University Place

The Color of Food: Reflecting on Our Food Movement

So my name is Paul Robbins. I’m the director of the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin Madison. And this evening’s lecture, “The Color of Food: Reflecting on our Food Movement” is going to be terrific. We’re really delighted to have Natasha Bowen to Wisconsin this evening. I’m really looking forward to lecture because it’s great! For those of you who have not had a chance to page their way through this book this is people’s stories and lives told from somebody with a terrific ear for community and life experience and she took all her own photos! And I asked her, are you like a professional photographer? And she said no, I just thought I had to do it and it’s seamless. The other reason we really are welcoming this talk is that it’s part of our larger lecture series, “Everyone’s Earth: Conversations on Race and Environment.”

And let’s face it, the environmental movement that I grew up in, as a member of the super sugar crisp environment society of the 1970’s, which has done a lot of work, enormous work, in the food movement of the last few decades, has nonetheless been somewhat limited in its reach or at least in its reflection publicly of a range of communities who are practicing agriculture or practicing environmentalism. Too many communities have not been included in setting the agenda, in securing educational opportunities, finding jobs in leadership positions and conservation. Even outdoor recreation, like the movement as a whole, skews in a strange demographic way. So it’s the institute’s hope, along with all of the social movements in the community working on this to disrupt this conversation and by doing so, change our awareness.

Finally, I’d like to take a moment to thank our partners. This includes the Agroecology Department, Art Department, Center for Humanities, Borghesi-Mellon Workshop Food Studies Network… I get that right? …The Department of Community and Environmental Sociology, Soil Science … Soil Science, welcome Soil Science, Department of Afro-American Studies and the University Lectures Committee. I’d like everybody to just thank them all, there’s a lot of support here for Natasha’s work. (applause) Now I’d like to turn it over to Monica White who is the Nelson’s Institute’s professor of Environmental Justice, I really like that. We have a professor of Environmental Justice. And she’s also a member of the faculty and community and environmental sociology, a very close partner. And was instrumental in bringing Natasha to Wisconsin, please welcome, Monica White. (applause)

– Thank you. Thank you, thank you, thank you. I am so excited. It’s been really wonderful having Natasha here and you’re really in for a treat tonight. I’m so pleased to introduce Natasha, who’s not only an amazing author, grower, and community activist; she’s also my friend. One of the first talks that I gave when I was hired here, I had given a talk on black farmers. And a student who asked the first question, who was in his late twenties, he raised his hand, he’s as an African-American from the DC area, he said, “You know, when you said black farmers,” he said, “I drew a blank.” He said, “I couldn’t remember seeing a black farmer.” He said every farmer I had ever thought I had known was always white. And so thanks to Natasha’s work, we have a wide array of faces and people and cultures and their stories to really illustrate and to make this connection, not just for that student but for all of us, and so we’re deeply grateful for your work. And Natasha’s and Lucille, spent five years, that was her car. Her little pick-up truck … not pickup but a station wagon! (laughter) Spent five years gathering stories and portraits of farmers, food activists from black, Latina, Asian and Native communities across the country. Stories that invite us to dig deep into race, culture and community. Her work has garnered national attention. Currently, Natasha runs a community garden, as well as gardening and cooking programs in Frederick, Maryland’s public housing communities. She’s also breaking ground on a women-owned fruit and flower farm. So please join me in welcoming my dear sister friend, Natasha. (applause)

– Thank you Monica for the introduction and for getting me out here. Thank you to the Nelson Institute and everyone that collaborated to bring me out here. I really appreciate the invite. And thank you all for coming out to dig into stories and a message that I think are really important in this good food movement that we’re all so passionate about. Ever since I started this work and immersed myself in the food movement and starting growing food myself over seven years ago, it’s always just been really important to me to try to share these stories and get out as much as I can to share this message with as many audiences as I can because it is so important.

But, of late, with a one-year-old daughter at home and another little daughter on the way, and as Monica mentioned, running community garden programs and breaking ground on a long-time dream of mine to run a women-owned farm. Needless to say, I don’t get out very much anymore. But it’s still really important to me in this work and anything I’m doing related to food, to be digging into what it means to me, what this food work means to me as a woman of color. And the weight that our food carries for all of us but particularly for communities of color. So when I do get out and share these stories, I really try to encourage my audiences to do the same. So I do hope by the end of this talk you all will be inspired to keep digging. And as for literally digging in the dirt, it is never in a million years anything that I thought I was going to be doing. Particularly with such dorky glee. (giggle) A little bit about me, I did not grow up farming or gardening.

