Wherever we are, in any environment from urban to rural, we are here on earth. We can be comforted by the earth in our sadness, we can be held in our sorrow. I am learning not to underestimate the true possibilities of my own healing when I am in deep relationship with the land. And I am also unlearning the illusion that we can possibly heal our human relationships without healing our relationship to the earth. This healing includes following and supporting indigenous leadership. This includes giving land back. None of us is free until we are all free, until we treat all of our human relationships and our earth mother with the respect and reciprocity that is needed.”
“Let the Earth Love You Back” by Rebekah Sze-Tung Olstad, from The Moon Times
Earth Love You Back” by Rebekah Sze-Tung Olstad, from The Moon Times
Jonah and Kai featuring the roof of our new classroom.
Every year we welcome thousands of people to Soul Fire Farm for our food sovereignty programs and we are excited to share that we are Fortifying Our Foundation so that we can better accommodate our program participants. Since 2010, we have primarily operated out of the living room of a single family farmhouse, and as we grow as an organization we realize we need to upgrade our infrastructure to meet the needs of our community as well improve the well-being of our staff – sharing your living room and bathrooms with thousands of guests every year is a challenge! Additionally, our County Health Department recently notified us that we are no longer operating as a residential site and need to comply with commercial facility guidelines. Therefore, we are raising money to build a Program Center, Guest Lodge, Classroom, and Commercial Drinking Water and Wastewater Systems. All buildings will be energy efficient, accessible, fire-safe, environmentally sustainable, and bring us up to code with our County Health Department.
We invite you to join us in Fortifying Our Foundation at Soul Fire Farm! These campus improvements are quite literally essential for the continued food sovereignty work of the organization. It’s about investment in the long term future of the farm and our community. We are so close to meeting our fundraising goal and we have so much gratitude for those who have already donated to and shared our fundraiser. We are also incredibly grateful for the love and labor of Jonah, Kai, Neshima, Emet, and our contractors, without whom the construction of these spaces would not be possible.
Side view of the new classroom.
Upcoming events and programs:
- The 3D Virtual Skillshare series is a multilingual and multidimensional workshop series designed for BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, people of color) to deepen skills in specific farming and homesteading practices in a culturally relevant, supportive, and joyful environment. We invited expert facilitators to offer workshops throughout the season – from seedkeeping to agroforestry, soil health to honey bees, medicinal herbs to mushrooms. We will premier a 15-minute instructional video showing a hands-on, step-by-step explanation of each topic as part of a 90-minute interactive webinar, a virtual forum for engaged learning and with opportunities for questions and answers. The webinar will be multilingual with simultaneous Spanish interpretation for Spanish speakers. Registration is open!
- Soul Fire Farm’s Liberation on Land Skillshare Video Series features Black, Indigenous, Latinx, and other people of color farmers and land stewards. Paying homage to legacies of African Diasporic and Indigenous wisdom and innovation carried through generations, each “how to” video tutorial demonstrates practical, hands-on skills for making life and livelihood on land, growing food and medicine for our families and communities, and strengthening community food sovereignty. The series is intended to equip all of us with the land-based skills needed to reclaim leadership as gardeners, farmers and food justice organizers in our communities, heal trauma and relationship with earth, and imagine bolder futures. Closed captioning and Spanish-English subtitles available!
- La serie Liberación en la Tierra: Serie de Intercambios por Video de Soul Fire Farm presenta a agricultores y administradores de tierras negras, indígenas, latinx y otras personas de color. Rindiendo homenaje a los legados de la sabiduría e innovación de las personas negras, latinxs, e indígenas llevadas a través de generaciones, cada video tutorial “how to” (“como hacer”) demuestra habilidades prácticas para hacer la vida y el sustento en la tierra, cultivar alimentos y medicinas para nuestras familias y comunidades, y fortalecer la soberanía alimentaria comunitaria. La serie de videos está diseñada para equipar a todxs nosotrxs con las habilidades basadas en la tierra necesarias para recuperar el liderazgo como jardineras, agricultores y organizadores de la justicia alimentaria en nuestras comunidades, sanar el trauma y la relación con la tierra, e imaginar futuros más audaces. Subtítulos tanto en inglés como en español disponibles!
