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“The plant people have taught me to be generous and not be shy about blossoming, that it is our nature. I think when others see us, it can inspire them to open up and blossom too and we can be a field ablaze with dignity and beauty together.” ~ From Brenda Salgado, quoted in Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds by adrienne maree brown
Witnessing Emet blossom into spiritual adulthood has been so inspiring. We celebrated his Bar Mitzvah, a rite of passage ceremony in the Jewish tradition. For the first time he lead the service at his synagogue, read publicly from the Torah, made his own commentary of the text, and donned a tallit, or prayer shawl, his grandmother made for him. We celebrated Emet all weekend with songs, dances, and delicious food. Reaching spiritual adulthood signifies accepting full spiritual and ethical responsibility for oneself and we are excited that Emet reached this important milestone in his life journey. Announcements:
Spring is a time of transition, rebirth, and rejuvenation. The days are becoming warmer and longer with the sun rising earlier and setting later, and summer is almost here. The days have also become greener – the grass is growing faster and the trees have regained their bright foliage. We also keep finding surprises everyday on the land – herbs, berries, tadpoles, and other signs of life. Our seedlings continue to thrive from the love and care of Damaris, our guardian of the greenhouse, and are growing up to become nourishing food through the guidance and wisdom of farm manager Larisa and the incredible work of our farm team – to which we welcomed our newest member, Olivia! We are so excited that our CSA is beginning so that we can share our abundance of food with our community.
Our laying hens are excited about our crops too – in fact, we had been finding them outside of their enclosure snacking on them! People often dismiss chickens as nuisances, but our resident chicken charmer Lytisha rejects that. Instead, she insists that chickens are very attune to their needs and are actually very good at communicating them to us humans – we just need to listen better. In this instance, our hens fleeing the coop was them telling us that they weren’t satisfied with their surroundings, so we met their needs by moving them to more luscious, greener pasture (and we also put up a higher fence!). We moved our first batch of meat birds out to pasture and are now raising our second batch of chicks in our brooder.
What we do at Soul Fire Farm would not be possible if we did not have the infrastructure in place for it. It is the backbone of our operation, and we appreciate Jonah so much for bottom lining the infrastructure projects on the farm! We now have a farm road which has been a blessing for folks on the farm team, and he recently finished the shop roof. Jonah is particularly passionate about creating spaces that facilitate sociality, and we can how that influences how he designs these spaces. We’ve already enjoyed performances, team lunches, and dessert soirees on the new deck he built, and the canopy, a space where program participants can stay, is beautiful. The area around the pond looks fantastic and is becoming a wonderful place to swim and relax as it gets warmer. He is currently working on the timber frame for the porch as well as the bathhouse that will support program participants.
In addition to the almost 200 young chickens we are currently raising we’ve also had a lot of other youth on our farm this month and it’s always a joy to interact with young people. We donated eggs to the Delaware Community School and kindergarten students from the school visited us to bring us one of the baby chicks they hatched. 20 freshman students from Darrow High School camped at our farm and learned about the history of Soul Fire Farm, afro-indigenous farming practices, and land displacement in the midst of weeding, planting, and mulching with us. Harlem Grown, a non-profit in NYC that empowers youth through urban farming education, came to our farm and we had the pleasure of witnessing and facilitating incredibly vulnerable and courageous conversations between the team about their organizational structure while spending time together working on the land. We’ve also welcomed many volunteers during our last two community farm days, including folks from the Hudson Valley Farm Hub, and hosted another successful Lawn to Garden workday in North Albany!
Together with other core members of the Northeast Farmers of Color network, we are working hard to advance our land sovereignty reparations efforts in the northeast. This summer, we are in a deep process of listening, learning, and building relationships with members of northeastern Indigenous communities who are the rightful stewards of these territories. European-descended people currently own between 95-98% of the land in the United States and nearly all of the land in the northeast, no accident of history. We hope to unite people from whom this land was stolen together with those displaced people whose blood has mixed with the land over centuries of forced labor*, toward a common goal of freeing the land from degradation and restoring access to land for our peoples – for farming, for ceremonies, for living in community. Our efforts moving forward need to support, build upon, and complement existing efforts led by Indigenous communities. If you have feedback or suggestions for us, please reply to this email or contact Ulum Ahtohil at 508-322-8277. Free the People! Free the Land! *Paraphrased from the insightful words Baba Ed Whitfield shared with us during last month’s Land Trust Forum at Smith College
Land sovereignty is also a crucial issue for farmers in Puerto Rico. A couple weeks ago Lytisha and Ceci attended the 6th annual Community Food Funders Gathering in NYC. The event concluded with a panel of frontline activists from Puerto Rico who led a powerful discussion about Hurricane Maria and community-led responses to the disaster. They emphasized the ways US colonialism and imperialism have created food apartheid in Puerto Rico and the ways the Jones Act – which makes it so that imports en route to Puerto Rico have to first travel to the United States, increasing cost – hurts Puerto Rico, which is import-dependent for food. Farmers have been historically displaced from the land by US corporations, sparking a desire to create a Puerto Rican land trust, which we talked with Ana Elisa, Jorge, and Isabella from La Finca Conciencia about when they visited us at the farm.
A huge barrier for many people invested in food justice work is lack of access to capital, particularly for people of color for whom discrimination continues to play a role in who gets access to funding. Amani and Leah led a conversation with Community Food Funders in NYC about how philanthropy foundations can commit to making grantmaking procedures more equitable and accountable to communities of color. Organizational structures often also reflect inequity and are complicit in upholding racism in the food system. We hosted our first Uprooting Racism in the Food System Immersion (URFI) workshop this season with almost 40 farming and food justice leaders invested in understanding the intersections between food injustice and racism.
Food sovereignty includes the right to nutritious, culturally relevant foods produced through sustainable farming methods and in just working environments for those growing our food. On May 15th, board member Taina represented Soul Fire Farm at the Farmworker Fair Labor Day in Albany where activists advocated for the passing of the Farmworker Fair Labor Practices Act to ensure that farm workers have access rest days, overtime pay, workers compensation and collective bargaining. You can find out more information on how to be involved in supporting this important piece of legislation here. You can also support La Finca Conciencia, the Center for Political, Educational and Cultural Development, and AgitArte, organizations that are doing incredible grassroots organizing in Puerto Rico in the wake of Hurricane Maria, so that they can sustain their work and their communities. And finally, in recognition of the fact that the food system was built on the stolen land and stolen labor of Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian and other people of color we created the Reparations Map for Black-Indigenous 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! This month’s Love Notes was written by Lytisha Wyatt. |
Emet’s Bar Mitzvah
Our greenhouse
Our hens and rooster exploring new pasture
Emet driving the crawler truck; the beautiful new deck; Jonah looking cool; the pond area
Children from the Delaware Community School
Shoutout to Neshima for this beautiful logo!
Ana Elisa Pérez-Quintero (La Finca Concencia), Giovanni Roberto (The Center for Political, Educational and Cultural Development), Jorge Díaz Ortiz (AgitArte), and Gabriela Alvarez (Liberation Cuisine)
Uprooting Racism in the Food System workshop
Farmworker Fair Labor Day at the State Capitol