Earth ‘n’ Us, in Miami’s Little Haiti, has a plethora of turkeys and other animals running around. Photos: Natasha Bowens

This is the last installment of Natasha Bowens’ Color of Food series for Grist. She will continue to explore agriculture, race, and class on her blog, Brown.Girl.Farming.

I eagerly wandered up and down the streets of Miami’s Little Haiti looking for any sign of a farm. If you’re familiar with Little Haiti — or any neighborhood in Miami, really — you’re probably thinking that a farm is the last thing I was going to find. Then I knocked on the door of a typical Miami home, painted a sandy yellow with a red-tiled roof, walked through the sun room and the kitchen and ended up in a not-so-typical backyard. It was like climbing through the wardrobe into Narnia.

Emus are farmed for their meat — but stay away from the knifelike nail on their toes!Three turkeys were strutting around to Beethoven playing on a stereo, followed by an angry goose with his neck outstretched. Two large emus flashed their long eyelashes as they stared at me, the intruder.

I had been transported to an urban paradise, designed to grow food by mimicking the natural ecologies of south Florida … OK, maybe minus the emu.   

Earth ‘n’ Us is a permaculture farm that has been in this North Miami neighborhood for 33 years. When it began, Little Haiti was one of the poorest areas of the city and well-known for its crime and drug trade. Now Ray, the owner, is  growing and expanding the farm to neighboring lots with help from members of the community.

Ray has already acquired an acre of land behind his house, on which you can find an abundance of fruit trees, like mangoes, avocados, bananas, and papayas, as well as two gardens growing everything from okra to beets and cabbage. The land also supports chickens, ducks, geese, goats, pigs, emus, turkeys, a python, and an iguana. (It’s just not Florida without snakes and lizards.) Tree houses for residents, renters  and WWOOF volunteers overlook the gardens.  

“Ray’s been here for so long, and he created this urban paradise just because he’s that kind of guy. But now he sees the need to expand and educate the kids in the neighborhood, and to produce more food for the community,” Matrice, a WWOOF volunteer who’s been studying permaculture at Earth ‘n’ Us for six months, told me. (Ray and Matrice wished to be known by first name only.)

Earth ‘n’ Us hosts workshops on various topics including permaculture design and home brewing, as well as movie nights and tours for the local kids. Its neighbor, Community Food Works, also offers courses on beekeeping and alternative energy solutions and runs a permaculture certificate program.  

‘Ponics scheme

About 30 minutes north, another urban grower is trying to offer healthy food for the community and provide courses on how people can grow their own food using hydroponics.  

Jessica Padron started the Urban Farmer, a hydronics farm in an old auto shop. Jessica Padron started The Urban Farmer when she had her daughter Bella. “I wasn’t happy about the idea of not knowing for sure if our food was safe,” she told me. “So I researched a way to grow our own food that would require little maintenance and be easy for me as a working mom.”  

The hydroponics farm is built on an industrial site in Pompano Beach that was formerly an auto shop. Padron and her partners had to remove 300 yards of material out of the site to begin constructing the farm. They chose an outdoor hydroponics system because the soil at the site was so contaminated.   

The system includes towers tiered with polystyrene containers that hold coconut husks for the plants to grow in. All that’s needed is a daily feed of water and a 16-nutrient solution, and they are cranking out over 10,000 plants. While I don’t agree with the Styrofoam containers or the cost of starting a hydroponics system (not really practical for your average food-desert resident), I was impressed with the amount of food being produced right there in an old auto yard in South Florida.   

Legacy of injustice

It’s actually fitting that the end of my farming and food justice journey for this season has brought me to Florida. It is where I grew up and is home to my family, and it’s also home to many farmers of color that have emigrated here from the Caribbean and Central and South America.   

Neighborhoods like Little Haiti and Little Havana in Miami are home to many such immigrants, but the rural areas that make up the majority of the state have also drawn large populations of Haitian and Latino immigrants with the promise of work.    

The only problem is that some of the employers in these agricultural areas of Florida apparently think they’re the Spanish colonizers of 1565 … meaning slavery is OK in their book. Over the past decade, 12-plus employers in the state of Florida have been federally prosecuted for the enslavement of over 1,000 farm workers.

