“I dare to be powerful. I use my strength in service to my vision.”
Audre Lorde
In forests, mycelium networks connect trees, transporting sugars, carbon, minerals, and messages between them. Rather than just compete for resources, trees in forests support one another by distributing them. We are inspired by the many examples in the non-human world of beings working cooperatively to ensure their collective survival! Our team is filled with wonderful, talented people who graciously hold down different aspects of our collective food sovereignty work as an organization. We celebrated the gifts we bring forth during our Midsummer Night Staff Soiree filled with delicious food, a camp fire and ritual, and scavenger hunt.
We are also grateful to be immersed in a mycelial network with other friends, farmers, and organizations who support our work. To continue this life-giving work of ending racism and injustice in the food system, we are making vital shifts in our campus infrastructure to improve the well-being of our staff and the hundreds of visitors who participate in our programs yearly, spearheaded primarily by Jonah, our Habitat Builder. 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 also invite you to join us in Fortifying Our Foundation at Soul Fire Farm.
Upcoming events and programs:
- This Saturday, August 29th, we are looking for volunteers to help us with chicken processing! We also have a limited number of other in-person volunteer opportunities available.
- Ask a Sista Farmer Open Call for Co-hosts: Since the beginning of the pandemic we have hosted weekly episodes of Ask a Sista Farmer where every Friday experienced Black womxn farmers answer your call-in questions about gardening, livestock, agroforestry, plant medicine, and food preservation. For Season 2 we are moving the show to the first Fridays of each month at 4pm EST, and we are looking for co-hosts! If you are interested in being one, reach out to us. If you want to view the previous episodes, they are linked here: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, and eighteen.
- 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!
Announcements:
- We are excited to launch our online store! We are selling herbal products, such as teas, salts, baths, and salts, as well as merchandise. We are also selling frozen chicken for pick-up only on Tuesdays between 3-5pm (folks should remain in their car when they arrive at the farm and we will bring their orders out to them). Thank you Cheryl for setting up our store!
- Help inform funding and policy making through the 2020 BIPOC Farmer Survey! This month the 2020 BIPOC Farmer Survey will be going out to our farm family in the Northeast. This survey, developed by Soul Fire Farm, Northeast Farmers of Color Land Trust, and the Black Farmer Fund is designed to gauge the needs and desires of current and aspiring farmers of color regarding land, access, and capacity in the region. As a bonus, three lucky participants who complete the survey before August 31st will also be selected to win a gift box curated by artisans of color in the region!
- We are disheartened by the response of Ogden Publications, publisher of Mother Earth News, when farmers demanded accountability for Joel Salatin, a contracted contributor to the publication, when he wrote an article filled with racist commentary targeting Black and Indigenous farmer Chris Newman of Sylvanaqua Farms. Rather than engage with the concerns brought forth by individuals on social media, Ogden Publications instead deleted their comments, silencing the voices of BIPOC farmers and our allies. Alongside other farmers we are calling upon Ogden Publications to address this incident and hope you will join us by contacting Ogden Publications to urge them to hold Joel Salatin accountable for his statements and commit to anti-racism work within their organization.
- 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 have a lively cultural affairs page that we encourage you to check out, with recent videos on the history of and steps to weave a dreamcatcher, an incredible interview on archival activism, and more!
- Last month we signed onto this Open Letter from BIPOC Leaders in Food & Agriculture to Food Systems Funders, inviting the program officers at W.K. Kellogg Foundation, Rockefeller, and Walmart to discontinue a pattern of paternalistic practices in philanthropy that reinforce white supremacy and devalue the knowledge, genius, and experience in our communities. We are grateful that other foundations, such as the Globetrotter Foundation, the Ceres Trust, the Panta Rhea Foundation, Colibri Giving, Pritzker, and the Surdna Foundation, are also calling upon these foundations to do the same.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- We are excited to announce that Leah Penniman is a candidate for the Pritzker Emerging Environmental Genius Award!