I didn’t grow up anywhere near agriculture. I was born in Newark, New Jersey, raised in South Florida. About as far away as from rural farm life as you can get. And like many such Americans, I really never gave much thought to my food. I would go to the grocery store with my mom and my brother and get food and go home and eat it and not really think about where it came from, how it was processed, much less who was behind producing it and all the hands that touched it. Even as a grew older and supposedly wiser and was, you know, cooking food for myself in college, if you can call microwaving ramen and folding Kraft cheese with mustard in half on the way to class cooking. (giggles) But even then, I wasn’t thinking about how, you know, the way that we grow our food and the way its processed is impacting the health of our bodies and the health of our environment. I wasn’t thinking about the history and all the politics that our food carries and how those impact different communities in different ways. I also wasn’t thinking about my food culture which is rooted in Southern food and how it can be perceived by other communities in a certain way.

I wasn’t giving much thought to the fact that growing up food insecure, as I did, gave my family a badge that was invisible to me. I also didn’t know at the time my own family history with agriculture and how like many with roots in the black South, I came from a long line of sharecroppers and domestic cooks on my father’s side in Greenville, South Carolina. And before that, agricultural slaves, right? So it wasn’t until later when I fell into this work that I really began digging and realized all the stories, the many layers of stories that are baked into our food, into our very seeds. And that goes for all of our foods, right? So on my first farm job, going row by row, working corn seeds into the ground, is when it hit me. I just had this vision of these farmers, my ancestors, all of our ancestors, who came before me and had been doing this very same thing in this very same way for hundreds, thousands of years. And that was powerful. It really wasn’t history that I was conscious of yet, but I could feel it as soon as I dug my hands down into this rich soil. I felt this connection. Connection to something bigger than me.

And that was it, that was when my dorky glee for digging in the dirt began. But backing up, how did I go from clueless college student to gleeful farmer? It’s kind of a long story, but one I try to summarize like this. I went traveling after college by myself. Worked my way around the globe, living in a lot of different spots. Living out of a station wagon which for some reason would become a thing for me. That was my first station wagon, but we’ll get to that later. And I really had my eyes opened to how we’re living on this planet. And what we can do to get involved and create change. So I came home after a few years, and started working in environmental and healthcare advocacy and organizing work in Washington, DC.

I was learning a lot and following my passion in these issues but I quickly saw that there was an elephant in the room when talking about the health of our bodies and the health of our environment. And that was food. Definitely right there at the center of it. So I really kind of jumped down that rabbit hole of the food world and started absorbing as much as I could, reading as many books as I could, going to food and farming conferences, volunteering on community gardens and urban farms in DC, growing my little garden in my little backyard, and eventually started working for farmers at DC’s largest farmers’ markets, and over time I ended up making, what ended up being one of the best decisions of my life, but at the time, and to my family and friends, seemed like the worst idea they’d ever heard, that I was going to leave my job, with benefits, and start farming for free, (chuckles) or in exchange for room and board. So that was the beginning of my farming career if you can call it that. But as I worked my way around various rural and urban farms, started immersing myself even deeper into this good food movement and sustainable agriculture and the food justice movement, it didn’t take long to see that there were more elephants in the room. Big ones. Serious ones. Ones that… seemed to be, that people didn’t really want to talk about, but it was becoming obvious that these were the issues that were keeping us from having a truly sustainable and equitable food system and movement.

Inclusive movement. Y’all know these elephants. We deal with them in every facet of society and it seems lately that their ugliness is becoming more and more socially acceptable. I’m talking about racial inequity, racial injustice. And for those familiar with the food justice movement, you know that racial inequity and injustice is involved when talking about food access across communities, when talking about farm labor rights, but I’m talking deeper than that. I’m talking our entire food system and the folks who hold the power. And the movement to fix that system and who’s really benefiting from that. I’m talking about the history, the politics, the pain, the oppression, the survival, the transformation that comes with our food and our agricultural system. I’m talking about that sacred connection that’s very personal, that we all carry, a very personal relationship with our food that can be painful particularly for communities of color but can also be liberating and revolutionary.