The jungle of South FloridaYes, I said enslavement. Workers have been chained and held captive in produce trucks, beaten, and shot, among other atrocities that are reminiscent of this nation’s past.   

Immokalee, Fla., once home to the Calusa and Seminole Native American nations, is now the largest farm-worker community in the state. Immokalee has become infamous for the violation of human rights taking place on the tomato fields in the area, and the Coalition of Immokalee Workers has fought hard and in some cases successfully for improved wages and working conditions for the tomato pickers. [See Grist's coverage here and here.] But farm workers here in Florida, and around the world, have been suffering from these injustices for years, and although some effort has gone into changing that, we still have a long way to go. The Coalition of Immokalee Workers continues to fight for the rights of its majority Latino, Haitian and Mayan Indian farm workers, and continues to investigate slavery in the fields today.    

I just wonder if we will ever get past such blatant disregard for human rights as seen in Immokalee and erase the negative legacy that agriculture has seared into our minds for people of color.   

While this trip has opened my eyes to some incredib
le and inspiring urban farming and food-justice projects being led by brown folks in under-served communities, the reality is that the issues within our food system are rooted in historical racial and economic injustice.

And unless we step together out of the shadow of denial and into the brutal light of honesty, we will only be repeating those patterns, and standing in the way of a truly just and healthy food revolution.   

If you’re a farmer, urban grower, or food activist of color and would be interested in joining a national directory to put farmers of color on the map and strengthen the food justice movement, please leave a comment below or email me.

Exhorticulture: Growing Power’s inspiringly artsy garden in Grant Park.Photos: Natasha Bowens

The Color of Food series is about my experiences searching for black and Latino farmers in the sustainable food movement.

As I glided smoothly above Chicago’s streets on the L and looked out at the crisp city skyline, I wished I were staying in the city longer. But as soon as I stepped off the L and into the 28-degree weather of November, I was glad I was only in Chicago for a few days.

I’d hoped to spend a few months interning for Growing Power Chicago, but due to their extremely busy fall season, they had to postpone the internship program. However, I couldn’t resist stopping in to check out their gardens and visit other farmers of color and food justice organizations in the city.

The Growing Power projects are run by Erika Allen, daughter of Will Allen, CEO of the Milwaukee-based organization. (See Grist’s interview with this urban-farming official “genius.”) The projects focus on food justice and youth education in Chicago’s Southside as well as other parts of the city.

One of the gardens sits right in the middle of the city in Grant Park and is an impressive display of the aesthetic possibilities of a vegetable garden. The 20,000-square-foot garden (pictured above) is a collaboration with the Chicago Park District and Moore Landscapes, and is named “Art on the Farm.” Its carefully designed vegetable beds complement the stunning view of the city skyline and Lake Michigan, and the 150 heirloom varieties of vegetables grown there help feed Chicago. It also serves as a space for youth education and job training.

The thing that stood out to me about the Growing Power gardens was that they are completely weed free! Since I’ve been spending much of my time on farms this summer endlessly pulling weeds, I was pretty fascinated by this. Apparently weed-free gardens are easier when you start with super-nutrient-rich soil, which Growing Power creates using vermicompost, that is free of unwanted seeds from the beginning. Simply said: worm poo = no weeds.

My Chicago travels also brought me to Growing Home, a unique urban farm organization that is working to grow healthy food for the city while empowering formerly incarcerated residents in the Southside of Chicago by providing paid job training on the farm. (See Grist’s previous coverage in the Breaking Concrete series.)

“My grandma had a garden in her backyard, but she didn’t do it for fun; she did it because she had to. Growing was her empowerment.”

I showed up to the farm in the Southside neighborhood of Englewood during a community outreach event. They were screening the documentary film The Garden and hosting a nutritional cooking workshop, where I learned to make a raw apple pie. Unfortunately, Growing Home seems to suffer from one of the same challenges that many nonprofit organizations do: successful outreach. Though the event was sparsely attended, the staff was still full of energy and passion for their work.

Seneca Kern, the community outreach coordinator, said his biggest challenge was breaking through the perception that food is not important. As a society, “we’ve trivialized food,” said Kern. “We think our whole sustenance should come from fake food that tastes good. We have to give it more importance than that.”

