How Soul Fire Farm Is Supporting Black Farmers On The Land And On The Hill

As the $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief packages inches closer to approval and implementation, a $5 billion provision just might spark a revolution for farmers of color and signal a shift in American food culture and food justice. Tucked into the sweeping packaged is the Emergency Relief for Farmers of Color Act, sponsored by freshman Senator Raphael Warnock, which provides relief payments to help farmers of color pay off loan debt. The Act is a progeny of Senator Cory Booker’s Justice for Black Farmers Act, a bill introduced in February.

One of the people working behind the scenes on Booker’s Justice for Black Farmers Act was Leah Penniman, co-founder and farm manager of Soul Fire Farm in Grafton, New York, a nonprofit that is “dedicated to uprooting racism and seeding sovereignty in the food system.” Daily, Penniman works at the intersection of agriculture, food access, and racial justice. Originally envisioned by Penniman and her partner Jonah Vitale-Wolff to be a small family farm with ad-hoc programming, Soul Fire Farm very quickly became a cultural and educational beacon in the Black and Brown community. Their on-farm trainings for people of color have multi-year waiting lists. Penniman calls the public response to Soul Fire’s offerings evidence of an “insatiable hunger for justice and sustainability.”

“We’ve been seeing this exponential curve of both indigenous food sovereignty work as well as—what we call—’returning generation’ Black farmers,” Penniman told me of recent years.

The astounding growth of Soul Fire Farm is a testament to the ample demand, interest, and opportunity that awaits in the agriculture sector once people of color are given appropriate access to land, training, and funding opportunities.

“It was very, very clear that what we were offering aligned with a yearning that community and society had. So, as we started to fill some of those needs, it was almost as if the floodgates opened,” Penniman recalls of the beginning years of Soul Fire Farm’s programming for people of color interested in farming.

Penniman, a mother of two, a former science teacher, and the author of Farming While Black is a passionate activist working to end food apartheid in America one harvest at a time. I spoke with her about the rocket ship rise of Soul Fire’s brand, what it’s like to found an agriculture business centered on racial justice, and what makes her hopeful about racial justice in the food sector at this moment in time. 

Eve Turow-Paul: Can you tell me a bit more about the mission of Soul Fire Farm and how you go about addressing this mission through your business model?

Leah Penniman: We have a very ambitious mission, which is justice in the food system. There are three basic buckets of things we do: Farming, training, and advocacy. Our 80-acre farm employs Afro-indigenous practices—such as raised beds, cover crops, and polycultures—to grow herbal medicines, fruits, vegetables, mushrooms as well as pasture-raised proteins and honey. These ancestral practices put carbon back in the soil and increases biodiversity. Our harvest goes out weekly—at low or no cost—to those who are surviving food apartheid.

The second bucket of work is educational programming. We want to train and equip and support the next generation of Black and Brown farmers. We run a flagship one-week intensive residential course where people come and learn everything from seed to market. And now we are just launching this year a really exciting fellowship program that provides a generous stipend to several graduates of our week-long immersion to start their own farm. They get a mentor, they get a year’s salary, they get technical assistance. Because, oftentimes, it’s that gap—if you don’t have Mommy and Daddy’s trust funds, how do you take the leap to start your own farm business, when it’s not going to be profitable for some time? It’s sort of helping bridge that gap.

And then perhaps the most important bucket is getting at some of the root causes of injustice in the food system by working on policy and institution building with coalitions across the country. One example of this work is [Soul Fire Farm’s contribution to the shaping of] the Justice for Black Farmers Act, which addresses decades of discrimination against Black farmers and provides pathways for new farmers to get into the business and find land. We also support two new institutions: the Northeast Farmers of Color Land Trust, which addresses the need for land access, and the Black Farmer Fund, which provides non-extractive loans and grants for Black food and farming businesses.

Turow-Paul: When did your work in farming and food justice begin? And what inspired you to start explore agriculture?

Penniman: I think there were many starting points. One was as a five year old gardening with my grandmother in Boston in her strawberry patch. That was my first positive experience pulling food and joy from the Earth. A second starting point was my summer job as a 16-year-old at The Food Project, which does more than grow food— it’s really a youth development program. There were opportunities to build relationships with peers, to run our own farmers market and learn how to do the accounting, to be involved in community service. And I just loved farming. I loved the magic of putting a seed in the ground and taking care of it and then food comes out, and then you give that food to people and it brings them such joy.

Being an African American teenager growing up in a mostly White rural community, I had a lot of self-esteem challenges. And there was something that was really elegant and simple about farming and undeniably good. Nobody can say you don’t need food or you don’t need farming. I needed an anchor to my own worth at that time period.

I continued to farm after [my time at the Food Project]. I always had an aspiration to one day have my own farm, but didn’t know how that would manifest.

