The groundlessness of 2020 shocked many of us out of monotony. For some that spiritual reckoning may have meant a crisis of pink hair dye, or a penchant for cottagecore, but for many Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) land stewards, it was a call to go back to the land.
For the BIPOC land stewards Teen Vogue spoke to, land has myriad meanings. It can be a space for sovereignty — a space to grow food for themselves and their communities while divesting from a system that refuses to condemn the structures perpetuating climate change and white supremacy. For others, it is reparation for generations of slavery and land theft from Black and Indigenous peoples, which, as the Northeast Farmers of Color Land Trust writes, “built the foundation of the United States, cutting us off from health, wealth, language, knowledge, and sense of place.” For others still, it is simply about the healing act of digging one’s hands in the dirt among friends, breathing fresh air, and powering off the doomscroll.
While it’s not easy to be a BIPOC farmer in a landscape where about 95% of U.S. farms are operated by white people, and the USDA has been accused for years of discriminating against Black farmers, these land stewards are forging ahead with ingenuity, creating healing spaces and fresh food for their communities.
Teen Vogue spoke to the founders of four different land projects about their journeys back to the land in 2020, and their hopes for 2021.
40 Acres Project
After George Floyd was killed, Adrian Lipscombe, owner of Uptowne Café and Bakery in La Crosse, Wisconsin, says she began receiving donations from white people with little or scant explanation. She had spent months witnessing the inequities the coronavirus pandemic had wreaked on Black farmers (white farmers reportedly received 97% of federal payments) and many more months looking into the rich history of Black agriculture. It was against that backdrop that she decided she wanted to buy land to rectify Black foodways and traditions.
The name “40 Acres” comes from a Civil War–era special order from Union general William T. Sherman to divide up confiscated Confederate territory and provide each freed enslaved person with 40 acres and a mule. Adrian envisions the 40 Acres Project as a 40-acre sanctuary to train Black farmers, and a place to celebrate Black agriculture and food: “There’s no book out there that’s showing you how to create a successful Black farmer.… I would like a center that will focus on collecting the history and archiving of Black farmers, a place that farmers can come to gain information…and try to build back trust with the USDA.”
The 40 Acres Project, in partnership with the Muloma Heritage Center, has recently purchased land in St. Helena Island, South Carolina. The area has ties to the Gullah Geechee, descendents of enslaved Africans who live in close-knit communities on the lower Atlantic coast.
Adrian effuses about the need for reparations for former enslaved people, and to reclaim the heritage of Black farming: “A lot of us were taken [as slaves] for our talents, for things that we already knew how to do.… There was this transfer of bringing smart, talented people to this area. And then when the [Civil War] happened, and the North was releasing slaves along the way, what were [the freed enslaved people] supposed to do [without land]?”
“[Land ownership] was an identity that caused power. It created the economy, it created the community. It made you an entrepreneur and made you a business owner, it made you have some type of identity on a property or on land that you were brought here.”
Grand Risings Farm
Zedé Harut had been thinking about starting a farm since she was in high school, but years later, the uprisings that alighted across Minneapolis after George Floyd’s death pushed her to act: “[My partner Degen Goitom and I] decided, you know what, there's just so much trauma in the cities, there's so much pain. Food is a healing way in our communities, and I would love to be able to provide fresh, organic food for my community. What better time?”
The June uprisings were the tipping point, but the couple had begun to question living in Minneapolis the winter before, when Degen says he received around 10 back-to-back parking tickets from the same police officer, who he says would target his car. Says Zedé, “It was so consistent and redundant…. After I had my daughter, I just felt like this is not a place I want her to be raised in. We made this choice [that] it would just be better for our mental health, for our children, to be raised off the land with nature, with animals, more natural and intuitive.”
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In early June, Zedé, Degen, and their young daughter moved around 80 miles north of Minneapolis onto Ojibwe land that her mother had bought over a year ago. They started Grand Risings Farm, the first Black-farmer-owned community supported agriculture (CSA) program in northern Minnesota. The name was inspired by Zedé’s mother, who first taught her about food insecurity in her community.