Kern spoke about how Growing Home is trying to change that perception with their work in the community, not only with the job trainees, but with the local youth. Some of the challenges they face in doing that work come from within.

“In under-served communities there is often an undercurrent that things are owed to us. In a way they definitely are, but we owe some things to ourselves,” said Kern. “When I talk about farming with [black or African American] youth, slavery comes up in the first 20 minutes, but the only reason I know anything about agriculture is because of my grandma. She had a garden in her backyard, but she didn’t do it for fun; she did it because she had to. Growing was her empowerment.”

Chicago’s Growing Home fields protected for winter.Tim Murakami, Growing Home’s Urban Farms Manager, gave me a tour of the half-acre site, which consists mainly of three large hoop houses in which they grow salad greens and other vegetables for market. They also have a large farm outside the city, in Marseilles, that brings in more vegetables for market and serves as an additional farm-training space for the trainees.

“Our biggest market is the Green City Market in Lincoln Park on Saturdays, but we also have a small market here in Englewood,” Murakami told me. Englewood, famous for its murder history, still has one of the highest crime rates in the country. At its inception, Growing Home was working with the neighborhood’s homeless, providing paid work and job training. Later they began working with local residents who’ve struggled with substance abuse or criminal records as well.

The trainees work on the farm as well as get class time. When I asked Murakami if he thought the program was successful, he said it was definitely an uphill battle but that there were some special successes.

Last year, even in this down economy, “there were people that stood out and got jobs,” he said. “We were a starting point for them. Imagine, a 40-year-old woman who has never had a job before gets a job … all because of our program here on a farm in Englewood.”

I can imagine that, now, and I was happy to see another path to food justice that I hadn’t before considered.

Check out some of the other great urban farm organizations in ChiTown:

• City Farm Chicago
• Green Youth Farm, project of the Chicago Botanical Garden
• Roots & Rays Garden, located in Pilsen, a majority Latino neighborhood
• Xochiquetzal Peace Garden, Pilsen
• Kilbourn Park Organic Greenhouse and Community Garden
• Dunne Tech/Southside Educational Farm

Attendees at the Black Farmers ConferencePhotos: Natasha Bowens

The Color of Food series is about my experiences searching for black and Latino farmers in the sustainable food movement.

On the same day black farmers gathered in Brooklyn for the first annual Black Farmers Conference, the Senate finally voted to award $4.5 billion in damages to African American and Native American farmers for discrimination. The long-awaited settlement funding — three decades in the making — was an outgrowth of the Pigford vs. Glickman class action suit over how processing times for loans to black farmers from a long-ago U.S. subsidy program had far exceeded those for white farmers.

Nice coincidence. But as attendees of this conference know, there’s still a long road ahead to end discrimination, and to fight for land and the right to grow healthy food.

The day kicked off at 8:30 a.m. in the Student Center of Brooklyn College, with black farmers from the South, urban growers from the North, and the food activists from all over signing in, checking their coats and snacking on locally grown apples while waiting for the program to begin. Most are used to being one of the 15 or so people of color at the typical 1,000-person farming conference, so it was empowering to be surrounded by more than 500 others, ready to discuss issues pertinent to our community.

Cameal, youth intern from ENYFarms, gives thank-you speech for award as Will Allen and others look on.The energy in the room was thick. Two of the most prominent black leaders in the food movement, Karen Washington of New York City (who I mentioned in my piece about NYC’s food justice movement) and Will Allen of Growing Power in Milwaukee, Wisc. opened the conference.

Allen comes from a long line of farmers, with over 400 years of farming in his family since sharecropping days. He left his career as an NBA player to farm again. (Read Grist’s 2009 interview with Allen.)

“Many of us in this room have these roots,” Allen said, “and we need to pass them on.”

When Allen came up to the podium, the crowd gave him a standing ovation and began chanting his name. Which was maybe more suited for a basketball arena than a farmers conference, but it was clear that everyone in the room respected what Allen has done for the movement, including me: I’ve looked up to the work of Growing Power since I began immersing myself in sustainable urban agriculture.

