Interview with Black Earth Farms
The Black Earth Farms Collective is an agroecological lighthouse organization composed of skilled Pan-African and Pan-Indigenous farmers, builders and educators who spread ancestral knowledge and train community members to build collectivized, autonomous, and chemical free food systems in urban and peri-urban environments throughout the Greater East San Francisco Bay Area.
Three collective members—Diego, Tanamá, and Jibril—spent a few days in spring 2020 visiting the East Fork Ranch, where all of our Organic hemp is grown and is now being processed. I caught up with them right before they left to talk about access to food and land, capitalism and colonialism, and a bunch more.
Ryan: So, do y'all wanna introduce yourselves?
Diego: I can start. My name is Diego, I'm part of Black Earth Farms. It was started in 2019. My family is from Mexico and Cuba and I'm from Los Angeles originally.
Tanamá: My name is Tanamá, I'm originally from the East Coast and my family comes from Borikén and Chile. Been part of Black Earth Farms since the beginning.
Jibril: My name is Jibril; I'm from Sacramento. I lived in the Bay Area growing up a little bit. I live in Oakland right now, off the grid on a 1/10th of an acre. Also a part of Black Earth Farms and been part of a lot of international delegations that have been going to different countries. It's good to be here, it's good to be on this CBD Hemp farm, cannabis farm.
Ryan: How many people are involved in the collective and can you talk about some goals?
Jibril: So, there's about 11 of us involved at this point. We're not paid staff, not hourly paid staff or anything like that. It's all community based work. We raise money up; when people need funds we can give funds out, if they need support; but it's not a paid job right now.
But I guess what we're trying to do is construct local food sovereignty in the Bay Area. That's what we're talking about and what we're doing. And then also we're trying to heal ourselves from trauma, heal ourselves from pain and physical and mental ailments that we've experienced and have gotten during our time in the capitalist system, and just prioritizing healing and prioritizing constructing local food sovereignty.
And then also educating the people about what's going on, right, and getting people's knowledge up through a setting of popular education. So, holding space for popular education and facilitating workshops that can teach people what food sovereignty is and what that looks like and what the steps moving towards that are.
Right now we're just trying to find land I guess. We need land. We have the seeds and we have all the skills and knowledge on how to grow food and cannabis and whatever, but we just don't have any land.
Ryan: You brought up popular education. How do you talk to younger people about how moving out of the city and being a farmer and growing your own food and medicine are all cool things to aspire to doing? I grew up in a city and hardly anyone ever talked about moving to the country to become a farmer. How do you drive that message through?
Tanamá: One way that I've done it, I work with youth—I mean we consider ourselves youth, but when I talk about youth I mean like 12-16 maybe, cause that's the next generation almost. So, part of what I've done is to use music, hip hop, people who are talking about growing food, and not in a corny way. People like Dead Prez, DJ Cavem, you know, there's folks out there talking about this through hip hop and that's a good way to learn and connect with our own community and show that it's cool. And just us doing it, being like, “OK I'm gonna go plant these seeds in the morning and then go to the skate park in the afternoon.”
So like, making those connections; how you can still do what you wanna do and be able to learn to grow your own food and have healthy access to food. Because that's a big issue for us and a big thing we're trying to solve is this food apartheid and being able to grow our own food and distribute it to our own community and for ourselves. Yeah, so, using music, using art, using our own culture and this blend of cultures cause we all come from different backgrounds. And really getting people's hands in the soil, cause there's like an immediate connection I feel; like once people put their hands in the soil for the first time in a long time, you know.
Diego: Yeah, I would say, going off that too, that the types of people that we work with, mostly people who we kind of recruit or like most of the people who actually come to our work days are mostly Black, pan-African, pan-Indigenous folks that have histories of trauma with working land. So there's definitely that step of like, “Okay, we can't just bring people out to the countryside and expect them to have good mental health being on land every day.”
So, using urban agriculture as a stepping point to get to that level where we can have work days in an urban setting, like Tanamá was saying, and bring in food and bring in music and culture and other types of stuff that people can identify with. Then use that as like a training grounds, like most people actually have basic skills on how to steward land, and start talking about moving out of the city. The first step is just building the capacity so that people have basic farm knowledge in the cities.
Jibril: I think one thing I forgot to say about what this project is about is this: Black Earth Farms is a collective of Black and Indigenous youth, so pretty much we're people of African descent, people who have Indigenous ancestry, people who have faced the brunt of colonial violence in capitalism. And also, are disconnected from our food system... a lot.