Grand Risings Farm is still in the startup phases, and the couple’s goal is to eventually acquire enough capital to provide opportunities for other Black and Indigenous farmers. Though starting a new farm has been challenging and expensive — Grand Risings Farm hasn’t yet been able to secure funding from the USDA — they are buoyed by the support of their community.
“It's easy to be frustrated all the time, like, ‘Man, why can I have this equipment. Where’s my 40 acres and a mule? I'm struggling to afford to heat my home, why is that?’” says Zedé. “It’s so easy to get caught up in the circumstances that we were given, but you can still do it. You just keep going and find the people that can support you and your vision.”
Queering the Farm
Queering the Farm (QTF) is an Albuquerque-based collective of queer and trans BIPOC land stewards on Tiwa land. It was “seeded,” in the words of its founder Zaba Ángel, in the summer of 2020. Through word-of-mouth, Instagram, and a post on the Gay Agenda newsletter, it quickly grew, and now collaborates with seven organizers who regularly host work parties for QTBIPOC-owned land projects in the northern New Mexico area.
The collective blossomed at a time when the queer and trans BIPOC community was feeling shaken by the COVID-19 pandemic. Outdoor work parties were a fun way for folks to connect with low risk of COVID infection. “People were really needing to continue to see each other. And not only to interact with each other but also to interact with the land — there’s a lot of healing in that,” says Ángel.
Queering the Farm organizer Mayam, who recently started their own farm, Ancestral Acres, explains that forming the network was also a way to protect the local queer and trans community, and the project took on a new urgency when the pandemic hit: “As queer and trans folks who already feel threatened by so many different things, whether it be transphobia, homophobia, and access to resources, it felt like this was bigger than just growing food — this is also just keeping each other alive.”
At the heart of Queering the Farm, there is a sense of care and gratitude. For Ana Victoria, a QTF organizer and a new landowner, this collective is partly about healing. “We know, particularly for Black, Indigenous, and people of color, our ancestors have been disenfranchised from having access to land and resources. That’s part of the intention, to provide access to land and to facilitate that healing. That can happen when we connect with the land, when we learn how to grow our own food, how to make medicine together, and to really build a community.”
“What’s really been beautiful is to just see folks light up when they enter the space [of a work party]. I think that’s one of my favorite things. When I'm in community with other folks here, there’s just this sense of tenderness that really takes place,” adds Mayam.
Blood + Change: Queer Land Project
Loba from Flora Pacha and Niko Cariño Tiare, the founders of Blood + Change: Queer Land Project, had each imagined the idea of a land project and a community center for decades — it was part of what they connected over when they met three years ago in Los Angeles. But before the pandemic, accessing a loan and purchasing land seemed like a lofty idea. The COVID-19 pandemic forced them to reprioritize.
“We understood that this might not even be the first pandemic, and we were also just thinking about sustainability and living in the city, how [it was] basically almost impossible to have a space to grow food, a space to do water catchment, a space for composting,” says Loba.
“We just started realizing we have to create networks to be able to sustain and support each other because that’s all that’s going to sustain us,” says Niko.
In October 2020, they found an affordable two-acre plot of land in Northern New Mexico, took out a loan, and started what they call “a hub for technologies for the future,” a space for QTBIPOC to learn skills needed to survive climate change.
“Something that I noticed, just from doing polls on Instagram and talking to different people, is that because we don't have access to our families, a lot of the knowledge around construction, gardening, building, or using power tools has been taken away from us,” Loba says. “So it is [about] sharing important information that maybe didn't get passed down because of people not having access to their blood family, or people deciding that their blood family is not a healthy place to be.”
“I see the future with a lot of queer and trans BIPOC people,” Loba says, “but I also understand that for us to be there in the future, we need to know how to work good land; we need to know how to grow food; we need to know how to harvest water. So that's kind of what really drove me to do this — the importance of fellow queer and trans BIPOC being able to access a space that’s not, you know, just some white, cis, het-learning situation in which you can’t even listen to what the person is saying because it's embedded in so much disrespect to everything.”
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