Plank 9 – Promote Sustainable Farming, Fishing and Ranching

We spoke with Kenya Crumel, Black Land and Power Director at National Black Food and Justice Alliance (NBFJA), a member-based organization fighting for Black food sovereignty, self-determining food economies, and land. NBFJA is also one of the founding members of HEAL Food Alliance!

Kenya spoke to us about how she finds inspiration in the work that NBFJA members are doing to advance and grow Black food sovereignty in their communities.

Watch a clip of our interview with Kenya 

Kenya: On a day-to-day basis, our members inspire me with the work that they’re doing together. I was just at the BUGS Conference, and the folks in Detroit, for example, are just so incredibly organized, purchasing a farm from the Municipal Land Bank and raising funds so that folks who are currently leasing land are able to own their land and don’t constantly have to worry about being literally uprooted.

And at Sankofa Community Orchard down in Richmond, Virginia, Happily Natural Day stewards five acres where aspiring farmers can learn from other more experienced farmers, apply to be a part of the Central VA Agrarian Commons incubator program, and then move on after a few years to have their own land to implement the practices that they learned.

What led to the creation of the National Black Food and Justice Alliance?

Kenya: Dara Cooper, Beatriz Beckford, and Baba Malik Yakini came together and recognized the extractive, exploitative, deeply anti-Black food system that we all live in that values profit over human life and that has disappeared Black foodways. Black people lack access to and control over production, distribution, and consumption of foods that are healthy and grown in ecological, sustainable ways. The National Black Food and Justice Alliance is working to build collective power by reframing narratives and identifying opportunities for coordinated action and collaboration and cooperation. 

We have about 60 member organizations. Our members are farmers and leaders of food co-ops – those are the two big categories. We have a couple of family-based farms that have had land for a hundred years or more, but primarily we’re working with collectives. And we have some individuals who are academics or attorneys and want to provide some knowledge, wisdom, and resources to our work.

Over the course of the 20th century, the number of Black farmers decreased by 98 percent between 1920 and 1997. Through massive land theft, white farmers and developers usurped at least $326 billion worth of land and assets from Black farmers. In this context, can you tell us more about the land justice work that you’re doing?

Kenya: We’re working toward purchasing land (or accepting donated land!) that can be removed from the speculative market. Ideally we’ll transfer the title to a community land trust, whether we have to develop one or if there’s an existing land trust that we partner with. Black-led community land trusts or other groups of folks can work together to steward the land, share the work, share the profit, and decide how the land will be best utilized to support Black food systems and eradicate food apartheid.

And the land will not be for sale after we gain title to it. Nobody could come in and purchase it. It’s not about individuals owning the land, but it’s about land that’ll be in trust so that it will remain in Black hands. 

Hear from Kenya, Dara Cooper, and Mama Savi Horne on the history of Black land loss in NBFJA’s Practical Guide to Black Food Movement Terms…

The Resource Commons is another way NBFJA has been working to secure land for Black farmers and keep existing Black farmers on their land. Could you tell us about how the Resource Commons came about and some of the successes that it’s had?

Kenya: The Resource Commons is an initiative born after years of conversations with our members, which I have helped shift from ideation into implementation. Recognizing the trauma that traditional banking and the USDA have caused and continue to cause amongst Black farmers, NBFJA members decided to create a non-extractive loan fund with a simplified application process. We’re able to do this because these are not transactions. This is not a transactional relationship. These are relationships with people that we know. 

After doing a good deal of research, we focus on funding for land purchase (whether it’s urban or rural), investments in farm equipment, and investments in infrastructure and building out regional food systems. These are all things that our members stated that they needed. 

We just piloted the first round of funding earlier in 2023 and are really happy that we could provide a little over $400,000 in this pilot round. We’re looking to increase that year over year. Right now it is exclusively for our members, but it will ultimately open up across the country for other Black farmers. 

