This in-depth Mother Jones article from Tom Philpott features Tahz Walker, a farmer and food-justice activist with our grantee the Rural Advancement Foundation International-USA (RAFI-USA). The organization “provides grants of up to $10,000 for farm infrastructure, processing and refrigeration, or collaborative projects with multiple farmers.” The article looks at black agrarian efforts focused on “people pooling resources and buying land for multiple uses.”

In the article, Philpott notes:

Agriculture, the backbone of the Black middle class just a century ago, has largely vanished as a force in Black American life. According to the latest US Census of Agriculture, only 1.7 percent of farms were run by Black people in 2017. Meanwhile, the value of farm real estate has exploded: During the 20th century, its price rose dramatically, and has continued its ascent since, representing both a devastating loss of Black wealth and a major obstacle for would-be farmers trying to break into agriculture…

For most young Black farmers, land is out of reach. To launch their operation, Walker and [his wife and co-farmer, Cristina Rivera-Chapman,] did what a lot of aspiring farmers do: They rented. Their vision was to grow top-quality food for underserved communities within the Raleigh–Durham–Chapel Hill “Triangle,” a region marked by rapid economic growth and massive racial and economic inequality. Open land within easy range of the Triangle is pricey. So for several years, Tierra Negra was an itinerant operation, hopping from rented patch to rented patch held by owners always on the lookout for more lucrative tenants.

But that approach was in direct opposition to the organic agriculture Walker and Rivera-Chapman are devoted to. Growing food that doesn’t rely on chemical pesticides and fertilizers requires years of patient investment in the soil. “The last straw” came in 2017, when the couple rented an acre-and-a-half plot in downtown Durham. The price was reasonable—around $500 per month—but the landlord, a New York investor, could void the lease at any time with a 30-day notice. “We saw the writing on the wall with the land there. We’re just like, it’s a vacant lot in the middle of the city—it’s probably not gonna be there long,” Walker says. “There’s a high-rise there now.”

For years, Walker and Rivera-Chapman had been plotting to pool their resources with friends, including Courtney Woods, an assistant professor of environmental engineering at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and Justin Robinson, a musician and scholar of Southern foodways who was a fiddler for the Grammy-winning Black old-time group the Carolina Chocolate Drops. (In his own off-farm job, Walker works at RAFI-USA, a North Carolina-based rural-justice advocacy group, managing the Farmers of Color Network.) Together they formed the Earthseed Land Collective (the name pays homage to a series of books by the Afrofuturist novelist Octavia Butler) and bought the 12-acre property that houses Tierra Negra. More recently, with a community bank loan and support from a local land trust, they bought an additional 38 acres of adjoining land. Such prime real estate, Walker says, would not have been affordable “if we weren’t able to work through a collective model.”

Read the entire article.