I’m talking about the story being told, the picture being painted of our beloved good food movement. When I looked around as a new member of this movement and realized I’d suddenly entered this very crunchy, seemingly very white movement for good food, I felt completely out of place as a woman of color. I loved that special connection with the land, that personal connection that I had had when my hands were in the soil, but I felt it fading very quickly as I looked around and didn’t see my face in the movement around me. I didn’t see my people being represented in the movement around me. Pull up this slide, one of my favorite Marcus Garvey quotes. I couldn’t have that connection really feel validated or supported when I wasn’t hearing the stories of my culture or seeing my people’s history represented in the narrative of food and agriculture. All I was really seeing was my people being portrayed as the problem. Our food culture demonized, our communities lacking. And knowing this isn’t our singular narrative as black and brown people, knowing our rich history with the land and our diverse food culture across the country, I started to wonder if the picture was simply being painted to leave all of that out.

To paint this exclusive picture of good food and sustainable agriculture. And if I felt like I was left out of this picture having the racially ambiguous skin tone that has been confusing curious white folk since 1983, (audience laughter) then surely other people of color felt the same, felt equally frustrated and alone. Because in all of the spaces in this food work, the farmers’ markets, at the conferences, on the farms, in the books I was reading, in all of the media following, this growing movement– and this trendy hipster movement– This is my favorite. This is cultivating the capital Foodshed. This is DC, a.k.a the Chocolate City, and these are the young farmers issue. You couldn’t deny the overwhelming feeling that this wasn’t for us. The farmers’ markets that were sprouting up everywhere were lacking bilingual staff in neighborhoods particularly in DC where I lived where English wasn’t necessarily the first language. Lacking culturally relevant foods. The books and conferences on sustainable agriculture and permaculture were pretending like indigenous people haven’t been growing this way for thousands of years.

You know, even in the food justice works, supposedly to benefit people of color. In neighborhoods, like many in DC, that are predominately black and brown, the folks that were showing up with new grant money to start organizations and lead conversations on food access and food security, were led by white folks that were not from the community, nor often were even working with the community members. And staff were scratching their heads wondering why they couldn’t get people to come out. Local residents must not be interested. There were local residents already doing this work on the ground. Folks that’d been growing in their backyard before organic was a thing. Keeping chickens before they were legal. Right? But they weren’t getting invited to the conferences to speak. They weren’t getting on the trendy magazine covers and they sure weren’t getting the funding. Otherwise, it might look like this instead.

It’s LaDonna. This is real to me. This is what the picture should look like because this represents who is most impacted by our broken food system and who should be leading the food movement. This is real; this is LaDonna Redmond who’s an incredible food activist, who’s done great work in Chicago and in Minneapolis. If you don’t know her, look her up. And this, just to counteract that Flavor “Capital Foodshed” issue, these are the young farmers that I know in DC and Baltimore doing amazing, amazing work contributing to the food system there. So, this disconnect, this misrepresentation this picture that’s being painted is not being shown by the larger movement. So as I witnessed all of this, my giddiness about my new-found life path, began to slip. I really began to question my place in this movement and in growing food and if it was really for me.

If it was really doing good for people like me. But before I gave up, I knew I had to go out and find other folks like myself, find out about work being led by, food work being led by communities of color. So I hit the road in my station wagon, living once again out of a station wagon. (laugher) This is Lucille who took me all over. Y’all can see how ambitious I was. I thought I was going to go everywhere, but Lucille had other plans (laughter) ’cause she was old. But with the support of my community, this community that I was falling deeper into as I was hopping around and learning, learning, learning, meeting amazing folks, folks of color in this work that really pushed me to go ahead and make this project, make this idea that I had that we need to share our stories. We need to change this misrepresentation, we need to get our faces out there. And I’m willing to go live out of my station wagon and do it.

