“We can — we must — hope for a better world, because a better world IS possible! So, it’s left to us to continue struggling in that same spirit, for a world where poor people, people without a voice, demand and obtain the respect and dignity due to them, where corporations no longer define the limits of our liberty, where they don’t dictate our dreams, fence in our imagination, and block the roads toward our destiny.”
Lucas Benitez, from the Coalition of Immokalee Workers
We were awed by the amount of talent present during our cipher on the last evening of our first ever Spanish immersion. Several people played guitars and sang, folks recited poetry they wrote themselves, and there was so much dancing! This immersion left us feeling energized, inspired, and excited for future collaborations with the Hudson Valley Farm Hub, who helped us design the curriculum for this immersion.
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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We are hiring for a summer 2019 farm apprentice! We are also looking for a Coordinator of the Northeast Farmers of Color Land Trust. Please see the job descriptions and applications here.
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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 also 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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Here is an interview Leah did with the Food Tank.
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Last Community Farm Day of the season is November 10! Sign up here.
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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!
The fall equinox came and with it arrived cool, wet weather. It’s incredible to think that only a couple months ago the sun rose at 5am and set after 8pm; now the sun stays just long enough to light our work days. It’s difficult to not reminisce about warm, sunny days by the pond when our days have been so cold and rainy, but these seasonal shifts hold many lessons for us. In the Mohican oral tradition, as in many other traditions, such as the Taino and Dagara, these life cycles are sacred and respected, and recognizing our connections to these cycles is just one way of honoring them. With colder weather, shorter days, and a myriad of fall allergens floating around, it is imperative to remember to take care of ourselves! Just like the land in the northeast during the latter part of the year, we also need periods of rest and recovery. The increasing amount of darkness during the day is a natural cue and advice for us to slow down.
The farm itself certainly has slowed down – the amount of okra, peppers, and tomatoes we’ve managed to harvest has decreased significantly, and after our first frost this past weekend may cease completely. After a vibrant and busy season, us on farm team – Larisa, Damaris, Lytisha, and Ceci – are excited for this shift. Jonah’s been busy preparing the new cabin, the project from Builders Immersion, for winter; he recently installed windows, which will keep out winter precipitation. During our community workday this past weekend, 70 people volunteered their time to get cold, wet, and muddy with us. What was accomplished in mere hours would have taken us much longer had we had to do some of these tasks on our own. We harvested all our sweet potatoes, maize, parsnips, leeks, and herbs and cleaned and processed onions and garlic. We moved several tarps, removed drip and plastic from beds we are done cultivating, and removed some of the ever-present, implement-impeding rocks that live abundantly in our fields. And in the spirit of “fall cleaning” we raked leaves, organized firewood, and cleaned out our drainage grates.
“We’ve been begging and begging for medical attention, but no one listens.” Linda Lee is one of 2,500 African American, Haitian and Mexican farmworkers who was exposed to high level of pesticides while working near Lake Apopka in Florida. Like many of these farmworkers, she consequently developed a variety of health problems linked to this chemical exposure. During our Spanish immersion a participant shared some of this history with us. It is upsetting, unjust, and exemplary of the lack of protections farmworkers in our nation have. In the United States, most of our food is grown and harvested by 3.5 million farmworkers, 80% of who come from Mexico and Central America. Not only is their labor largely invisibilized, their jobs have one of the highest fatality rates while they have access to little-to-no health insurance and abysmally low pay. Farmworker justice is integral to fighting for food justice and food sovereignty and cannot be left out. For that reason among many we were excited to have hosted our first ever farmers immersion in Spanish. Most of the participants were experienced farmworkers from the Hudson Valley Farm Hub. This immersion particularly challenged us to think about ways to increase the accessibility of our programming – not only in translating things to Spanish, but also how to account for differences in literacy, ability, and age. Together we made salsa verde, explored the medicinal properties of plants, planted more strawberries for next year, and learned about ways to add fertility to the soil with chicken manure, compost, and compost teas. We learned a lot from participants as well – for example, one person had thirteen years of experience working with and processing chickens in Mexico, and we learned so much from her! The discomfort we felt not being able to speak fluent Spanish for a few days pales in comparison to what many immigrants who are not fluent in English experience everyday in the United States – a fact we were reminded of during our Language Justice discussion. In a culture where farmworkers are invisibilized it was beautiful witnessing the raw vulnerability of the participants in a space where they were both seen and heard. Indeed, one person shared that “in 3 days here we learned more about each other than the last 8 years as coworkers on our farm.”
This September we hosted a NEFOC (Northeast Farmers of Color) gathering at Mama Claudia’s beautiful land in New Hampshire. We were joined by about 19 of the neighbors’ turkeys who escaped to join us – clearly they were as excited about hearing our updates as we were. Living in white rural spaces where you face ample discrimination and isolation is incredibly harsh for people of color; we are lucky to have each other’s love and support. We voted to form a hiring committee to coordinate the land trust we are establishing with the goal of reparations and repatriation of land to Indigenous-Black-POC farmers and land stewards in the northeast. As stated in the announcements above, we are looking for a Coordinator of the Northeast Farmers of Color Land Trust! Please see the job description and application here. We need everyone’s help to find the right person(s) for the role, so please consider who in your networks can be invited to apply!
Also in September, Amani had the privilege of representing Soul Fire Farm at the first northeast encounter of the People’s Agroecology Process, a grassroots-led initiative to scale-out agroecology in the United States, Canada and Puerto Rico. According to La Via Campesina, “the origin of agroecology is the accumulated knowledge of rural people, systematized and further developed through a dialogue of different kinds of knowledge: scientific knowledge, knowledge of organizing communities, and the everyday practical knowledge of agroecology and food production.” Agroecology exists as an alternative to our current dominant food system that is rooted in colonial, imperial, and racist violence. This first encounter was hosted by people from the local Nipmuc and Mashpee Wampanoag tribes. “All these different people came who brought to life so much of the work we educate and focus on and organize around,” Amani shared. There were people from as far north as Canada and as far south as Puerto Rico. Amani was personally inspired by the fact that people at the encounter were constantly checking in with farmers from Puerto Rico about the welfare of the island post- Hurricane Maria. Hurricane Maria put agroecology to the test – the farmers that were able to immediately feed people in the aftermath of the storm, when the U.S. government failed to send help to Puerto Rico, were farmers growing food in ways consistent with agroecological principles. Agroecology represents the type of relationship to the land we must work towards to combat the current and future effects of climate change on our communities.
We had many more exciting things happen on and off the farm this past month! Youth from the Troy Jewish Community Religious School came and learned about Jewish agricultural practices, such as pe-ah (setting aside part of the harvest for people without wealth), shmita (letting the land rest and fallow), and berakhot (saying blessings of gratitude before eating harvest and appreciating the abundance). We hosted another Uprooting Racism in the Food System training on the farm, where a participant shared that “[they] feel so grateful to have been welcomed on to the land and in to such a beautiful space where [they were] allowed to be vulnerable and learn and be okay with making mistakes.” Amani gave a lecture at the University of Albany and at SUNY Albany about racism in the food system, Larisa did a training at the Hudson Valley Farm Hub (in Spanish) prior to the Spanish Immersion, and Leah spoke at Bard College’s “Can the Northeast Feed Itself?” Conference.
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. Sonya Joy 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.