- Learn more about our work by checking out our features in CNN, Wall Street Journal, To the Best of Our Knowledge, Thrillist, The American Ethnologist Society, the Thomas Reuter Society, Food Revolution, Sustainable Food Trust, the MOSES Organic Farming Podcast, Heifer International, Hudson River Flows, Splendid Table, the Global Ganja Report, Antonio Neves, Dr. Maya, The Full Set, Eating Matters, Know Where Your Food Comes From, and the AMC Closing with Toshi Reagon.
Like trees in forests, bees are known for their collaborative nature, embedded in their social hierarchy. Justin recently shared how “it’s inspiring how bees work hard and work together for a goal…. People scatter from a problem, but bees run towards it, helping each other, working together. If you put smoke in there, they all run in and start drinking honey to prepare, they all defend the hive together. No bee runs off to solitary safety waiting for danger to pass.” He shared this powerful insight in regards to the Honeybee 3D he hosted with Arif Ullah a few weeks ago.
In ecology, descriptions of the non-human world are rife with examples of competition and “survival of the fittest” terminology, but nature presents us with many examples of inter- and intra-species cooperation. Many people speak of pecking orders amongst hens, but as long-time stewards of poultry we also witness the ways birds can support one another, such as heeding the call of a rooster or our guard geese when a possible threat lingers nearby. The “Three Sisters” maize, beans, and squash also provides us with another powerful example of mutual support: when planted together, the maize provides a stem for beans to grow upon; the squash, growing along the base of the maize, shades weeds out; and the beans fix nitrogen for the maize and squash.
We’ve enjoyed watching the new 14 beautiful sheep in assorted colors and one goat interact with each other, recently introduced as part of our silvopasture, an indigenous system that integrates nut and fruit trees, forage, and grasses to feed grazing livestock. In All We Can Save, an anthology of essays, art, and poetry co-edited by climate leaders Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and Dr. Katharine Wilkinson, Leah writes about the power of silvopasture systems to trap 42 tons of carbon per acre per year, possible because “pasture stores carbon in the above and below ground biomass of grasses, shrubs, and trees.” We are excited for the release of this book on September 22 that will illuminate the expertise and insights of dozens of womxn leading on climate in the United States and aims to advance a more representative, nuanced, and solution-oriented public conversation on the climate crisis.
Brooke harvesting garlic, some of which we will save for seed as we have since 2007.
Late summer has been filled with tomato pruning and daily harvests, often ending with satisfying dips in the pond. We continue to donate produce to FarmLink, West Hill Refugee Center, and FOCUS churches as well as approximately 25 families as part of our Solidarity Shares program. We also recently began delivering collards and kale to Umana Restaurant, a Black-owned world cuisine spot in Albany. A new value-added item we have been excited to share is sofrito, a heritage salsa of Puerto Rico used as a base for stews and sauces. Our good friend Taina has an amazing song celebrating sofrito that you can check out here!
We finally have our new septic system approved! After more than a year of work, we are assured that we can now go to the bathroom here on the land without causing any problems to the groundwater or ecology through overtaxing the existing residential septic. The entire mound is one acre large and in 2021 it will be covered with lowbush blueberries. Some other exciting news – our board elected Karen Washington as President and Gerald Mitchell as treasurer at their last meeting! After a fruitful summer of constructing gardens with residents and organizations in the Capital Region through Soul Fire in the City, Kiani and the team just finished the last build of the season! We want to issue a special shout out to wendelin regalo for all the amazing language justice work they’ve been doing translating the Liberation on Land video series! Naima has been coordinating filming, scripting, pre- and post-production of the Liberation on Land videos and also filmed and edited the Soul Fire Farm Virtual Tour, which you can now check out!
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.
Radical Magical Brilliance, founded by our alum Gabrilla Ballard, is a wellness project that uses media arts, community building, and health advocacy and education to support the well-being of Black women. They host a weekly podcast that offers illuminating insights, guidance, and inspiration, and they also offer a well-being card deck filled with affirmations to invite and inspire a process of self-inquiry and self-appreciation that can be purchased on their website. We encourage you to check out these offerings, and more, on their website.
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.