We talked about the Resource Commons being non-extractive. Our relationship with the land also needs to be non-extractive. So we encourage and support members of the alliance engaging in practices that do no harm to the earth, like no tilling or capturing carbon. But in addition to that, there’s a lot of healing just amongst our people. There’s working well with the land, but we also have to work well with each other. We have a lot of examples of beautiful relationships. We’re really focused on holistic well-being at all aspects – financially, our practices with the land, and then the practices with one another.

You’ve previously mentioned that NBFJA aims to ultimately recover up to 15 million acres of land for Black farmers. Could you tell us about the impact that that would have in terms of creating thriving and resilient Black farming communities?

Kenya: Our vision is that by acquiring the land, training farmers and providing them the resources to steward that land – and also defending land – we can create our own food systems. That’s the larger goal. 

My colleague Dr. Jasmine Jackson works on the self-determined food economy side, our food co-ops and such. I’m on the other end of that spectrum with the land, building the ramp to get to the foodways and the cooperatives. We want to be able to grow the food – and even before that, secure seeds and lands to grow the food – so that we can package it, distribute it, put it into retail markets so that it’s affordable for Black people all over the country, and do it in a way that is hopefully regionally based so that we don’t need to fly food all over the country or the world and aren’t contributing to those issues from a climate justice perspective. 

We’re also developing a program right now to battle land loss due to heirs’ property – and other folks are doing this too, like the Federation for Southern Cooperatives and Land Loss Prevention Project. It’s still a rampant issue, so we just want to lend our support as best as we can. It doesn’t make sense for us to go out and purchase land or accept land donations and put that in a trust while folks are struggling to keep land that they’ve had in their families or in their organizations for some time. And we know there’s a variety of reasons that land comes under threat, including heirs’ property and back taxes, things that could be easily resolved but folks just don’t have the resources.

Ultimately, we want to ensure that food apartheid is eradicated and that folks are less dependent on larger corporate systems and can sustain their farming operations.

How does restoring and preserving Black-owned land advance climate justice goals?

Kenya: If we are less reliant (or not reliant at all) on large corporations in our food systems, if we’re able to protect our land from GMO seeds, and if we’re working collectively to steward land and distribute food regionally, then we can lessen the impact of some major causes that are exacerbating climate change. We don’t need planes flying our food across the country if we are working locally and supporting one another. If we’re working collectively and stewarding the land and bartering and exchanging, we have what we need. So we don’t need to call on corporate America to get food where we need it, to educate us, to get us the supplies, if we can just organize regionally to supply the food, supply our farmers with what they need, and then create that food chain. 

And there’s a lot of education that has to happen. A lot of people just have never seen broccoli growing out of the ground. They don’t know that they can grow their own string beans or peppers. You just need a pot. You don’t have to have a yard. You could do this on your windowsill with the soil and just save your seeds from the pepper that you just cut up and cooked. A lot of people just think, “Oh, I can’t do that.” But you can. We all can. 

Are there particular policies that you are working for at the moment? 

Kenya: We are working on the Farm Bill, to ensure that it’s easier for Black farmers to access funds. A lot of folks are so frustrated with the USDA that they don’t want to have anything to do with it. But we need to simplify grant applications and funding processes. And loan forgiveness has been talked about but not enacted, and non-Black folks are fighting back against it. That’s such a huge obstacle, just getting past the debt. If debt forgiveness could be accomplished, I think that would be really significant for our folks who would no longer have to worry about that burden hanging over their heads.

How can people support your work or take collective action? 

Kenya: If folks know people who have land that’s just sitting idle or are interested in providing zero interest capital for the Resource Commons fund – or even flat out donations – that would be wonderful. There’s a donate button on our website at blackfoodjustice.org. And if you want to have a conversation about land donation, reach out to me directly at kenya [at] blackfoodjustice [dot] org.

The post Recovering Black land for food and climate justice appeared first on HEAL Food Alliance.

Plank 9 – Promote Sustainable Farming, Fishing and Ranching

We spoke with Roberto Nutlouis, founder and Executive Director of HEAL member Nihikeya, which builds a regenerative ecological footprint through restorative farming practices and Indigenous Diné knowledge systems. Roberto is Diné (Navajo) and is of the Todichinii (Bitter Water) clan, born for To’ Tsoni (Big Water) clan. 