So we did a little CrowdSource fundraising, was able to get on the road, and started hearing directly from communities of color, black, Latina, Native, Asian communities, rural farmers, urban farmers, food activists, all over the country and it was transformational. We began flocking to each other and connecting at food conferences and farmer conferences and rejoicing in that connectedness that we could have. In spaces like the Black Farmers and Urban Gardeners conference, one of my first conferences, where we all came together and I could hear so many people saying, “Wow, “I’m usually only one of a few in these conferences “and now look at all of us here together. “This is for us; this is focused on us.” And people started really opening up and sharing their stories with me. Stories of growing up with a love for farming and nature but being made to feel like they weren’t allowed to be in that space. Growing up and being the only kid in their 4-H club. Being a rural black or brown farmer, and being one of the only in their rural areas. Not being taken seriously as a farmer because of their race and ethnicity. Or being bypassed at farmers’ markets because of prejudice and assumptions.

This happened a lot; these were a lot of stories that came out. Happened to me, myself, when I was farming for a season in upstate New York on a communal farm where there was a diversity of farmers there, young farmers. And we’re running a farm business. We were a market CSA farm. And we’re at the farmers’ market and we had customers come up and say, “Y’all are so cute. “Are you from the Urban Food Justice group in the city?” Why? ‘Cause we’re black? We can’t just be farmers? We gotta be from the city or ’cause we’re interested in food. It’s gotta be this nonprofit food justice work? Why can’t we just be like the other hipster farmers moving here in the Hudson Valley trying to get our farm on? (laughter) I met farmers Hmong and Latino farmers, who would have then customers assume that they weren’t the farm owner, that they were the labor. That they didn’t speak English and customers coming up talking to them like they’re kindergartners. Trying to ask them if their food is really organic.

I couldn’t bring myself to put her picture up here because we lost her, but the head of Southern African American Farmers’ Organic Network, Mama Cynthia Hayes, I was able to sit with her in Savannah, and she was telling me that the part of the reason they had to get a lot of their farmers’ organic certified organic is because unlike what a lot of non-organic but organically growing farmers are doing now, putting a sign out on their table just saying, you know, we’re all natural, we don’t spray, that wasn’t working for her farmers. They weren’t getting the same trust from the customers. They had to have that USDA sticker. So not only are our farmers of color feeling alone in an industry that is already pretty isolating, but they’re struggling to get equitable treatment. Like farmers experiencing blatant racism and fearing for their lives while they’re just trying to run their farm businesses and feed their communities. This is Chris Newman who runs his farm business in Charlottesville. Some of y’all may have heard about him recently because his Facebook post went viral after he simply commented on the white supremacist rally that took place there and how his commentary was really just that. The problem isn’t the KKK and these extreme groups, it’s the everyday racism that folks like himself are experiencing being a black farmer in Charlottesville. Where he while making deliveries into wealthy neighborhoods was getting the cops called on him so many times that he had to stop making deliveries into those neighborhoods.

Or that he was getting harassed by passersby on his farm to the point that he had to stop renting farmland that was visible from the street, while he’s just trying to feed the community and run his business. So this is real. And this kind of injustice, unfortunately and as we know, is not new. This is akin to the Jim Crow era and the harassment intimidation that pushed black farmers and family out of the South and into urban cities in the first place. Urban cities like Detroit and New Jersey where my ancestors fled to from the South. This dates back to the very beginning of our agricultural system itself. Because when you have an industry that was built using stolen land and stolen bodies, and even today still runs on modern slave labor with bodies sourced from just different countries, you’re pretty far from just. And decades and decades after colonization and emancipation, after black families across the South were eventually able to leave sharecropping, the post-emancipation slavery system, gain land of their own, start farm businesses of their own, and by 1920 had reached 1 million strong, decades even after this, injustice in the system still reigned. I’m sure many of you are familiar with the black farmers versus USDA discrimination lawsuit, Pigford vs Glickman that ended in settlement about five years ago now.