Allen gave a presentation on Growing Power’s history, current productions, and future plans. The only organization of its kind led by a black man, Growing Power has 52 employees, 39 goats, 500 hens, and 19 beehives. And that’s just a tiny portion of the work they do. I was blown away by the sheer scale of the farms’ production and the program’s projects, including their enormous composting facilities and innovative aquaculture centers. Allen spends much of his time traveling around the country, as well as internationally to places like Kenya or the Ukraine, to help other urban growers set up shop and begin training future urban farmers through their Regional Outreach Training Center program.

Allen spoke about the harsh reality he sees every day, with farms shutting down due to lack of funding or loss of land. “It’s one thing to be at conferences and doing assessments,” he said. “Now it’s time to go into action.”

After Allen, the high school interns from East New York Farms! in Brooklyn, where I’d previously volunteered for two months, took the podium to receive their George Washington Carver Award. (Other awards were presented to People’s Grocery for their food justice work in Oakland, Calif. and to Afrikan Zion Organic Roots Farm in Vermont for their work with such NYC neighborhoods as Bushwick, Harlem, and Bedford Stuyvesant.)

“It’s inspiring to be here and see that we have people to look up to,” said Cameal, a 16-year-old intern. “In my three years [doing this work] I went from learning the ropes to teaching the ropes — so, thank you.”

There were multiple breakout sessions to choose from. I checked out “Reclaiming and Reframing Black Farmers’ History in the U.S.” with cultural anthropologist Dr. Gail Myers, who spoke about how Africans and African practices survived on slave plantations and served as the foundation of much of America’s first agricultural successes, like the early rice economy in South Carolina. I also attended “The People’s Struggle for Food Sovereignty: From Local to Global,” and heard from members of La Via Campesina and The National Family Farm Coalition, represented by Ben Burkett, a black farmer from south Mississippi.

The afternoon panel on the Pigford case against the USDA, however, was by far the most powerful portion of the day. The statistics highlighting the disparities in wealth, land tenure, and farm sales between white farmers and black farmers (according to Dr. Spencer Wood, in 1992 all farm sales declined by 12 percent, but black farm sales declined by 46 percent) made the white people in the room gasp and the black people nod with a tired affirmation of old news.

Gary Grant, president of the Black Farmers & Agriculturists Association, was the one to point out that on this very day the Pigford funding had finally been passed through the Senate, but that we still have a long way to go to end discrimination for black farmers.

“You can talk about urban gardening and food justice all you want, but it’s not going to happen if the USDA is supposed to be the People’s Department [which is what Abraham Lincoln called it]. We have to take the department back for the people,” Grant said, with loud support from all of us in the room.

Grant spoke about his personal struggle with his family’s land, as well as how this settlement money for black farmers will now be reported to the IRS, so that the farmers who were discriminated against by the government will now have to pay taxes to the government on the money they were given as a “sorry” for that discrimination. Tell me how that makes any sense?

He also spoke to those of us who don’t live in the South about how alive racism still is there, especially for farmers. He painted a clear picture of how some of these regional USDA offices have Confederate flags and lynch nooses hanging on their walls. That sends an undeniable message to any black farmer walking in the door asking about why their loan is delayed. He also noted how during a black farmers event this past summer in Tillery, N.C., crop dusters buzzing overhead disrupted the event all day long.

“Racism will not end in this country u
ntil black farmers are healed,” said Grant.

Photos: Natasha Bowens

The Color of Food series is about my experiences searching for black and Latino farmers in the sustainable food movement.

From what I’d been hearing about Detroit all year, when my train rolled into the station I was expecting to walk out onto a scene from I Am Legend.

However, I quickly discovered that the grapevine had given me nothing but over-exaggerated rumors.

Of course there are parts of the city that have seen their fair share of neglect, but this city, in my opinion, is anything but abandoned. I think what you see in Detroit depends on the way you look at it. I’m not talking about a “make lemonade out of lemons” kind of perspective, I’m talking about really lifting up the skin of Detroit and seeing the flow of radical action and creative energy keeping it alive.

Inner conflict

On my second day in the city I got to tap into that energy firsthand. I was invited to attend a discussion on dismantling racism in the food system by a group some consider to be radical, but I consider to be a strong inspiration.

Throughout my journey I have found that white folks still fill most of the paid jobs at many food justice organizations and even urban farms that promote and support farmers of color. What does that matter? Some say it doesn’t.

