“I was the conductor of the Underground Railroad for eight years, and I can say what most conductors can’t say — I never ran my train off the track and I never lost a passenger.”
Harriet Tubman
Some of the contagious joy from Sunday, captured in this photo (one of many) by Neshima. We hosted Harriet’s Apothecary Healing Village for the fourth year (!), and it was a beautiful, sunny day of of healing, love, community, and self-care rooted in justice and liberation.
Announcements:
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Farming While Black is available for pre-order on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Indie Bound! Reserve your practical guide to liberation on land today!
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Additionally, this winter and spring we will be traversing the continent to discuss African Diasporic wisdom in farming and food sovereignty as part of our Farming While Black book tour! Invite us to your community by completely this booking form.
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Sign up to buy our delicious, pasture-raised chicken. In an effort to make our chicken more financial accessible we are also asking for donations so we can provide sustainable, pasture-raised chickens to the people in our Albany/Troy community, which is also listed as an option on this form.
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This year at least 14 refugee and immigrant families will receive FREE vegetable delivery with your support. Please pitch in for a Solidarity Share today.
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We are looking for self-directed volunteers to come weed on Thursdays between 10am and 12pm, and/or folks who can operate a weedwacker. Sign up for time slots here. Please do not come to the farm without signing up first.
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Leah will be a keynote speaker at the Black Farmers and Urban Gardeners Conference. The conference will be from October 19th to the 21st in Durham, NC.
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Leah will be speaking at NESAWG’s conference about different strategies to transform our food system based in her experiences with Soul Fire Farm on October 26th.
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Leah will be speaking with Ed Whitfield at the 38th Annual E. F. Schumacher Lectures, the theme of which is “Towards a New Reconstruction: Land, Racism, and Economic Emancipation.” The event will also be celebrating the 150th anniversary of the birth of W. E. B. Du Bois! The talks will take place on Saturday, October 27th from 1:00pm to 5:00pm at Saint James Place in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. Tickets can be purchased here.
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We’re hosting an Uprooting Racism in the Food System in DC in collaboration with Common Good City Farm on November 16th. Tickets can be purchased here.
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Check out this article on Modern Farmer about the important of black land, this WhyHunger article on reparations, and this interview with Leah at the Tilth.
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The USFSA has just launched a new publication compiling stories and histories collected through interviews with fifteen members of the Alliance since its formation in 2010. “Our History” provides readers with an understanding of how the coalition has evolved over the years, where it’s headed in the future and how to get involved. Through its overview of the USFSA’s past, present and future, “Our History” is an important introduction to food sovereignty in the U.S. Read more on their blog. And don’t forget to register for the IV National Assembly of the US Food Sovereignty Alliance, Oct 12 – 15.
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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 turnaround 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!
This summer we hosted our first very Builders Immersion, A hands on training for activists to level up our carpentry and building skills in a space that celebrates the liberation of people of color and LQBTQIA communities. Jonah, our resident Habitat Builder, facilitated the program alongside Sandy Nurse, an incredibly gifted carpenter, community organizer, and social justice activist based in Brooklyn. Sandy and Jonah had different teaching and building styles that complemented each other incredibly well, and many expressed deep gratitude at having the unique opportunity to learn building from a black woman. Sandy was awed by how quickly everyone picked up the new and often complex vocabulary and concepts, and continues to be inspired by the ways black, brown, and native folks make space for each other in ways that are supportive of learning and growing. For Jonah, doing physically intensive work with others is an act of love and a way to connect with people. Even after the full week of 12-14 hour days, in addition to the previous week of excavation where he worked everyday for 16+ hours, he still ended Builders Immersion feeling incredibly energized. It was truly inspiring to witness folks go from approaching a task – like operating a circular saw or climb a tall ladder – with hesitation to working with confidence at the week progressed. We are excited to begin offering Builders Immersions on a regular basis! What that will look like will unfold over the years, but we desire to do more beginners trainings as well as advanced ones that even delve into topics like natural building.