Where thousands upon thousands of stories of discrimination and racial injustice were surfacing from black farmers across the country. They began sharing their experiences of walking into rural USDA agencies where confederate flags and noose’s were hanging on the walls, where agents would pull out their desk drawer to reveal loaded guns while sitting down to deny farmers’ loan after loan. Well, I’d like to share a quick story of a farmer and advocate who was deeply involved in this lawsuit and who we can hear from directly, so with my project, I did the oral history project so there is no video, it’s still shots and audio, so just to prepare you for that. Let me give him his introduction first. I’m getting ahead of myself. This is Mr. Gary Grant. He’s the head of the Black Farmers and Agricultural Association, which is one of the groups that was heavily involved in the legal battle. They’re based in Tillery, North Carolina, which is not only home to the farmer who was the main Plaintiff on the case, Mr. Pigford, but also holds a lot of history for black sharecroppers and black farmers. Mr. Grant got involved with the legal battle, with the lawsuit and formed the FAA in the 90’s when his parents and their family farm were already in the midst of their own discrimination case against the USDA because of all of the barriers that they were facing that ended with their farm being foreclosed on. And they began hearing more and more similar stories from black farmers in their own county and once this national suit was filed, then they just expanded and started gathering stories from across the country. So let’s hear from Mr. Grant.

– [Mr. Grant] No matter where the hearings were held, whether it was in Halifax County, whether it was in Mississippi, whether it was in California, all the black farmers were telling the same story. I don’t get my… I’m told there’s no money. I’m not given an application. I’m told it’s in the process. I get my money after the window of planting season. So that’s why we know that it was a national crisis. And if our ancestors from slavery, up until 1900, could manage to get almost 17 million acres of land, and we have lost 70-80% of it, between 1920 and 1996, something wrong, as Daddy would say. Something wrong!

– I’ll try to pause here. All right, sorry about that. 70 to 80% of black land lost. Black farmers put out of business, farmer after farmer with the same story of inequitable treatment in the industry. And it should be noted that all of these stories from this case were silenced by settlement. Right? So just like Mr. Grant’s family’s case, all those stories, that case was dropped. After 30 years of fighting their own personal case, the DOJ stopped it when the larger national case went to settlement. And that’s what we have to understand. And you see, you go to court and you testify, and you get national coverage, and all of these stories begin to come forward, and then they offer the settlement and it stops everything from going into the record.

And what they’re left with is money that in total may have looked like a lot, but when each farmer only ended up with about $50,000, you know, Mr. Grant would say the city cousins might think that’s a lot of money, but they don’t know nothing about farming. $50,000 wouldn’t replace the tractor or the rest of the equipment. Right? It wouldn’t even touch the cost of the land. I think Mr. Grant shared that his family lost 300 acres of land at an $800 an acre. This was back in the nineties. That’s a lot of money. That’s almost $300,000. And that’s just the land, that’s not talking about what can be produced on that land year after year. They found this battle for 30 years. So $50,000 was a slap in the face. And not everyone who even filed the lawsuit got that settlement. And let’s listen– This is just the other half of him talk about, quickly summarize his thoughts on that.

– [Mr. Grant] 23,000 applicants, I believe it was and only 12,000 of them were successful. When we look at who was successful, it was folk who were like me, who went in to get a loan and were mistreated, who have lost their land, who were no longer in farming, and who had no intention of going back into farming. Very few of the folk who were farming were successful in Pigford. Why? Because the ultimate goal of USDA was to put small farmers out of business. And they have pretty much, pretty much done it. You got 990,000 black farmers in 1920, and by the year 2000, remember the quote, by the year 2000, you have less than 20,000 farmers. They’re gone. You’re not even a political mass to be dealt with.

– Not even a political mass to be dealt with. Could this be why it feels like black farmers have been all but erased from the system, due to institutional discrimination and injustice. And as you can see, it’s not just black farmers, but Hispanic, Native, Asian, even women farmers, were just a blip on this screen. I don’t think it’s really a coincidence that the demographics that show the majority here are also match the demographics of who holds power and who always has. All of these groups of farmers of color and women farmers have also filed discrimination lawsuits against the USDA really challenging that power. And since these lawsuits, we have seen some mandates coming down, some quotas passed down, some revamped initiatives from non-profits and the like, focused on recruiting and supporting more farmers of color. But in my personal opinion, they are not good enough. And they’re not always working.