- Uprooting Racism in the Food System is a theory and action training we offer for farming and food justice leaders to uproot systemic racism in our organizations and society. We delve deep into the history and structural realities of racial injustice and develop an understanding of the movement strategies of frontline communities struggling for food sovereignty. We will examine our personal and societal roles of complicity in and resistance to the system. Much of the time will be spent developing tangible action plans – to use our sphere of influence to uproot these oppressions. True to Soul Fire Farm’s values and culture, this work will be rooted in fierce love, courageous self-reflection, and healing connection to land. We are offering four virtual workshops in 2020: in August, October, November, and December.
Announcements:
- Read about our decision to cancel all on-farm programming and in-person speaking events in 2020 in light of the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as Soul Fire Farms’ COVID-19 Response and our COVID-19 Press Release. We also want to remind folks that we are currently closed to the public so please do not visit the farm. Thank you for your understanding!
- We are humbled by the outpouring of support we have received from our community in the last couple months, instilling us with hope for a more just future amidst the grief we feel about the continued legacy of anti-Black police violence in our nation. Read our declaration in defense of Black life and check out the resources and opportunities we compiled for ways to get engaged. We also gave feedback to the Movement for Black Lives on the BREATHE Act, a bill advocating for divesting resources from incarceration and policing, building new approaches to community safety, investing resources to build equitable communities for all, and enhancing the self-determination of all Black communities.
- We collaborated with other BIPOC-led food justice and agriculture organizations across the country to name our concerns to the program officers at WKKF, Rockefeller, and Walmart about a continued pattern of paternalistic practices in philanthropy that reinforce white supremacy and devalue the knowledge, genius, and experience in our communities. You can read the letter here.
- Check out this Food & Land Sovereignty Resource List for COVID-19 compiled by Soul Fire Farm, Black Farmer Fund, and Northeast Farmers of Color with hundreds of resources to support BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and people of color) farmers in navigating the pandemic.
- Many people in our community have been asking for “how to” farming and gardening resources, including videos and online tutorials. We want to share this ever-growing list of BIPOC-led “how to” videos, gardening projects, and online learning resources.
- Ask a Sista Farmer! Are you ready to grow your own food and medicine for self-reliance and community resilience? Every Friday experienced Black womxn farmers answer your call-in questions about gardening, livestock, agroforestry, plant medicine, and food preservation. And, if you have capacity, please donate to the farms of the presenters or a Black farmer near you. Linked here are recordings of episodes one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, and sixteen.
- Farming While Black is available for purchase on Powell Books, an independent bookstore in Portland, and Indie Bound, a website that connects consumers to local, independent bookstores in their area.
- Learn more about our work by checking out our features in Vogue, in Senator Bernie Sanders’ video Why are there So Few Black Farmers in America?, Mother Jones, Zora.Medium, Gastropod, Modern Farmer, the podcast When We Fight We Win, For the Wild, Matador Network, Living on Earth, A Growing Culture Broadcast, Future Harvest, Acres Magazine, Take Away Only, Hudson Valley Magazine, and The Cultivator. We are also excited to announce that we wrote a chapter and poem in the soon-to-be released All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis!
Seed, bed prep, transplant, weed, trellis, irrigate, harvest, repeat: this is what the flow of summer is like on the farm. It is hard work, but it is so abundantly satisfying. As summer progresses the maize surpasses Leah in height, blessing us with beautiful cobs of sweet corn. Justin and Leah have been preserving a lot of our harvest, transforming it into sauerkraut, pesto, and jams we are excited to distribute in our farm shares filled with delicious offerings like garlic scapes, homemade ketchup, and pea shoots. Every week our food reaches about 50+ families per week through our Solidarity Share program: 25 families receive their shares via doorstep delivery and another 25 families pick up their produce from FOCUS Church, the West Hill Refugee Welcome Center, and the Victory Bus Project.
New geese!