The autumnal equinox is this weekend, marking the transition to days growing shorter, nights growing longer, and winter approaching us in the northern hemisphere. We’re starting to see the shift in green to reds, oranges, and yellows as the trees’ leaves explode in vibrant color, and mornings and evenings are becoming cooler and crisper. Fall offers many questions (and metaphors) we can reflect on: how was your growing season? What crops thrived and what didn’t? What weeds or pests threatened your growth? What are things you can do in subsequent seasons to deter them? How are you preparing the land and yourself for winter? We are already preparing for the end of the season on the farm. Our greenhouse is housing more curing onions, winter squashes, and pumpkins than growing seedlings. Ceci, our resident SeedStorian/Seed Steward has been preparing the saved seeds of Moyamensing tomatoes, Eritrean basil, ají dulce, calendula, bee balm, and salvia for TrueLove Seeds. Lytisha moved our last batch of meat chickens to pasture last week. Damaris and Larisa have been prepping the beds we’re done cultivating for the season for cover cropping. And on our September Community Farm Day volunteers sowed oats and peas as a cover crop, harvested and preserved basil, dug the remaining potatoes in our fields (600 pounds!), cleaned and sorted garlic for seed, cut and stacked firewood, weeded our beds and elderberries in the orchard, and harvested beets.
Hard work can be incredibly nourishing, but we also have to know when to take a step back to see what our minds, bodies, and spirits need. Too often in liberation work we forget about taking care of ourselves, but we can’t engage in this work fully unless our physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual needs are met. Unfortunately resources for health and healing are often inaccessible to low-income people of color so taking care of ourselves can seem impossible. The intention of Harriet’s Apothecary, which we hosted last Sunday with Beatbox Botanicals, is to continue the rich healing legacy of abolitionist, community nurse and herbalist Harriet Tubman. Sunday was a celebration of the wisdom and healing abilities of ourselves, our communities, and ancestors – human and plant. The wellness industrial complex has misled us into forgetting that we do, in fact, already know so much about our bodies and our well-being and therefore already hold many of the tools to heal ourselves! A theme during the healing village was to remember to trust our intuition and recognize the ways our bodies communicate with us. We explored this through self-directed and group divination, meditation, massage, yoga, drumming, dancing, medicine making, and spiritual cleanses.
We’ve had some more exciting things happening both on and off the farm. In August, over a Soul Fire Farm grown meal, we met with folks from Race Forward and the I-Collective about a coordinated reparations strategy to get land and resources returned to Black-Indigenous farmers in our region and came up with some projects that we can collaborate on. (Email us at love@soulfirefarm.org about our fall gatherings of the Northeast Farmers of Color where these conversations will continue). We welcomed students from Williams College, where we spent time together in our medicinal orchard and cleaned onions for our CSA. Students from the Lighthouse Holyoke youth group had the honor of harvesting maize from our sacred milpa, our tribute to the original indigenous stewards of this land. Leah hosted the Hudson Valley Farmlink program, where participants explored the ways in which racism permeates our food system and reflected on ways they perpetuate food system oppression and can work to dismantle it. Amani joined Shirley Sherrod from the Southwest Georgia Project, Isa Mujahid from CT-CORE, and Rachel Sayet from the Mohegan Tribe on a panel moderated by Savi Horne from the Land Loss Prevention Project to explore different traditions around, perspectives about, and relationships to land, power dynamics in food and agriculture that persist today, and how our communities are working to reclaim our power through the land.
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. Catatumbo Coop Farm 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!
Additionally, at Soul Fire Farm we are committed to increasing the access people affected by food apartheid have to fresh, nutritious food as one way we combat oppression in the food system. Most of the meat accessible to low-income people and people of color is industrial meat – meat coming from animals raised in concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) where they are mistreated and injected with antibiotics and hormones. Industrial meat production also often happens in proximity to low-income black and brown communities, where air and water contamination results in health problems like respiratory illness, asthma, and lung inflammation. We renounce these practices and the ways they harm our communities and the land and instead raise chickens in a way that is more in alignment with what our ancestors practiced. Because of the sustainable practices we employ, such as raising chickens outside on spacious pasture, investing in fencing to protect them, and feeding them a locally-sourced non-GMO diet our meat costs more than meat produced inhumanly on factory farms from animals fed cheap, government-subsidized grains. We want to make our chicken accessible, so we are asking for donations so we can provide sustainable, pasture-raised chickens to the people in our Albany/Troy community.
This month’s Love Notes was written by Lytisha Wyatt.