So, I guess prefacing what Diego just said with that, and understand that the reason why people have trauma surrounding land and being on land is because of slavery and genocide and all these things that have cost us... that have cost our ancestors their future and their lives and their present time. I guess it's important to recognize that as well.
Ryan: When talking about moving out of the city, one of the biggest obstacles is getting that land back. How do y'all talk about overcoming that? Cause there's land, right, it's just “owned” by people.
Tanamá: I mean, yeah, 98 percent of farm land in the US is owned by white folks, mostly white men, and so we're really pushing for reparations in a lot of ways, and that looks like land sovereignty, you know. And, like, Soul Fire Farm is one example: They have a reparations map; land-based Afro/Indigenous projects that people can directly support are on that map.
In the Bay Area there's a lot of wealth inequality, like the most extreme of anywhere in the world practically. We're really pushing for people to think about, “what does reparations look like?” and it's not just writing a check, you know. It's learning colonial histories, learning about capitalism, and how everything was built on the genocide of Indigenous peoples' stolen land, and then through the enslavement of African people who were stolen from their country to come to the US and build the whole economic system basically. And they were selective of who they were targeting. They were targeting scientists, farmers, teachers, people in the community—leaders in the community to come over because Europeans didn't have that knowledge.
That's why, for us, when we enter a space we'll pass around a reparations jar and whether that looks like seeds, land, material resources, connections, time. But, yeah, it's not an easy thing. We're trying to raise money through that and other ways, but we're also at the same time trying to work outside of the capitalist mindset because no one can own land; land belongs to no one. We're just trying to see how do we get that out of the speculative market for the next seven generations, for people to steward in an appropriate way.
Jibril: Bringing this into an international concept, right? There are a bunch of people internationally who are working on food sovereignty and they're occupying land. They're out there, in the MST in Brazil, which is the Movmeintos Sem Terra, or the Landless Worker's Movement. They're landless, they're people from the cities like Sao Pãulo and Rio de Janeiro, all these large mega cities, pretty much, in Brazil that have basically moved to the countryside and occupied latifundio land.
Latifundios are like thousands and thousands of hectares of land that are owned by one land owner pretty much, who oftentimes is spraying the fields down with pesticides, and has hundreds of thousands of cattle on the land that are destroying the rain forest and all this kind of stuff.
The MST is out there occupying that land and they've been successful at it; they've resettled a high number of families. But, also, a lot of them are losing their lives too, right, because these land struggles are so contested by the land owners—
Tanamá: And not just that, it's the Fascist right-wing of Bolsonaro in Brazil, right, and that's been more recently. And in other places, where all these people are working together to call these social movements terrorists basically, right.
We had the opportunity this last year to travel to Chile, Nicaragua, Jamaica, Cuba, Palestine, Venezuela, and Puerto Rico to gain inspiration, share knowledge, and see what works for people there, and what we could take here and strategize on how to occupy land, how to organize. Because that's one thing we're missing in the US, is that unified social movement that most of Latin America... a lot of Latin American countries have that, you know. That's why they're able to make changes like that.
So we need to be able to do the local work, but also have an international context. Understanding that the sanctions that were put on Nicaragua and Venezuela affect the people of those countries. And then people wonder why they migrate, and then they go into farm working, right, so all the food is produced by these farm workers.
There are a lot of connections, and that's a lot of the popular education that we're trying to do for our community, too, is make those connections; like, why should we care about Venezuela or Palestine or these other countries when we're struggling ourselves? It's the same struggle; it's against capitalism, neoliberalism, colonization, all these are unified struggles.
Ryan: For people in the cannabis industry, the majority of whom are white and making money off of a plant that has put a lot of people in jail and using stolen indigenous land, how could they pay back some of their privilege?
Jibril: Well, I have a thing. I know for a fact that there are Black and Brown folks in Portland and in the rest of Oregon who are probably trying to get into this industry. But maybe all of these people who have these cannabis businesses that are new to the game, who haven't really been in it that long... for me at least, my pops has been incarcerated for cannabis three times since 1985 and so I've known what's going down. And this is in California and Florida, so it's like that shit's been going on for a minute and I've been affected by that directly.
But I guess the people who are now in the industry, they can try to put together some money to get these folks on land. To get these folks who have been incarcerated on land. And to get them growing cannabis and to help them get started up. To physically put someone, to get them on their feet. I don't know how people would chose that or like what the process is behind that, but if there was some type of organized push from leaders in the Oregon cannabis industry to get land for these folks who have been subjected to violence that has been caused by the War on Drugs, I think that could be a good look for the community.
