Soul Fire Farm: Growing Racial and Eco-Justice
A white woman heads over to a field to watch a black woman as she tills the soil. She wants to ask her some questions about what she’s doing. The white woman has never worked the land. The black woman makes her living coaxing life out of dirt.
The setup feels so … loaded. Filled to bursting with menacing political, cultural, and economic implications. It makes the white woman (me) highly uncomfortable at first, but the black woman (Leah Penniman) is having none of it. Neither is her co-worker, Amani Olugbala.
“We’re here because we need our hardneck garlic in the ground,” Leah explains.
Here, to be precise is Soul Fire. It is a farm, a social cause and a civil rights project, all rolled into one. Leah and her husband, Jonah Vitale-Wolff, bought 72 acres in Grafton in 2006. Grafton is a rural town of about 2,000 residents located about 20 miles east of Albany, north of the center of Rensselaer County. Nestled amid Rensselaer Plateau, much of the land in town can’t be cultivated, though it’s perfect for grazing. Driving on Route 2, drivers zoom pass pocket farms with chickens, pigs, horses, cows.
It’s easy to see how a young couple living in inner-city Albany, raising two young children, Neshima and Emet (now 14 and 12 years old), without access to fresh vegetables but with extensive backgrounds in farming, could become enamored with the notion of creating a place of their own where eco-justice (and fresh vegetables) could thrive.
Leah and Jonah used their personal savings and scraped together loans from family members to purchase the land. On paper, they knew what they were getting into. Leah and Jonah both have backgrounds in farming and organizing: Leah with The Food Project in Boston, in addition to farming initiatives in Massachusetts, Ghana, West Africa and Haiti. Jonah on a variety of family farming projects around the world via WWOOF (World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms), a biodynamic farm in Northern California and a natural building company.
Both the farming and the building skills came in handy for three years while Leah commuted back and forth to her full-time science teaching job in Albany and Jonah worked full-time rehabilitating the soil (heavy clay, degraded down to roughly six inches of topsoil when they arrived, now with triple that) and building their solar-power house (and later a barn and loft apartment program space).
But the reasons Leah and Jonah are there, and the reasons, according to Jonah, 90 other people have signed on to help them put that garlic to bed this fine, crisp morning, run as deep as the bedrock under our feet.
“When Leah and Jonah founded Soul Fire, they were living in a poor, predominantly black neighborhood in Albany,” Amani tells Edible. Amani is Soul Fire’s full-time farm educator (they have a staff of five year-round, with additional people added seasonally). She’s also one of the Capital Region’s most prominent rappers and poets.
“People talk about food deserts, but at Soul Fire, we call it food apartheid. In Albany’s South End, they could get Cheetos and soda for a few bucks, but a carrot? Not a chance.”
No one at Soul Fire is talking in rainbows. So many institutions founded on laudable ideological concepts fail because they are less focused on the reality they’re rooted in than the principles that inspire their work. Soul Fire brings facts, data sets (and perhaps more essentially, solutions) to its revolutionary rhetoric.
“Black people in America are 10 times more likely to die of bad nutrition than violence,” Amani says. “Soul Fire was founded not just because Leah and Jonah wanted a better place with better food for themselves and their children, but because they wanted a better place and better food for their community.”
While they rehabbed their soil, experimenting with sheet mulching and lasagna gardening, their friends and former neighbors in Albany were chomping at the bit to have the opportunity to access farm-fresh food.
The first year, they produced farm shares for 20 families over 20 weeks. (And yes, Leah was still teaching full-time and farming on her “days off.”)
Their business model was radical. Instead of selling their produce at farmers’ markets or having people pick up their goods at the farm (an impossible feat for many of their customers, who are either without transportation or too busy juggling multiple jobs and kids to hit the farm), they deliver them to convenient drop-off points in the neighborhood, and when necessary, deliver the shares door-to-door, throughout Albany and Troy.
Currently, about seven acres of their 72-acre parcel (the rest is dominated by forest) is farmed, producing 80-plus vegetable and fruit varieties (like kale, husk cherries, tomatillos, watermelon radishes). They also have meat and laying chickens. Currently, Soul Fire has more than 80 families on board, all of whom pay on a sliding scale.
“We don’t believe that just wealthy people should have access to good food,” Amani says. “Our CSA is open to all, regardless of ability to pay. We offer solidarity shares or scholarships for immigrants, refugees and folks impacted by state violence. It goes up from there and is priced for folks on food stamps, low-income, medium-income, high-income and folks who want to contribute a bit more to help pay for our solidarity shares.”
Last year, several organizations, including the New York State Health Foundation, the New World Foundation, the Clif Bar Family Foundation and the Claneil Foundation contributed to Soul Fire to help fund their educational initiatives. (Their CSA is self-sustaining.)