He shared his experience drawing on Diné knowledge to develop agroecological farming systems and build community.

Watch a clip of our interview with Roberto

Roberto: I’m not trying to make capitalism work. Of course it’s not going to work. It continues to do what it does, what it’s supposed to do, what it was built to do. 

My work isn’t trying to solve the world’s problems. Everybody has a responsibility to solve their world. Creator put me here in the community among Diné, so the work I do is more specific to my community and the knowledge that we have. The solutions we come up with may not necessarily solve the world’s problems, but this is what allowed our people to survive and thrive in ever-changing landscapes throughout eons. 

For me, it’s about building what works for us, especially as Indigenous people, as Diné, coming from a community that’s still rooted in these lifeways and time-tested ancestral wisdom. We’re very fortunate and blessed to have narratives of our evolution as Diné people on this land. Our ancestors have gone through social and ecological calamities since time immemorial, and we still have those in our narratives. 

My success and the work that I’ve done is tapping back into that knowledge and looking at our own ways of relating to the life forces that we coexist with and that enable us to live on these landscapes.

And is there a particular teaching or historical moment among the Diné that you draw inspiration from in the work you do?

Roberto: The late Dr. Herbert Benally identified a model called Hózhóogo liná, based on the relationship between the earth and the cosmos and how it manifests itself on a daily 24-hour cycle of dawn, blue twilight, yellow twilight, and darkness. Dawn represents the cultural teachings and spiritual values of our people. Blue twilight represents self-sufficiency, because our physical body is the instrument we are gifted to sustain ourselves. Yellow twilight embodies kinship and our important roles in the wellbeing of our community. And darkness reminds us to have reverence for our ecology, our sacred homeland, that is also our home — not just the physical home that we come to, but the overall larger place we call Diné Bikéyah. 

Using these four pillars of Diné knowledge in our work, we try to get a sense of how this connects to climate change, social justice, and food sovereignty. I work with a team of people on community engagement around land stewardship, and we incorporate our cultural knowledge and traditional practices to facilitate dialogue with our communities. This is appreciated by our elders, because now they understand and can give feedback, instead of us just coming in all scientific and economic. 

Read more about the four pillars of knowledge, as laid out by Dr. Herbert Benally…

You were previously with Black Mesa Water Coalition. How did you get from that work to Nihikeya?

Roberto: I helped co-found Black Mesa Water Coalition back in 2001. It was a student organization around environmental justice work, because of the use of our sole source of drinking water in the Navajo aquifer for mining purposes and transportation.

Right before the pandemic, the organization succeeded in its main goal – to put an end to the mining and the use of the groundwater. The board decided to decommission the organization, since it had done what it was created to do. We had already started restorative economy work under the model of just transition, and that work continued. But when the pandemic happened, everything halted. After the pandemic, we reorganized and launched Nihikeya to continue that work.

Nihikeya is a Diné word, which means our ecological footprint, where we call home. We chose the word Nihikeya because we want to rebuild a regenerative, ecological footprint on our landscapes so that future generations can call it home, and we want to rebuild a lot of our food systems that have been destroyed over time.

We have the capacity, our people have done it. The Indigenous people of the Western hemisphere have been managing ecologies on continental scales and made them very abundant. Now is the time to use our ancestral wisdom to rebuild systems that are resilient to these incoming changes that we’re already experiencing.

With Nihikeya, you’ve been working to establish an agroecological community farm that incorporates rainwater harvesting and edible landscapes. Can you tell us how the community farm project came into being?

Roberto: I was always fascinated with farming, because both sides of my family farmed. When I went to college, my main focus was on traditional ecological knowledge and traditional dryland farming. 

I also did research around the different farming methods on the Navajo Nation, as our ecology is very varied, from low-lying river valleys all the way to high alpine mountain country. I looked at different farming strategies of Diné people in the different ecologies. And that’s where I came across alluvial farming. This is a very common farming practice and technique, not only by the Diné people, but also by other pueblos in the region. They set up their farmland strategically around the alluvial fan where the annual flood and all of the organic debris get to water and re-fertilize these fields. I wanted to replicate that system.

