Leah Penniman
Farmer training, land return, and a food-sovereignty curriculum rooted in Black and Brown agrarian tradition rather than imported onto it.
The record
- Standing
- active practice
- Based
- Soul Fire Farm · Grafton, New York
- Co founded
- Soul Fire Farm, in 2011, with the stated mission of ending racism in the food system and reclaiming ancestral connection to land.
- The programmes
- Farmer training for Black and Brown people; a subsidised farm-food distribution programme for communities living under food apartheid; and domestic and international organising toward equity in the food system.
- Trained at
- Many Hands Organic Farm, Farm School MA, and with farmers in Ghana, Haiti and Mexico.
- Recognition
- James Beard Foundation Leadership Award, 2019.
Standing is this studio’s placement of the work, not a ranking of the person, and it is the one line here that is a judgement rather than a cited fact.
The work
Farming While Black is two books at once. It is a practical manual — soil, seed, business planning, tools — and it is a historical correction, tracing techniques now sold as innovations to the African and Afro-diasporic agrarian traditions they came from. Raised beds, composting, polyculture, and cooperative land ownership all have documented lineages that the mainstream sustainable-agriculture literature had quietly dropped.
Soul Fire Farm is where the argument is operationalised: training programmes for Black and Brown growers, food distribution into communities under food apartheid, and organising work on land access, which is the binding constraint underneath all of it.
Black Earth Wisdom carries the same project into the wider environmental conversation, as edited testimony rather than a single voice.
Where to read them
Sources for this record
Corrections
This record was assembled from the sources above, and nothing in it was inferred to fill a gap. If it is about you and it is wrong, or you would rather not be listed, write and it changes.