Occasionally we also include wonderful homemade lard soap from Justin in our shares, made with recipes he spent years perfecting, as well as eggs from our laying hens. We are expecting our first honey harvest soon and are excited to share that with our community as well. A few weeks ago, Justin processed our first batch of meat chickens with help from Zach of Laughing Earth Farm. In the spirit of reciprocity Justin also helped the folks at Laughing Earth process their own chickens the week prior. We also recently welcomed several African geese and Chinese geese on the farm, where they will cohabit with our hens to protect them from predators, and cats for rodent control.
The original stewards of the land we farm in Grafton, New York are the Stockbridge-Munsee Band of the Mohican Nation, forcibly displaced to a reservation in northern Wisconsin in the 1800s. We have been building a relationship with members of the community over the past several years and want to uplift news from the Arvid E. Miller Memorial Library and Museum, the official repository for the archives of the Stockbridge-Munsee community whose primary goal is to preserve and protect Mohican history and culture. They recently assisted the Greene Land Trust in developing a placard in the Catskills acknowledging Mohican history, with a focus on Mohican women’s leadership. They also host Munsee and Mohican language classes and a weekly and there is a “nice to meet you Monday” where different staff talk about their work. They have a lively cultural affairs page that we encourage you to check out!
Two local community members building a garden through Soul Fire in the City.
Kiani continues to lead our Soul Fire in the City project. We have built over 40 gardens this summer thanks to her leadership and the support of other Soul Fire Farm staff members and volunteers! We are excited to welcome two team members who have worked with us before and are now working with us in deeper ways. Brooke Bridges, who cooks with Ria during our immersion programs and supports our farm team and Soul Fire in the City, is also now supporting us with administrative tasks, which has been a tremendous help. We are also excited to welcome Dayo Marsh, who will also be supporting our alumni support and partnership work. Dayo currently works with Northeast Farmers of Color and has worked with us in the past as a farming immersion facilitator and 1-month farm team support person.
Because of our decision to cancel all on-farm programming and in-person speaking events in 2020 in light of the COVID-19 pandemic, we’ve had to develop new virtual opportunities to engage with our communities. While we were saddened by the fact we were unable to host our annual immersion alumni reunion this year in conjunction with our Summer Soulstice party, we had fun connecting and dancing with some of our alumni virtually! We also recently held a gathering for the folks accepted into our 2020 Farming Immersion programs that we are unable to host this year.
Some other virtual opportunities we are curating include the Liberation on Land Skillshare Video Series, for which we recently released the first four videos of: Honoring the Land, Mushroom Inoculation, No-Till Beds, and Beekeeping. Larisa is producing this series in collaboration with Naima, Dayo, Wendelin Regalado, Emet, Ria, and our friends Taina and Gaetano. Naima has been coordinating our 3D Virtual Skillshare series for BIPOC, the first workshop of which was this past week with Justin and Arif Ullah on beekeeping. And Cheryl has been following up with different organizations interested in our virtual Uprooting Racism in the Food System training.
As so many of us grieve, condemn state-sanctioned violence, and experience the intersection of painful and disproportionate impacts on our communities, we want to uplift stories of hope, resilience, and dreams breathing into being by sharing the incredible work our alumni are doing. Larisa, Dayo, and Lytisha are collaborating with Look Studios NYC to share these inspiring projects on our social media.
Woke Foods is a food service and food justice worker-owned cooperative focused on innovating Dominican and Afro-Caribbean plant-based foods. In response to COVID-19, Woke Foods has been preparing 100 free hot meals for BIPOC living in Upper Manhattan and in the Bronx, prioritizing essential workers, the elderly, and folks being released from prisons. This project is being led by their chef Raina Robinson in partnership with the North Bronx Collective at Hot Bread Kitchen in East Harlem. Amidst all this amazing work they are doing to support their community during these challenging times, Woke Foods has also experienced financial difficulties, such as losing their catering and workshop clients during the pandemic as well as not having the finances to pay for administrative support for the cooperative. They are currently accepting donations for non-food related materials and to pay their team for their labor. You can donate to them on Venmo at @WokeFoods or send a donation here.
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. 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 us!
This month’s newsletter was written by Lytisha Wyatt.