Sliding Rock Farm has become a community space to organize and host workshops.  We call it Sliding Rock Farm, because there’s a rock outcrop right next to the farm that we call Tse Adahnidilwoo’í, sliding rock. Kids have played there for generations, sliding down the rock (you can see the grooves still in the rock). This area was farmed by my grandmother’s father, so it goes a couple of generations back.

We do a lot of traditional food building, edible landscaping, and native plant identification, trying to look at the traditional Diné food systems and educate the community and bring in knowledge holders.

And it has inspired people to do their own thing in their own areas and their own landscapes. So it’s achieving what it was intended to do, to inspire our communities to take action and to be self-sufficient and self-directed.

Workshop organized by Nihikeya

You’ve spoken before about combining ancestral knowledge with contemporary innovations to address the ways that climate change and legacies of extractivism have modified the landscape. Could you tell us about a time when you’ve encountered a need for both of these forms of knowledge to coexist?

Roberto: Our farm is a really good example. We developed a rainwater catchment that comes down from the surrounding landscapes. The rainwater catchment restores the watershed and slows the floodwater as it comes into our fields. 

As we rehabilitated certain areas, we incorporated different types of water catchment systems. We learned these techniques from folks in a community called Big Mountain that have been working on these conservation practices since the ’80s. Their community resisted the Peabody Coal Mine when it first started. And they resisted relocation during the so-called Navajo-Hopi land dispute. They really pushed for the importance of self-determination and food sovereignty, even before it was a thing. We brought some of those young people over to our area and they showed us different techniques of how you put the rocks together and use some wires and fencing or whatever you find around to wrap what’s called a rock apron. We also cement the rocks together to make a rock retaining wall. 

Last year we experienced a 50 or 100 year flood. Our system withstood it pretty well, but the main dirt roads got washed out. Climate change and extreme weather impact our homeland, and the infrastructures we build now have to be able to withstand some of these extreme effects. 

We’re ready to be able to export some of these techniques to other communities that want some assistance. And we’re always open to other techniques people are using or developing.

Read more about how US policies created and exacerbated the Navajo-Hopi land dispute… 

And how do you employ agroecology on your farm?

Roberto: I like the term agroecology because the work isn’t just the farm itself; it’s tied into the larger ecology. In a lot of peasant farms in the Third World majority, they have systems that are built in sync with local ecological processes, and all of the seeds they grow are designed to fit into that ecology. 

In the social movement space around agroecology, they uplift farmers and land users who have a wealth of knowledge but don’t necessarily have diplomas or scholarly status. A lot of our work is around uplifting local knowledge that’s often overlooked. Especially in this country, it’s been demonized. Part of our work is to heal ourselves and believe in ourselves again. 

Our communities have been put into this impoverished state intentionally. Poverty is not who we are. It’s not part of our culture. But this system has put us and keeps us in poverty. We were forced to forfeit billions –  if not trillions – of dollars that could have been invested in social development for our community, so that these towns and cities could have cheap electricity and cheap energy. That’s how we still find ourselves in poverty, even though they’ve been mining our lands. That’s what capitalism is. But it’s our responsibility to build a new system, and that’s our work.

And it’s through agroecology that we are going to find a solution to create landscapes in these changing ecologies and make the landscape lush and thriving again. We have the ability. If you go to our cornfield, you see that we’re reversing the impact of climate change. We’ve captured moisture and put it back into the soil. The land is so lush. Imagine doing that through the whole watershed. We could reverse the aridification that’s happening.

We have the capacity, our people have done it. The Indigenous people of the Western hemisphere have been managing ecologies on continental scales and made them very abundant. Now is the time to use our ancestral wisdom to rebuild systems that are resilient to these incoming changes that we’re already experiencing.

In your view, why are land access and Land Back important for climate justice?

