Above photo: “Farming While Black” / Kontent Films.
Upstate New York’s Soul Fire Farm is that’s part of a larger movement trying to return land to the stewardship of people of color.
And restore Afro-Indigenous farming practices along the way.
Once upon a time, 14%of farmers in the United States were Black. That was in 1910. But that number has dwindled. Today, Black farmers comprise less than 2% of all growers across the country. On this week’s episode, our host Lucas Grindley notes: “That’s more than 14 million acres of lost land.”
This loss, along with the discrimination and violence perpetrated against African-American farmers and the current movement of more Black people returning to agriculture and land stewardship, is the subject of the documentary “Farming While Black,” which was released in 2023. Mark Decena, the writer and director of the documentary, describes it as a Venn diagram of social justice, climate justice and food sovereignty.
“It was very dangerous to be a landowner in the deep South post-Civil War, except for the eight years of Reconstruction where land ownership was at its peak. And Leah [Penniman, cofounder of Soul Fire Farm, who was one of the characters in the documentary] definitely points that out,” Decena says.
While it might not be as dangerous to own land in this South in 2024, there are still a lot of challenges to reverse decades of land dispossession. To explore that and the solutions Black and other marginalized people are implementing as they return to the soil, listen to this episode below or subscribe to the Next City podcast on Apple, Spotify, or Goodpods.