In my opinion, it’s because the group who has always held the power is still holding the power and it’s almost sometimes encouraging and enforcing tokenism. Right? Overlooking existing groups who are working toward community based solutions that could use the support and that could lead us in the right direction. We really have to rebuild the system. With new leadership from our most marginalized communities. And we have to begin valuing and prioritizing that connection and trust and relationship-building that is vital to this work actually being truly sustainable and equitable. We have to start taking the time to put in that work and first educating ourselves on the stories, on the history, on the reality of the injustice in our systems. And the cultural history and the traditional agricultural practices and knowledge that live across our diverse nation. Because without that recognition, and that effort at connection, how do we expect people to want to come to the table? And I always say anyway, we shouldn’t be waiting for folks to come to the table, if voices are missing we need to go out and knock on their doors and ask to sit and listen at their tables. When I knocked on the door of Mr. Kevin Welsh, a farmer and member of the Eastern Band of the Cherokee Nation in Cherokee, North Carolina, I had to scoot my chair up really close to hear what he had to say because he talked so quietly. And his wife said that was his strategy to make sure people were really listening.

(audience laughs) Kevin Welsh and his wife run the Center for Cherokee Plants in Cherokee, North Carolina, which is essentially a seed bank and propagation nursery of heirloom Cherokee plants that they bring back and give out to every member of the Eastern Band of the Cherokee Nation in the form of garden kits and seeds. With that, they also do storytelling around the seeds and their cultural history with agriculture. They bring back lost gardening skills in the community. They’re doing incredible work. And Kevin started out his talk with me, by reminding me that the Cherokee are the original agriculturalists of this region. They’ve been growing food for about as long as what is considered the bread basket of modern agriculture and the fertile region of the Middle East, which began about 6,500 years ago. He was basically just saying, our people came out of the woodland, we’re agriculturalists, and we don’t differentiate between wild gathering and agricultural cultivation. To us, that is agriculture and they’re one and the same. But Kevin went on to tell me how they’re growing and harvesting practices have been restricted.

First of all, their lands have been taken and they aren’t permitted to harvest or grow in what is now protected land. The Eastern Band of the Cherokee Nation, the Cherokee sits next to the 11 million acres that used to be their tribal lands and is now preserved as the Smoky Mountain National Park. And their land has been reduced to just 56,000 acres. 11 million acres that they can no longer practice their traditional harvesting, hunting and wild gathering in. Though there is this need to grow out a lot of the plants, even the wild plants, yet these facts seem to be overlooked by health advocates, shaking their heads at the alarming obesity and diabetes rates that we see plaguing our native communities. And Kevin is trying to address community health with the knowledge he carries of his people and their traditional food culture. Let’s listen to Kevin directly. – [Kevin] What we do here at the Center for Cherokee Plants, is we develop culturally relevant varieties that our tribe uses and we put them back in the hands of the person that’s putting food on the table for their family. Plants that we do collect and cultivate have a story that go with it.

To me, that’s the fun part about collecting seeds is what makes them relevant to any society. And it applies to any group of people. So the plants that we collect and propagate, we interview elders, we do memory banking, and collect the oral histories. When we find a plant, we try to propagate it, and especially if it’s in short supply. ‘Cause the job here, although we’re a seed bank, is not to keep seeds here. Our job is to get them out there and to the enrolled members. We don’t stockpile. There’s no need, no reason, for us to stockpile it. A friend of ours made the commentary, the best way to save an heirloom seed is to share it.

When we give them to people, we give them, we empower them. – So when we give, when we’re sharing our seeds, and the stories that come with them, this is power. This is empowerment; this is revolutionary. To think that saving our own seeds is revolutionary. That’s the world we live in. That’s what we’re up against in this industry. We were talking earlier about what resistance looks like and it could be just saving your seeds. Saving your food culture. That power living in just a handful of tiny seeds, the cultural preservation, the self-sufficiency they bring to a community, saving them, planting them, sharing them, it’s all so sacred and liberating.

Particularly for communities who have had as much taken from them are our tribal communities. And yet communities like Kevin’s are being left out of the conversation a lot of the times. It’s highlighted in discussions about food security and health, of course. But just not in the solutions… and existing projects like Kevin’s. The history that his people have contributed to agriculture. And Kevin says part of the problem is in communication, not just the effort of reaching out and really listening, but in the communication itself, in the language. How the food system and even our food movements are talking about solutions. He says, his people have grown with best management practices long before they had names for it.

