of hope.

Our dynamic deep dives will be back this fall! The line up is shaping up magically with skill shares to reflect upon our relationship to cloth, color, and land (Natural Dye Plants – September 28 – virtual); to enhance our knowledge about fermentation and add abundance to our pantries (Miso Fermentation – October 12 – in person); and to examine tools and methods for seeding and growing vibrant, viable farms (Farm Business Planning – November 10 – virtual).

Save the dates! Registration opens in late summer!

July’s Work & Learn Days were joyous! We harvested gallons of abundant raspberries and generous bundles of comfrey, lemon balm, echinacea, and anise hyssop. We delighted in a shared aromatherapy experience while garbling the mugwort, lemon balm, mint, and oregano we dried last month, and continued liberating our lowbush blueberries from grasses. We enjoyed delicious food prepared by Ria Kitchen Magician around the pond and picnic tables and made new friends!

JOIN US!!! You’re invited to Soul Fire Farm to learn about some of our farming practices while supporting our food sovereignty work and getting your hands on the land.

• August 9, 2022, 10:00 AM – 3:30 PM EST Registration Link
• August 23, 2022, 10:00 AM – 3:30 PM EST Registration Link

In our last Ask A Sista Farmer, we were joined by the brilliant Nivek Anderson-Brown, homesteader and micro vegetable farmer from Leaf and Bean Farm in Virginia. Listen to that delightful episode here.

Join us on Friday, August 5th, 4:00-4:40 EST for our next episode on Instagram live @soulfirefarm with Dreu VanHoose, cannabis farmer from VanHoose Hemp Co. in Alabama. She’ll be dropping knowledge on how to feed plants with plants, composting, soil preparation and land planning. 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 the young 3 sisters garden reaching for the sky.

Soul Fire Farm will host 4 more tours throughout the 2022 farming season so that our beloved community can experience some of the plants, animals and humans that grow here. 

Next up August 26 & September 16. In-person tickets and virtual tickets available! Learn more and register here.

One of the happenings of the past month was our firewood work party. We’ve felled a number of suitable hardwoods this spring as we prepare the construction site for one of the forthcoming buildings on the campus: the caretaker lodge, known as the “Abode.” Additionally we selectively cut some trees that were becoming hazardous around the campus. Shout out to our friends at the More Trees Arborist collective who did a spectacular job taking down some of the trees that were close to the buildings. Their motto is “tree care for tree lovers,” and that really resonates with us. As with sustainable farming, sometimes the work involves not just nourishing and planting but also cutting and culling. It is our goal to develop a healthy and intentional relationship with death in an attempt to attend to the sustainability of the ecologies around us.

A few weeks ago the site team gathered with Emet, Neshima, and a few wonderful volunteers and friends of the farm: Mike, David, and Bill. Over the course of a morning we bucked a whole bunch of wood and split about a cord of it. There are many tasks that go much quicker with many hands, and preparing firewood is certainly one of them. We are grateful to our community for helping to sustain us!

Our measure of success is not to have arrived at some imagined perfect state, but to strive in the direction of our values, making mistakes, learning, and growing along the way. For example, there was a time when we were expanding our vegetable operation year after year, increasing the number of CSA shares to meet the needs of communities surviving food apartheid. As the annual production intensified, the soil got tired, and so did the farmers. We struggled to maintain the wellbeing of land and people. So, we learned and changed. 

We scaled back the vegetables to a more sustainable level, and increased our perennial fruit and herb operation in a way that suited the land and her stewards. We have also overgrazed our pastures in the past with too many sheep, chickens, and pigs for the capacity of our fragile soils. We needed to humble ourselves, scale back, and reassess what the land actually wanted us to be doing. Every year, we make mistakes, we learn, and we change. How are you leaning into challenges and welcoming necessary shifts?

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.

Chinua Achebe in Things Fall Apart, famously said: “the beautiful ones are not yet born”. I look around now, and all I see is beautiful, multidimensional beings forged of fire and stardust; on a mission led by intuition. 

From the evening of Friday, June 24th through to the end of the day Saturday, and the start of our annual SOULstice party, we celebrated and deepened relationships with some of our alumni. It is with utmost gratitude that we stand with you in this sacred work of liberation, food sovereignty and dismantling systemic racism in our bodies and spaces. This year the 2022 Alumni Reunion was buzzing with the magic you, the Alumni brought. We sang and danced around the fire, we laughed, we gave offerings to the land for blessing us with abundance, we cooked a stone soup meal together and sat side by side one another, rejoicing as we ate of the bounty we each contributed to. Many blessings and thanks to Wendy for waking us up with yoga, movement, and reverence to the land. To Adeola for the offering of healing through play workshop, and to Danie for showing us how to grow the clothing we wear from seed. Together we created containers of love, creativity, expression, learning, sharing and growth. 

We hope to see you at the 2023 Alumni Reunion.
~ Alumni Team

** stone soup: An old take about a community that cooked a large meal together by each adding one ingredient to the pot. They eat and feasted all night long for the bounty before them. 

Check out our hoodies in gold and green! Soul Fire Farm logo on the front and
“All revolution is based on land.”—Malcolm X on the back.

SHOP NOW

Members of the Working Group met over a 6 month period to develop recommendations for fostering diversity and racial equity in agriculture.  For context and a link to the report, click here.  Commissioner Ball recently emailed us to share a few highlights of the report’s impact and we would like to in turn, share some with you. They include: 

• Increased awareness within state government of the distinct challenges faced by New York’s Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) agriculture community.
• Allocations in New York’s FY2023 budget are dedicated to farmers that have been historically under or unresourced (Black and socially and economically disadvantaged), programs that support new farmers, urban farms and community gardens and more.
• New York State Department of Agriculture and Markets created an executive level position to raise and address issues and opportunities in the agency, developed a newsletter of resources for historically underserved and underrepresented farmers, created an email address for the public to communicate directly with the Department (outreach@agriculture.ny.gov)

While there remains much work to do, we want to take a moment to acknowledge these changes and recognize the invaluable efforts of all those who made them possible. 

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!