Roberto: In our community and our region, we’ve been impacted by how the United States government asserted control over our homelands. We were deemed incompetent in the early years of this country, and that made its way into policy. All of those policies still have a strong say over what can and cannot happen on these landscapes. 

Right now, you have to have a permit from the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) to produce agricultural products. In our region, all the agricultural permits were invalidated because of the so-called Navajo-Hopi land dispute in the ‘70s. To this day, nobody has permits in our region. I don’t have a permit, but I got permission from my clan mothers. Our activities are probably deemed illegal under federal laws. And that’s what continues to hinder a lot of our people from accessing resources and  entering into working with the land. 

So part of our Land Back, at least in our own way, is beginning to bring the clan mothers back into this conversation, because we’re a matriarchal society. Land Back is really important for us to use our own knowledge on the landscape. Those of us that still have the knowledge and still practice cultural lifeways have the responsibility to do what we need to do. So we’re not trying to push BIA to recognize or give us the approval – we’re going to go and do it. 

The government has fragmented land status across the Navajo Nation, so it makes it very difficult to do food system restoration at the Navajo Nation-wide level because of the different land statuses. We also live in three different states – Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico – that each have their own level of hatred against us. I’ve learned that our traditional food system does not even qualify as a farm under USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) guidelines, which are created by the state. Those were intentionally created so that corporate and industrial farmland could get all of the benefits down south in Arizona. 

Land Back really means giving us the ability to heal the land that we currently live on. We’re going to assert our right to use our land and our knowledge and do what we feel fulfills our obligation to take care of the land. It’s both decolonizing work and re-indigenizing work simultaneously.

And it is expensive. It’s expensive to have livestock. Even though we may be losing money to maintain it, there are deeper values behind our agricultural practices, beyond monetary gain. It’s about our community, it’s about ourselves, it’s about our own healing. It’s about the healing of land and our connection to the life forces.

Additional readings and resources:

Theory and Practice: The Case of the Navajo-Hopi Land Dispute

Black Mesa Water Coalition Green Economy Project, Piñon AZ 

Millions lack access to running water. Is the solution hiding in plain sight? (features a quote from Roberto and brief description of Nihikeya’s work) 

An Edible Landscape: Hungry for Food Sovereignty (feature on Roberto)

Diné Roberto Nutlouis — Water, Corn and a Just Transition for Sacred Beings

It’s time to center climate justice and real climate solutions in the Farm Bill! – HEAL Food Alliance (featuring Roberto and Nihikeya)

The post Drawing on Diné knowledge for Sustainable Food Systems appeared first on HEAL Food Alliance.

Plank 9 – Promote Sustainable Farming, Fishing and Ranching

We spoke with Mai Nguyen, a farmer and co-founder of HEAL member Minnow, which works to secure land tenure for farmers of color in California.

Trained as a geographer, Mai began their career studying soil and the atmosphere as a climate scientist. After working in labs and on climate models, they grew tired of documenting how we’re destroying the planet and made a shift to actively working on climate mitigation through farming, advocacy, and organizing California’s first worker cooperative farms. They shared with us their experiences farming with hope amid the climate crisis, and the success they’ve had nourishing their community while building ecological food systems.

Watch a clip of our interview with Mai

Mai Nguyen: As a farmer, I’ve experienced floods as well as successive seasons of wildfires, trying to harvest in thick, toxic smoke, trying to get my grains to the grain cleaner in the smoke, only to have a giant fire start by the grain cleaners and have my crops rot in the warehouse as they deal with closures because of epic, unprecedented fires.

What gives me hope is that I know that it is a long game. I’ve seen how my work has come to fruition on the farm. Over the past 10 years, I’ve been trialing different heirloom varieties of wheat, rye, and barley, these rare seeds that aren’t available through our corporate-dominated and propertied seed system, and adapting them to California’s climate. Rather than pumping from our already depleted water sources, I rely only on rainfall. I build soil nutrients through rotations with sheep for grazing and  intercropping with legumes to build the nutrients on site, rather than importing synthetic fertilizers, or even organic fertilizers that can seep into our waterways and create toxic imbalances for our riparian systems.