Organic is a government word, Kevin says. You talk to old timers and they don’t have any idea what organic is, but they do know how to make compost, and they know how to till under and plant beans to get nitrogen back in the soil. They may not know the scientific terms but those same applications are what they’re using. But these people, he says, that come up with these weird words, actually have a disconnect from the land itself. And we know that, that lack of recognition and honoring people’s history and their knowledge, just because it may not fit into the terms that we created, or that were created in some boardroom somewhere far from the land and far from these communities, half the time by people who’ve never tilled the soil. This helps perpetuate that distrust and that divide. It continues the barriers and inequity of power in our food system. But who are we turning to for knowledge and examples of systems that work… for agricultural practices that heal our land and bodies? If not our ancestors and our elders who already had systems in place.

As Valerie Segrest would say, “Other than the plants and foods around us, our elders are our biggest teachers.” Valerie is a Native foods educator and member of the Muckleshoot tribe in the state of Washington. She coordinates the Muckleshoot Food Sovereignty Project and says, “I think all of the pieces of the food movement “today are important and wonderful, “but there’s also an ancient system “that has been here a long time “and fed people a long time. “And we have to remember that old world system.” For tribes at least, it carries a different weight because we are always talking about sovereignty. And applying that to thinking about our food system makes it so much more personal. Every time I go and harvest, I’m expressing sovereignty. And to think about it in that way is really important. It’s what our ancestors traded land for… to preserve that sovereignty. And what would they think now?” Christina Rivera-Chapman, a farmer and educator at Tierra Negra Farms in Durham, North Carolina, works closely with and receives eldership, as she calls it, on everything she does from the elders that are native to the land she now calls home.

When her partner Tahz and her were struggling to find land, they listened to a friend and elder of the Occaneechi Band of the Saponi Nation in North Carolina who’s family had been on the land there since the 1600’s. Christina says, “The vet is helping us look “at communal land ownership models “that existed pre-colonization. “That’s where the solutions really are. “In some ways it’s intimidating “because there’s no systemic support for that now, “but we know there are systems that existed “before this one and that they are still here, “already laid out for us.” And she is teaching us that we don’t have to disregard our ancestors when having these conversations. We have support in the room. Christina and Tahz were able to cooperatively purchase land just recently with a group of young farmers of color in North Carolina where they’re not running an educational farming community and cooperative farm business and empowering communities of color throughout Durham. Communal land ownership, communal farming, cooperatives, these are not new. These systems were started by our communities. Some of the oldest farmer cooperatives in this country were started by black and brown farmers.

Tribal cooperatives, the Federation of Southern Cooperatives which still exist today. We now have Dr. Monica White who will school you on all that. (laughs) Communal farming practices, communal trade systems, where neighbor farmers would share in the labor and in the harvest, where farmers weren’t trying to do it all alone. This is just how things operated in our regional food systems that used to exist, where farmers just had– particularly in marginalized and isolated communities. Where farmers had to get together to figure out a system that worked for everyone. Like the acequia system, an ancient communally-owned irrigation system that is still in place today in the Southwest, brought here by Central and South American indigenous farmers. This is a system where farmers own and share their rights to canal irrigation that harvests rain water coming down off the desert mountains and channels it to each farm and the farmers have ownership over this. This is a system that is still in place on farms like that of Don Bustos in Sante Fe, New Mexico. He’s farming there on land that was passed down from the women in his family over 300 years ago.

So when practices like this, and solutions like this that are born from within our community, within our culture, or we have community ownership over them, this not only empowers the community, but encourages participation and leadership to push them forward. It’s sustainable; it works. Whereas looking at failed initiatives, particularly in community food work, how many times can we look and see that they came from outside the community, that they weren’t rooted in that community’s history, their culture, their existing knowledge and practices? And more often than not, which boggles my mind, often not even engaging the community members or listening to what they might need or have to say. Not allowing participation and leadership in the process. For me, no engagement, no transfer of power. It’s that simple. Now solutions that are working, like examples many of you may be familiar with, for example, in nearby Detroit, are rooted in community engagement and empowerment. Y’all have, again, one of the leaders in the Detroit Food Movement and a scholar on the history of the black food movement, right here on your campus, Dr. Monica White. And she was updating me just last night on just how much more phenomenal work the folks in Detroit are doing.