But, when [my husband] Jonah and I were living with our young children in the South End of Albany, New York, which is a neighborhood under food apartheid, we were struggling to get fresh food for our own family. There were no supermarkets or community gardens or farmer’s market. No bus line to get to the supermarket. So, the only way that we could get fresh food was to join a CSA, which ended up being our biggest expense, and we had to walk over two miles to pick up the food.

When our neighbors found out that we knew how to farm, they encouraged us to start a farm for the people. And that was where the idea of Soul Fire Farm was born. You know, “Let’s get some land, grow food, and bring it to our neighbors.” The following year, we signed papers and here we are.

Turow-Paul: There’s a saying of people “building businesses from the ground up,” but you literally built SoulFire Farm from the ground up.

Penniman: Yes, there was zero infrastructure. The driveway was not even passable in a car—we had to have a four-wheel-drive truck. So the driveway, the internet, the electricity—we had to bring all of those things in. We put in our septic system, built our house out of the trees and clay and straw of the land. The soil was eroded, so we had to build the soil back. We chose a difficult path.

Turow-Paul: What motivated you to keep going?

Penniman: Grit and determination. And also the feedback as we actually opened the farm, when we began to hear how meaningful it was for folks to receive fresh food, how meaningful it was for our program participants to learn how to farm, the impact on the young people. All of that certainly fueled us.

[It’s also experiences like] this child would not get out of the van because they were too scared of the Earth, and then eventually got out and went barefoot across the fields, and after a whole experience of, like, frogs, and toads and snakes, come back with tears in their eyes and say, “I really didn’t think there was any where I belonged. And now I know, there’s somewhere that I belong.”

Turow-Paul: Soul Fire Farm has so many different programs. How did you design your business plan?

Penniman: It has been iterative. We didn’t start out with an idea of what the community needed. We’ve always been listening and responding to what community members have said they need and how we can be in service of that need.

Deliveries were first, and then parents who were receiving the food were saying, “Can you take my kid for the summer? Because they have nothing to do, and the police are harassing them, and dangerous on the streets.” So we started youth programs. And then from there, we got calls about people wanting to apprentice. So that’s where the immersion programs came in. And then, a few years into the immersion programs for new farmers, our graduates were saying, “This is great. Now I’m motivated, and I have some skills but don’t have land or capital.” So then in comes the Land Trust and Black Farmer Foundation.

The biggest change with COVID is, with that temporary food scarcity, we started getting thousands of calls and emails every week specifically about how to grow things, and where to find seeds and whatnot. So that’s when we started our Ask a Sista Farmer show where you can call in and ask gardening questions.

Turow-Paul: What makes you hopeful about the time we’re in now, as it relates to food justice? Do you see opportunities coming out of this moment of crisis?

Penniman: This year, people who were previously insulated from discomfort had to experience discomfort—whether it was going to the store and not finding a thing that you need, having to stay home and experience that isolation, experiencing the government totally failing the people in terms of telling the truth, in terms of protecting us, in terms of prioritizing our children and elders.

Part of what makes injustice possible is being able to ignore the cries of the oppressed, or imagine that somehow the cries of the oppressed are mistaken. So my hypothesis is that, in really experiencing this “Oh, my goodness, industrial food doesn’t have my back. The government doesn’t have my back,” that it makes it possible for folks who were previously insulated to say, “Maybe all these Black and brown people were telling the truth. Maybe all along these hungry people were telling the truth.” And I think that’s what we saw with the surge of interest for the movement for Black lives—this new ability to listen and take in what we’ve been saying the whole time. And I hope we don’t lose that. I hope it’s not a fad. I hope that even as we get to a place of healing and restrictions lift that people won’t forget.

My hope is that folks who previously had their head in the sand about these issues of food insecurity and injustice have a felt the tiniest pinch themselves, and will be committed to partnering with all of us to make that necessary change.

Turow-Paul: What message do you have for women of color who are interested in starting a business in the agriculture or food sector?

Penniman: Well, I am glad you said agriculture or food because I think there are so many careers that relate to feeding the community that are not just hands-on farming. Sometimes we forget that all the myriad skills we may have—whether that’s marketing, design, being an artist, speaker, technologists—all of those have a place. So folks who care about food, but who might not want to be a farmer can still join us.

There’s also something to be said for the psycho-spiritual significance of building a career that’s connected to the Earth. We increasingly spend a lot of time looking at very small screens, hunched over, and our world becomes, like, this tunnel. We’re not evolved for that. There’s really no replacement for seeing the sky, for watching a barn owl come and land on a sunflower that you planted, picking that first raspberry and knowing that you’re going to process it into jam for your community. I think that even though the monetary benefits are challenging, there’s a whole lot of beauty and joy and meaning that we can get from choosing a life on land.

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.