The Detroit Black Community Food Security Network (DBCFSN) sprouted up in 2006 out of the need to address food insecurity in Detroit’s Black community and ensure that the majority African-American population was represented in the leadership of efforts to foster food justice and food security. Discussions about the Detroit food system and its long history of racism had been circulating among this group and other food activists, such as Lisa Richter of Earthworks Urban Farm, for years; and from those discussions, the monthly Undoing Racism in the Detroit Food System meetings began.

Many of the participants in the discussion were white and female, which parallels the majority demographic in the food movement. So I was instantly impressed with how they were handling the complex task of discussing our systemically racist agricultural history and unjust food-access system while staring the blunt truth of who dominates the jobs in this movement in the face.

Throughout my journey I have found that white folks still fill most of the paid jobs at many food justice organizations and even urban farms that promote and support farmers of color. What does that matter? Some say it doesn’t, as long as the intention to get the work done is there. Others argue that the black community should be leading the fight. I stand somewhere in the middle. (Go figure.)

As I was sitting in the Undoing Racism meeting in Detroit, I couldn’t help but feel that very issue lingering around the room and within myself. As someone who hopes to inspire more young brown people to engage in agriculture and to work toward just food systems in inner-city areas — but who was raised in the suburbs by a white mother — I sometimes have this nagging feeling that I am not the one should be pursuing such work. I wondered if the white activists and farmers in the room felt the same way.

Charity Hicks, one of the leaders of DBCFSN, raised the issue of white or upper-class privilege when she heard my story of being able to quit my job and travel the country on this farming journey. Her point was to make people in the room aware of the fact that most of the communities feeling the impact of our broken food system don’t have the same privilege to do what I, and others like me, are doing.

But while I agree that participants of the progressive food movement need to recognize and be aware of their privileges and differences when they enter a disadvantaged community to work, I also don’t think the answer is to split the movement and make white or “privileged” farmers and activists feel their help is unwanted by the minority and low-income communities they are working in.

That’s why I think we can all learn from the Undoing Racism in the Detroit Food System group, because they’re raising awareness about these and other race issues within the movement and are working together to break them down.

Composting community

Detroit’s food activists and farmers really showed me how radical, creative collaboration can accomplish big things. They’re determined to be self-sufficient and take community issues into their own hands.

For example, a year ago the DBCFSN took part in starting the city’s first Food Policy Council, which is now in the midst of planning a local-food summit for Spring 2011. And on a super grassroots level, some local residents, John Koller and Hannah Lewis, started hosting Soup at Spaulding, a gathering where community members pay $5 for a soup dinner made by Hannah and listen to proposed projects in the community (such as building a greenhouse, supporting local artists, or funding a neighbor to start a pickling business) and then vote on their favorite. The week’s winning project gets the proceeds of the dinner. This is the kind of community-driven action we need more of.

Others I’m less sure about. There’s a lot of media buzz about Hantz Farms, a 1,000-acre urban farm proposed for Detroit — but who will control all that food production? Likewise, the well-funded nonprofit Urban Farming has a mission to end hunger by planting gardens, but why then are so many of their gardens sitting empty?

Greg Willerer and Olivia Hubert of Brother Nature Produce.I was lucky enough to stay with a truly community-minded radical on his backyard farm near downtown Detroit. Greg Willerer and his fiance, Olivia Hubert, run Brother Nature Produce, a for-profit market-farm/business that grows and sells its main crop of salad greens at the Wayne State Farmer’s Market and the historic Eastern Market. [Tom Philpott also wrote about Brother Nature and the Detroit urban farming scene for Grist's Feeding the City series.]

Like many farmers these days, that’s not all they do; they also partner with another local farmer to run the city’s only Community Supported Agriculture program, and they’re in the midst of planning a flower farm and a large-scale compost operation for next season.

“I’m all about supporting other farmers in Detroit,” says Greg, “and this compost operation could supply and outfit the next sets of market gardens and farms in the city.”