Because Soul Fire has become so much more than a veg-delivery service. “From the beginning, Soul Fire was always only partially about growing food,” Amani explains, who found the farm herself through one of their Black and Latinx farming immersion programs. “It was about racial justice and food sovereignty.” (Latinx is subbed for Latina or Latino to make it gender-inclusive, Amani and Leah explain.)
“Less than 1% of the nation’s farmer-owners are black, about 2.5% of them are Latinx, about 14% are women,” Amani says. “But about 85% of the workers on farms are Latinx. White men are the center of the farming story in America. We want to empower women, gender nonbinary people and people of color to take leadership and get access to training. Black folks have a beautiful legacy with the land, but it was essentially erased by 500 years of chattel slavery all over the world. We want people of color to take back that legacy.”
The groundwork for what Soul Fire is doing was laid generations ago by Sojourner Truth, arguably the first black activist who saw the connection between livelihoods, food and social justice. In 1870, she got a meeting with President Ulysses S. Grant at the White House and asked him to give former slaves land grants out West, believing that if they were given a real shot at carving out a life from the land (many of them doing the same work they did as slaves), it would both free them from the public dime and ensure a viable future for themselves and their children. He didn’t bite.
Like Truth, Soul Fire believes that education and opportunity will lead people of color toward the path to true freedom (see sidebar on their programs, below).
“There are legal and structural barriers to access for black and Latinx farmers who want to start their own operations,” Amani says. “Our programs aim to teach people how to overcome or bypass them.”
In addition to purposefully blending and blurring the racial boundaries and class distinctions that the folks at Soul Fire believe degrade our humanity and choke basic civil rights, it is also taking aim at the boundaries of gender.
“About 80% of our full-time and rotating staff members identify as female or gender nonbinary,” Amani says. (“Nonbinary” is a catchall term for people who do not identify as masculine or feminine.) “Every human being’s experience is distinct. Race, gender and class can influence each person’s experience. A white woman who lives in Saratoga Springs will have a very different experience than a black woman living in Albany’s South End. We’re trying to bridge that gap, create a space where we can not only have access to the same basic rights but also create a narrative across the space between us.”
After seven years, Soul Fire is starting to make an impact not just in poor neighborhoods in the Capital District but far beyond. Even the USDA is paying attention, reaching out to Soul Fire recently to find out if they could collaborate on training and scholarship programs to encourage black and Latinx would-be farmers to open their own operations.
Some of the seeds of equality planted by Sojourner Truth more than a century ago are finally coming to fruition, not out West but on a small, hardscrabble plot in New York State. A few new ones have been added to the mix, too. The harvest tastes as sweet as justice.
Inconvenient Truths
All of the data is sourced from the U.S. Census’s most recent numbers.
- The average size of a farm in the U.S. is 418 acres. The average size of a black-operated farm is 104 acres.
- The average value of sales of all farms in the U.S. is $134,807, compared with $21,340 for black-operated farms.
- 57% of all farms have Internet access, versus 34% of black-operated farms.
- The number of black farm operators who are women grew 53% from 2002, outpacing the 29% increase in the number of female operators overall.
- Women comprise 14% of all black principal farm operators.
- Texas has the highest number of black farm operators (6,124), making up 2.5% of all farm operators in the state. In 35 states, blacks comprise less than 1% of all farm operators.
Food Sovereignity Programs
Black and Latinx Farmers Immersion
Participants learn how to plant gardens, prepare raised beds, plant from seed, transplant and harvest, make and use compost, work with micronutrients in the soil, manage pests without chemicals, care for chickens and so much more. BLFI 1.0 is designed for novice and intermediate growers to gain basic skills in regenerative farming and whole foods prep. BLFI 2.0 is for growers with 2000-plus hours of growing experience who want to take farming and food justice to the next level. There are four five-day sessions in the summer. Sliding scale: $100–$1000.
Youth Programs
One-day educational workshops are available for youth and intergenerational groups interested in dismantling oppressive structures in the food system. (Interested parties should contact Soul Fire for dates.) The program will focus on healthy food choices and positive community action. Soul Fire also offers a semester-long curriculum program available for classroom use, which Leah created after studying Mexican farming communities as a Fulbright scholar in 2015. More information is available on Soul Fire’s website.
Activist Retreats & Training Sessions
Soul Fire creates retreat programs for people with a variety of interests, from prison justice to eco-justice. Leah and Amani also run training programs for aspiring black and Latinx activist-farmers, on-farm restorative justice programs as an alternative to incarceration for area teens and racism training sessions for intersectional activists.
Uprooting Racism Immersion
This program involves both theory and action for future farm and food justice leaders who aim to uproot racism in society. Race, gender, ethnicity and class backgrounds will all be up for examination during the daylong program, which occurs twice per year. Sliding scale $100–$750.
Soul Fire | @soulfirefarm
The Food Project | @the_food_object
WWOOF (World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms) | @wwoof
New York State Health Foundation
New World Foundation
Clif Bar Family Foundation
Claneil Foundation
Sojourner Truth