Breaking ground on their grocery co-op, building an educational center, still running their 7-8-acre community farm that’s been there for ten years now? That’s phenomenal and one of the biggest contributions I think DBCFSN has contributed is starting the first comprehensive food policy council in the city of Detroit. Food policy in the city of Detroit. And then sharing how they did that and sharing their model with organizations and initiatives led by people of color throughout other cities throughout the country. Cities that many would call food deserts. Though that term does not really sit well with communities. Especially those like Luis’ and the Chihuahuan deserts of Texas and New Mexico. Luis Casenera is co-owner of Solar Farm, a cooperative farm in Chaparral, New Mexico run by farmers who transitioned out of migrant farm work and into farm ownership. His community is a community the grows food for the entire country, yet they have some of the highest rates of food insecurity. How does that make sense? The reason that they don’t like this term food desert is because they will tell you, the problem is not that food can’t be grown in the desert because that’s surely not true.

It’s just that the system isn’t looking to the desert for solutions, but instead just going there for cheap land and cheap labor. So along with other groups like theirs, they are sprouting their own solutions. Forming cooperative farms, creating community-run markets, getting food to their people. Running community based education programs, building certified community kitchens, helping folks launch their food businesses… and helping train and support farm workers looking to transition to farm owners as Luis did. Recruiting new young farmers from within their community. These are some of the other groups that are involved, and this is again, Don Bustos who you saw pictured. He’s here on his 300-year-old farm. He is one of the leaders of the training program that their doing.

And even those he’s miles, really the opposite end of New Mexico from where Luis and Solar Farm are located, he spends his time traveling up and down the state running these training programs for transitioning farm workers to farm owners and for new young farmers. But who is supporting these small community run systems? Is it the bulk of support and funding in our nonprofit food industry? Because it is an industry. Reaching these folks on the ground. If not, where is it going? And who is the movement actually benefiting? These are all the questions I had as I’m going out and seeing this amazing work and talking to these amazing food leaders in their communities, Is really butting against those barriers in the system. And folks are doing, blazing the way, and going outside of the system, but we’re going to butt up against that ceiling if we’re not getting the same support, if our stories aren’t out there. Young revolutionary farmers like one of my favorites, Leah Penniman and her family at Soul Fire Farm. Who started what I think is one of the most impactful programs in farming… innovative programs in the country. And they had to start it out of their own pocket for lack of funding.

And they’ve been running it for a number of years now. They run a farmer training program for black and Latino young farmers. They run it on their farm and they focus on teaching the skills of regenerative farming and whole foods preparation in a supportive and culturally relevant environment. And this is just a slice of what they do. They also do some alternative to incarceration work, where they’re bringing young incarcerated folks onto the farm to get paid, to pay back their restitution but also gain these skills. They’re part of the Freedom Food Alliance which is doing some other criminal justice work that’s incorporating food justice work. And they’ve just started an incredible community of black and brown. They say, feminine-centered, queer-loving healing center and training program and political and creative space. They’re doing amazing phenomenal work and in my opinion, the ag institutions and all the powerful players in this food movement need to be going and knocking on their door and sitting and listening at their table if we want to truly change our food system.

And that’s what this is all about. I could go on and on with stories. And we could keep following all these threads that are tied to our food and I’m happy to open the floor up and have discussion after this, but in closing, if we want to truly change our food system, we have to be better. We have to fight harder, we have to dig deeper. We really have to take our blinders off and confront those elephants in the room and have those hard conversations about race and injustice and inequity. We have to take a pause from the work that we’re doing, and the passions that we have, and the agendas and dreams that we might carry, and just zoom out and reflect and look at ourselves in the mirror and look and see where we might be able to learn, change and grow.

I ask you to look around your food community here in Madison. Are the voices of people of color being represented? Do their voices have roles in creating the change you all seek? Is your network reaching out and connecting with and supporting other networks that are led by people of color? Who is benefiting from the changes being created in your movement? And are you honoring racial and cultural diversity as much as farming geeks honor the biodiversity? (laughter) Start now by building and investing in those connections across communities. No connection, no equality. What better way to connect than through sharing our stories, and what better way to share our stories than all come together and over food? Thank you all so much. (applause)