Greg, like many other Detroit entrepreneurs, dreams big. “Backyard gardening is great, but its too safe,” he says. “If we’re goi
ng to change our food system we have to go bigger. [In Detroit] we need to decolonize ourselves from the suburbs and produce food on our own. And to do that, we need to be curing our own compost. The hardest part of urban farming is getting compost; it’s expensive and you have to pay a delivery fee to get it trucked in. So this [compost project] would essentially take care of the hardest part of farming in the city. And since we have an abundance of garbage and an abundance of land, along with this horrible economic situation, it’d be stupid not to do it ourselves.”

Helping Greg turn the compost.During the two weeks I spent on Greg & Olivia’s farm, our work consisted of preparing the compost windrows on a vacant lot extending off their land. The key to good compost is having the right proportion of browns and greens, and Greg works with the local brewery and landscape companies to get vital browns: grain and dead leaves.

As we worked one cold autumn morning, with the smell of cooking compost and the sound of the wild pheasants that have begun to populate the sparse neighborhood there, I was reminded why — along with addressing food’s social justice issues — I love this work: getting that raw connection with nature, even in the middle of a post-industrial city.

Other inspiring projects in Detroit:

Grown in Detroit
Garden Resource Program
Catherine Ferguson Academy
D-town Farm
Honey Bee Market La Colmena, a Latino family-run grocery store
Detroit People’s Movement Assembly, a grassroots movement for the vision of Detroit
Georgia Street Community Garden
Vandalia Gardens
Green Corps, by the Greening of Detroit
ROC United, a campaign for restaurant justice
Ujamaa Food Co-op
Brightmore Garden

Good neighbors: East New York Farms! manager David and Afroza, an intern.Photos: Hugues Anhes

The Color of Food series is about my experiences searching for black and Latino farmers in the sustainable food movement.

I knew I was far from the apple orchards of West Virginia (where my farming journey began) when I found myself smack in the middle of the Big Apple, sitting on the subway between a man holding a live turtle in a five-gallon bucket and a man preaching the words of Ras Tafari to no one.

This, I thought, can only happen in New York City.

I don’t fit in either with all the suits and ties making their evening commute home; I sit on the train in dirt-caked jeans with carrot tops and basil hanging out of my backpack. In the city where anything goes, even I get some crazy looks. I just shrug and smile. It’s official now, I feel like a city farmer.   

Eating their words

The first thing I discovered is that the food movement in New York is not only alive and kicking, but very well-connected. Everyone I met referred me to the leading food justice organization, Just Food, which is launching a Farm School this year to train aspiring urban farmers, educators, and food justice leaders. They also said I should meet Karen Washington, a Just Food board member and lifelong Bronx resident who’s been working in the movement for decades; she’s also the president of the New York City Community Garden Coalition.

I was lucky enough to hear Karen speak at a couple of the many events I’ve attended since arriving. One such gathering was the New School’s Living Concrete/Carrot City series, discussing design and planning for urban farms of the future, where I also met Dennis Darryck, who started a farmshare project for residents of the South Bronx and Harlem. Karen and Dennis talked about the importance of this work in low-income communities, and they stressed the goal of getting New York’s 1.4 million food-insecure residents off WIC, SNAP, and other government-funded food programs and into jobs and ways to own their food sources.

“There are only 50 black farmers in New York State,” said Karen. “We need to change that.”

I also attended the Harlem Harvest Festival and Food Summit, organized by Harlem4. I was completely inspired by the Food Justice panel discussion, which featured Asantewaa Harris from the Community Vision Council. CVC is heavily involved in saving black farmers and is organizing the very first Black Farmers and Urban Gardeners Conference here in Brooklyn, which will feature keynote speaker Will Allen from Growing Power, among others.

When I’m not farming or going to panel discussions, I’ve been checking out farmers markets and other farms. I have discovered some great farms and organizations, such as Tagwa Community Farm in the Bronx, run by Abu Talib (pictured in the New York Magazine article “What an Urban Farmer Looks Like” as the only person of color); the Brooklyn Rescue Mission, which has a farm in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Bed-Stuy; and La Finca del Sur, which is a small farm, led by women of color, between the highway, train tracks and the projects in the South Bronx.  

After meeting so many inspirational activists and gardeners, I felt like I could hardly keep up. The presence and empowerment of blacks and Latinos in the urban farming movement in NYC seemed solid.