These varieties are six feet tall, compared to commodity grain, which is only about a foot tall. That means they capture six times more carbon than commodity grain. That grain stock is all carbon from the atmosphere being captured. Additionally, they send down deeper roots into the soil, such that we can hold more water in the soil, while capturing more carbon and building more soil organic matter.

When we experienced these periods of extreme drought in 2021, I was one of the few grain farmers in the entire western United States who had a crop. I had the same yields and the same quality, while other producers who were using conventional systems had to totally cut down their crops.

I am really proud to be able to provide food during our multiple overlapping crises, both of climate change and of the pandemic, when there were shortages and lack of distribution of flour into our grocery stores. I was able to get my flour out to communities via my flour share and the small-scale mills and businesses that I work with. It’s examples like that that help me feel optimistic in this time of climate doom. 

Read more about Mai’s farming work… 

Photo courtesy of Minnow

What are some of the unique challenges in growing and processing these heirloom wheat varieties, while also competing in a cereals market dominated by large commodity corporations?

Mai Nguyen: One challenge of growing grain for our foodshed is the lack of a robust regional supply chain. After I harvest my grain, I need it to be cleaned. When I started farming, there were five seed cleaners in the state that could take grain. In the past 10 years, we’ve been reduced down to just one. That is because of the corporate consolidation of seeds and not allowing farmers to save seed. For the one cleaner, it takes six hours round trip to get there and get the product back. And there are so many people relying on that place, that they have a backlog. Even when I received stuff back, I’ve had to get things cleaned twice, because they’re not built for grain cleaning. 

We have two mills functioning in the state that can service coastal California, and only one of them produces whole grain. And there’s only one mill in the whole state that will produce whole grain flour, and it’s in Los Angeles. 

Even just to get the grain to customers, or to bakeries that might have their own small mill for their own in-house production, it’s so challenging to get a thousand pounds or 5,000 pounds of grain somewhere, because corporate consolidation has destroyed all the smaller-scale distribution mechanisms. If you’re small, just trying to get those volumes somewhere efficiently and economically is really challenging.

At this point, I’m trying to create my own vertically integrated system on the farm. What I really need in order to do that is land. I have been leasing for the entire time that I’ve been farming, but at this stage I need to have secure land tenure that enables me to continue trialing the 70 varieties of seed that I have. I also need the space to have a facility that’s rodent-proof and weatherproof, to clean the grain, store the grain, and mill the grain, and to modify those facilities to be appropriate for those operations.

It’s clear to me what I need, and for me to get there seems like a great gulf that we are trying to address through Minnow, People’s Land Fund, and with our partners. 

You’re a co-founder of Minnow. Can you share how that came about? 

Mai Nguyen: Minnow started as a land justice organization that I co-founded with Neil Thapar. I came from a journey of farming and having my own land insecurity issues, as well as developing immigrant-owned agricultural cooperatives. I found that the successful farms in those cooperatives were ones that owned land. The ones that faced the greatest business challenges were the ones with land insecurity, though they were greatly helped by being in a cooperative. They had all this experience farming, but without land and land security, it was challenging for them to use their agricultural practices for the benefit of the land or to make long-term decisions. It also affected them and their families and their family planning, because of not knowing if they would be able to stay in that land, or even in that community.

We have so many of the answers to our societal issues, climate change, and social inequality, but we, especially farmers of color, need to be a part of our political infrastructure in ways that give us place and power to influence these issues. 

Building that power is really key for us to transform our conditions. Through interacting with farmers and doing co-op development work, what I was hearing again and again is that people needed land.

As the child of refugees, displacement and resettlement and making a home in a new place have been long standing questions for me. In these forums that I was in, representing farmers and democratic communities, I was constantly hearing people say, “Yes, we know that people need land, and it’s so challenging, and I don’t know how we’re going to do racial equity and also address Indigenous sovereignty,” and people would just step away. I was like, “We keep saying that we see the same problem, and we can no longer ignore it.” That’s how Minnow came to be. We wanted to address this challenge head on and no longer be afraid of it, and to try to forge a way forward where we all have place, we all have food, and we all belong.