But make sure it's not in a tokenizing manner. It's like, the land that they get for the Afro and Indigenous farmers, Black and Brown folks in Oregon, to help them get started, it can't be tokenizing. It can't just be one farm. It has to be maybe a few, five to ten, or something like that. Something where there can be a cycle; where equity actually happens. That's something that will have to be organized around and there will have to be coalitions built within the industry to make something like that happen.
Tanamá: Yeah, and in addition to that, connect with the Indigenous people of this land; connect with the Indigenous people wherever you are in a way where you're trying to build relationships and you're trying to support them because this is all stolen land, we're all benefiting from settler-colonialism if we're not indigenous to this land, you know.
So, that's one way. Another one is, I know the Black Food Sovereignty Northwest is a whole organization and they're having a conference on February 22 for mostly descendants of African folks who are doing work in the Northwest, and that's Oregon and Washington, so look for organizations who are putting that on and reach out to those folks to how you can be in support and solidarity directly. I would say that's one tangible way that's upcoming soon.
So, yeah, between getting to know, at least who are the Indigenous people of this land wherever people are at, and supporting people in a way, like Jibril said, that's not tokenizing, that's not just “Oh, we're doing this thing and it's good,” but in a way that's genuine.
Diego: I wanna say on top of that, just like considering folks who can't afford products that are being put out, and how a lot of the people who need that medicine can't access it; putting some consideration towards that. Whether it's a sliding scale model or some type of affordability structure so that people who are low income and can't afford some of these products, like CBD, can get proper medicine.
Ryan: Right on. So, I have about 100 more questions but this is supposed to be a short blog. Is there anything else you want to say before we wrap it up?
Jibril: Yeah, having food sovereignty is important. I don't know what the situation is with cannabis farms, but looking at actually how much money is spent on feeding folks on the land. How much money is spent on that? How much money are employees, people who are working on the land, spending on their food bill at grocery stores, right? When there's an ample amount of land to be growing food for the people that are on the farm and maybe, I don't know, other folks as well.
And I think it could break up some of the monoculture nature of cannabis as well. Cannabis is often being grown in a way that's been extractive and detrimental to the ecosystem, but now I think we're in a place where we can start changing that and we can start thinking about, “OK, what does it look like to not have a monoculture cannabis system, but to have one that actually feeds the people that are working on the land and is good for the environment and is good for us because we get to be exposed to biodiversity on a daily basis and eat fresh trees off trees?”
[Read more about East Fork’s regenerative cultivation practices, biodiversity, and potato gleaning project]
I see there's a little orchard out here, that's cool.
Ryan: Yeah, we plant a few more trees every year.
Jibril: Keep doing that. Get some hedge rows up, you know. It's like biodiversity: All these different plants that people put in can suppress pests. It's like, you can plant these potatoes and get rid of the symphylans; you can plant hedge rows and attract beneficial insects that can predate on aphids and other pests.
Thinking about agroecology too—agroecology is a system of design pretty much, a way of thinking about the food system that has a social, political, and ecological context right? It's usually ancient Indigenous knowledge, the knowledge of our ancestors in combination with new research and scientific development to create diversified agriculture systems. So, I guess just wanting people to tap into more of the agroecology mentality that has social and political context to it, rather than the apolitical permaculture mentality that sometimes facilitates more oppression and more stuff that we don't want.
Just thinking about, what is agroecology? How does it function? Do some research on that and see what's going down.
Tanamá: The thing I would like to get across is for these farmers to look around and see who's at the table. Are there Black women there? Are there Indigenous women there? Are there queer folks present? Who's in leadership? Who's missing?
That thing you were saying earlier, when you think of a farmer, what's the first thing that comes to your mind? Probably not us.
And, so just really looking at who has power and who's in leadership and who's missing, because the US is such a diverse place and most people—like we're people of the global majority, right. When you look at the world context, we're not the minority, and so we need to think about who's represented in these spaces, and who's at the table.
Diego: I think one thing I want to get across is going off of what Jibril was saying—and Tanamá too—but just, like, having more reverence for the land itself. I know this is an organic farm, so obviously there's not as much damage being done to the land, but just spending more time with the land in a way that's not just always extracting from it.
Holding ceremony—I know you all do the little thing in the morning with the [singing] bowls—that's a huge part of this organization, and what we do is holding ceremony on the land we're on, whether it's drum circles or dancing or any type of ceremony. Whatever that looks like to you, it's always important to include that in this work because it's Indigenous land and the earth remembers what happened here, so it's important to honor that and be sensitive to it.