The second thing I have discovered, however, is that not everything is how it seems.  

Value-added tactics

Raking it all in: Getting my hands dirty.

Don’t hat me for having fun! At the Claymont Community farm in West Virginia.

I’m stuck on this concept of blending contrasts. It may have to do with being the only brown girl I know interested in farming (although this really shouldn’t be a contrast at all); or maybe it has to do with going from D.C. political advocate to farmer-girl overnight.

Either way, blending things that aren’t expected to go together is my thing, always has been. After all, I’m a girl born of blended love: young hazel-eyed Catholic girl from Texas meets aspiring Black Panther from the dirty South. Their eyes lock in a club in L.A.The rest is history — out pops me.

I was always blending contrasts throughout my childhood without knowing it. I was just being myself. I was the tomboy who dreamed of romance; the shy girl who loved the theatre spotlight; the only girl of color for miles who not only listened to country music, but danced to it. And nothing’s changed. Now I’m the advertising grad who despises consumerism; the advocate who hates public speaking; and the brown girl who wants to farm … in the middle of the city much less.

So, this summer I said goodbye to Washington, D.C., a job, a sweet house, great people, and a guy to transplant myself onto an organic farm and dig barefoot in the mud.

Why? Well, the mud splattering was not the main objective, although it was a fun perk. Nor was the prospect of settling down on an idyllic farm in the countryside.

It was about finally diving headfirst into my passion, and confronting myself and the rest of the food movement with the issue of race and class while doing so.

I am into food. Not like a foodie into food, but like a farmer into food. I spend my weekends working at farmers markets, volunteering with local neighborhood farms and youth gardens, and trying to make things grow in the backyard garden I planted with my housemates. All I seem to read about is soil microbes, plant identification, and statistics on our pesticide-ridden food industry. I plan my food shopping around where and when I can get the most local food, and I’ve become obsessed with experimenting in the kitchen to have the least amount of processed food possible. All the while I constantly think about how much harder that all would be if I lived in southeast D.C. as opposed to northwest, and maybe earned below the poverty line and had kids to raise.  

Over the past three years I’ve been organizing and advocating on progressive campaigns for environmental issues, health care, and social justice. I realized that my activism on these issues and my passion for food and ag intersected perfectly and even had a name: food justice. I guess I’m now a “food activist.”

I want to learn how to grow it more efficiently and more harmoniously with our planet. I want to make sure it’s healthy for my body and my environment. I want to make sure it gets to those in need of it. Some of my friends don’t understand why and how farming is calling to me, but it is — loud and clear.

So I’ve packed up all my things and set off on the first step of this food journey: Learn how to grow it.

I’m really not too different from many other young people picking up the pitchfork and joining the ranks of the rapidly growing food movement … except that I seem to be the only person of color I know doing so. In fact, in my exploration from afar of the farming movement, I found very few farms and food-justice organizations being run by blacks or Latinos. Race has long been a hot topic in the environmental movement, but it saddened me to realize that, for the most part, this exciting food movement that I so badly want to be a part of is not even being led by the communities that most need it to take root.

It could even be said that farming and the black community embody some sort of contrast. If you think about the history of agriculture in our country, you can see how it has come to this. America’s agriculture industry was made on the backs of black slaves, starting with the cotton fields in the South and continuing through the long history of black families as sharecroppers after emancipation. Thus agriculture can still be viewed as disempowering if you’re black.

I feel that can no longer be so. I have to go out and dig deeper for minority-led farms firsthand. And if I come up shorthanded, I hope to help blend that contrast up and turn it around, because we need to be viewing this agriculture movement as an empowering act for our minority communities, especially our youth.

So I am riding off into the sunset, with my dusty backpack, my journal, and bug spray in hand, to apprentice, volunteer, and WWOOF my way around organic and urban farms across the country. I’m particularly seeking out those led by black and Latino farmers. My trip has begun on a rural farm in West Virginia, far from the hungry streets of some D.C. communities, but it will ultimately focus on farm and food-justice organizations in cities like Brooklyn, Detroit, Oakland, and Chicago — and any cities you may suggest!

I’m on a mission to continue blending contrasts in the hopes of making something beautiful. Add farm. Add yours truly. Press blend.