Photo courtesy of Minnow

What policies have you and your partners and Minnow been working on around land tenure, supporting farmers of color, and promoting regenerative farming?

Mai Nguyen: First and foremost is this recognition that this land has been stolen, and that the original inhabitants are still here. We are working on land rematriation. One of our projects, Kai Poma, was focused on engaging with the state of California, in particular with Caltrans, the transportation authority for California, to return land that they were managing back to Indigenous tribes.

Minnow played a part in that, thanks to the support of First Nations Development Institute and the California Tribal Fund who invited us in to provide legal support to write legislation. That is the first time the state of California is returning land to tribes. That sets a historical precedent for our state to continue this process of land return. 

In terms of work with farmers of color, the California Farmer Justice Collaborative passed the Farmer Equity Act in 2017, which created a state definition for socially disadvantaged farmers and ranchers. This was the first time the state recognized these groups of people as distinct. By creating that policy, it’s now possible for other policies to create set asides and programs for farmers of color. That policy work is a precursor to Minnow, and it has been essential for being able to even have any policies that specifically benefit farmers of color.

The Farmer Equity Act has also been influential in getting other states to try to adopt that language, especially as federal policies that we relied on for those definitions have been politically contentious and threatened. It’s really important for the state level to also have this definition. We use that in trying to advance policies and support different government advising entities that have been formed, such as the Farmer Equity Advisory Committee to the California Department of Food and Agriculture 

You also support farmers directly with land access. Can you tell us about that?

Recognizing that policy comes after grassroots action, our work has been more focused on trying to get people land however we can. With the People’s Land Fund, we   purchased over a hundred acres in Watsonville for a group of farmers. 

The People’s Land Fund is a collaboration of six organizations that proactively fundraises to help farmers purchase land. We initially came together at the beginning of the pandemic to create the California BIPOC Farmer and Land Steward Relief Fund – which redistributed short term, emergency relief funds to farmers of color. 

I had talked to over 130 farmers in that immediate shutdown time. Everyone was freaking out about loss of markets, loss of labor, and loss of money – but we knew that this relief work was temporary and what we really needed to do was to support farmers in their long term stability – and long-term stability requires land. 

We know that farmers are not going to be able to throw down a down payment for a $2 million property the way that a venture capitalist can. How can we leverage our connections and resources to enable farmers to have that competitive advantage? That’s how the Land Fund came about. We had this opportunity in Watsonville, thanks to connections that HEAL Member Kitchen Table Advisors, one of the members of People’s Land Fund had, to purchase land off-market, and for us to then hold the land and connect with the farmers to be on it.

And the transaction itself was made possible through funding from the Sustainable Agricultural Lands Conservation Fund, which lowered the purchase price, and using a portfolio of capital from grants and loans allowed a group of farmers, who were previously farm workers, to own that land together.

We’re trying to leverage our collective power and our privilege of being connected to philanthropic and investing organizations to build that financial power for farmers. For racial equity, which means a redistribution and activation of power, there is a financial piece and an ownership piece, and it’s linked to policy and sociopolitical power that we need to build.

For folks who are in California, or are farmers and specifically farmers of colors, what action or collective action can they take in support of your work and land justice?

Mai Nguyen: We talk about the foundations of land justice being about land return. First and foremost, we need to give back land that has been stolen from Indigenous peoples. That is dependent on our government interacting with tribal governments.

In addition to the learning and unlearning process that we need to do to support Indigenous sovereignty, we need to hold our government accountable and vote for the people who will support land back and introduce policies that advance land back and Indigenous sovereignty. 

Find out whose land you’re living on. There are 109 federally-recognized tribes In California, as well as many other tribes that have not been federally recognized or had their federal recognition terminated through the California Rancheria Termination Acts of the 1950s and 1960s. Some Native tribes and nations accept donations or outside support (including land donations and land taxes).

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